当代制度研究:关于现代社会的制度框架

"制度"一直是社会学研究的核心概念.制度就好比是工具和框架,作为工具,制度继续了悠久的历史文化传统,而作为框架,制度是个体自我评估的参考指标.在现代社会中,制度具有特别重要的意义,尤其对正在进行法治化与和谐社会建设的中国而言更是如此.     

A prudent characterization of the Ranked Pairs Rule

We show that the Ranked Pairs Rule is equivalent to selecting the maximal linear orders with respect to a DiscriMin relation, which is a natural refinement of the Min relation used to define Arrow and Raynaud’s prudent orders. We provide an axiomatic characterization of the Ranked Pairs Rule by building on an earlier characterization of the prudent order ranking rule. We conclude that a monotonicity criterion is the main distinction between the two ranking rules.     

What Defines Quality of Life? The Gap Between Public Policies and Locally Defined Indicators Among Residents of Kodagu, Karnataka (India)

Improving quality of life (QoL) is one of the main goals of many public policies. A useful tool to measure QoL needs to get a good balance between indicators guided by theories (top-down approach) and indicators defined by local people (bottom-up approach). However, QoL measurement tools often neglect to include elements that define the standard of living at local level. In this paper, we analyse the correspondence between human development index, as an indicator adopted by governments to assess QoL, and the elements defined by local people as important in their QoL, called here local means. Using a free-listing technique, we collected information from 114 individuals from Kodagu, Kartanataka (India), to capture local means defining QoL. We then compared local means with the indicators used by Human development report (HDR) of Karnataka, the main measurement tool of QoL in Kodagu. The list of local means included access to basic facilities and many issues related to agriculture and natural resources management as elements locally defining QoL. We also found that HDR does not capture the means defined by people as indicators of QoL. Our findings suggest an important gap between current QoL’s indicators considered by public policies and the means of QoL defined by people. Our study provides insights for a set of plausible local indicators useful to achieve a balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches for the local public policies.     

Application of ordinal correspondence analysis for submerged aquatic vegetation monitoring

The European Water Framework states that macrophyte communities (seaweeds and seagrass) are key indicators of the ecological health of lagoons. Furthermore, the restoration of these communities, especially the Zostera meadows, is one of the main objectives of the Berre lagoon restoration plan. Consequently, a monitoring programme of the main macrophyte species still present in the lagoon was initiated in 1996. This monitoring resulted in a sequence of 11 spatially structured annual tables consisting of the observed density of these species. These tables are processed in this study. First, we specify the principles of Beh's ordinal correspondence analysis (OCA), designed for ordered row/column categories, and compare this method to classical correspondence analysis (CA). Then, we show that OCA is straightforwardly adaptable for processing a sequence of ordered contingency tables like ours. Both OCA and CA are afterwards used to reveal and test the main patterns of spatio-temporal changes of two macrophyte species in the Berre lagoon: Ulva and Zostera. The results we obtained are compared and discussed.     

Gender and the residential telephone, 1890–1940: Technologies of sociability

Recent work on gender and technology debunks the claim that household technologies have liberated women from domestic work. The history of telephone use in North America suggests, however, that global conclusions about gender and consumer technologies may be misleading. Although marketed primarily as a business instrument and secondarily as an instrument to facilitate housework, the telephone was, in a sense, appropriated by women for social and personal ends. This paper explores the affinity of women for the telephone, how women in the half-century before World War II used the telephone, and why. It suggests that there is a class of technologies that women have exploited for their own, gender-linked, social and personal ends.     

A goodness-of-fit test for overdispersed binomial (or multinomial) models

Overdispersion or extra variation is a common phenomenon that occurs when binomial (multinomial) data exhibit larger variances than that permitted by the binomial (multinomial) model. This arises when the data are clustered or when the assumption of independence is violated. Goodness-of-fit (GOF) tests available in the overdispersion literature have focused on testing for the presence of overdispersion in the data and hence they are not applicable for choosing between the several competing overdispersion models. In this paper, we consider a GOF test proposed by Neerchal and Morel [1998. Large cluster results for two parametric multinomial extra variation models. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 93(443), 1078–1087], and study its distributional properties and performance characteristics. This statistic is a direct analogue of the usual Pearson chi-squared statistic, but is also applicable when the clusters are not necessarily of the same size. As this test statistic is for testing model adequacy against the alternative that the model is not adequate, it is applicable in testing two competing overdispersion models.     

On S-Convexity and Risk Aversion

The present note first discusses the concept of s-convex pain functions in decision theory. Then, the economic behavior of an agent with such a pain function is represented through the comparison of some recursive lotteries.     

Distinguishing the geographic levels and social dimensions of U.S. metropolitan segregation, 1960–2000

In this article, we assess trends in residential segregation in the United States from 1960 to 2000 along several dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, and life cycle and present a method for attributing segregation to nested geographic levels. We measured segregation for metropolitan America using the Theil index, which is additively decomposed into contributions of regional, metropolitan, center city-suburban, place, and tract segregation. This procedure distinguishes whether groups live apart because members cluster in different neighborhoods, communities, metropolitan areas, or regions. Substantively, we found that the segregation of blacks decreased considerably after 1960 largely because neighborhoods became more integrated, but the foreign born became more segregated largely because they concentrated in particular metropolitan areas. Class segregation increased between 1970 and 1990 mainly because the affluent increasingly clustered in specific metropolitan areas and in specific municipalities within metropolitan areas. The unmarried increasingly congregated in center cities. The main purpose of this article is to describe and illustrate this multilevel approach to studying segregation.     

Technology and Community: Historical Complexities*

As a comment on speculations that new electronic technologies will revolutionize community, this article points to three lessons drawn from historical studies on earlier technologies such as the telephone: (1) Effects are modest; (2) effects differ from one specific technology to another; and (3) the effects of any one technology can be contradictory.