Notfall, Nähe und Hilfsbereitschaft

The paper presents data of a survey about helping behaviour in the flood catastrophe in august 2002 in Germany. In this situation helping behaviour can be operationalized as giving donations for victims or helping in the flood area. It can be shown that helping behaviour like this is related to the individual definition of the situation as a case of emergency as it is defined by Darley and Latané. Nevertheless, the regional distance to the flood area is the most important factor on helping decisions.     

Circumcising the body: negotiating difference and belonging in Germany

ABSTRACT

The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare newspaper coverage in Germany, Israel and Turkey, and reveal transnational discursive dynamics that transgress national boundaries. We show how ‘otherness’ of Muslims and Jews remains present in a self-perceived secular, liberal imaginary.     

Gambling and Globalization: Sociological Perspectives on 'the House' and 'the Players'

In this article, we explore a few ways in which the age-old impulse to gamble has evolved into a global force. We start out by critically summarizing historical and foundational thinking on gambling in society, and then move into contemporary perspectives on the gambling act. We then focus upon two important actors in these global stages: 'the house' (the businesses that profit from gambling) and 'the players' (the individuals who, for the most part, do not). These explorations highlight the ways in which the globalization of gambling has been characterized by homogenizing trends as well as resistance to homogenization forces.     

Objectives,Role and Functions of Social Welfare Services in Sweden

The assumption in the 1930s that poverty was the cause of all social problems was clearly not borne out in the Swedish experiment in creating social security through massive insurance and other programmes. The public debate from the middle of the 1960s has therefore been concerned with an examination and re-definition of the aims of social policies. The perception of the role and functions of the social welfare services consequently changed. In 1974 a Parliamentary Commission published its report on the principles the services should follow in the future. The report emphasizes that the social welfare services have a definite role in the restructuring of society, and it spells out ways in which this aim can be achieved.     

Organized Violence and Institutional Child Delivery: Micro-Level Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa, 1989–2014

The conditions under which a mother gives birth greatly affect the health risk of both the mother and the child. This article addresses how local exposure to organized violence affects whether women give birth in a health facility. We combine geocoded data on violent events from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program with georeferenced survey data on the use of maternal health care services from the Demographic and Health Surveys. Our sample covers 569,201 births by 390,574 mothers in 31 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We use a mother fixed-effects analysis to estimate the effect of recent organized violence events within a radius of 50 km of the home of each mother on the likelihood that her child is born in a health facility. The results indicate that geographical and temporal proximity to organized violence significantly reduces the likelihood of institutional births. Although the level of maternal health care overall is lower in rural areas, the negative effect of violence appears to be stronger in urban areas. The study further underscores the importance of household and individual resilience, indicating that the effect of organized violence on institutional child delivery is greater among poor and less-educated mothers.