From the Editor

Sociological Forum -     

From the Editor

Sociological Forum -     

Re-Figuring Marked Bodies on the Borders: Breast Cancer and “Femininity”

The author discusses writings by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kathleen Martindale, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Rosenblum on their experiences with breast cancer, and explores their articulations of the impact mastectomy has had on their sense of femininity in relation to their own identities and body images, and in relation to cultural expectations, and how others perceive them. Their identification of the body as socially produced, and as a site of contestation and multiple struggles, offers a strategic site from which to engage with the violent gender-inflected notion of the ideal female body. Themes addressed include: the process of writing embodied experience to make it real, the body's role in the process of identity formation, the culturally constructed significance of appearance to the individual's sense of femininity, the value of the female body in a capitalistic society, and heterosexism in society and in the health care system.     

Supply Chain Scheduling: Distribution Systems

We study conflict and cooperation issues arising in a supply chain where a manufacturer makes products which are shipped to customers by a distributor. The manufacturer and the distributor each has an ideal schedule, determined by cost and capacity considerations. However, these two schedules are in general not well coordinated, which leads to poor overall performance. In this context, we study two practical problems. In both problems, the manufacturer focuses on minimizing unproductive time. The distributor minimizes customer cost measures in the first problem and minimizes inventory holding cost in the second problem. We first evaluate each party's conflict, which is the relative increase in cost that results from using the other party's optimal schedule. Since this conflict is often significant, we consider several practical scenarios about the level of cooperation between the manufacturer and the distributor. These scenarios define various scheduling problems for the manufacturer, the distributor, and the overall system. For each of these scheduling problems, we provide an algorithm. We demonstrate that the cost saving provided by cooperation between the decision makers is usually significant. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work for how manufacturers and distributors negotiate, coordinate, and implement their supply chain schedules in practice.     

Communicating during times of crises: An analysis of news releases from the federal government before,during, and after hurricanes Katrina and Rita

This paper examines the framing of crisis communication strategies before, during, and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by analyzing news releases from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security, and U.S. Senators and Governors from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. A qualitative content analysis found that all entities analyzed did not acknowledge their parts in the crises, placed blame on others, and tried to distance themselves from the crises. State leadership also used a unifying approach where they included themselves in the hardships affected residents were experiencing.     

Monte carlo approximation to edgeworth expansions

Since the 1930s, empirical Edgeworth expansions have been employed to develop techniques for approximate, nonparametric statistical inference. The introduction of bootstrap methods has increased the potential usefulness of Edgeworth approximations. In particular, a recent paper by Lee & Young introduced a novel approach to approximating bootstrap distribution functions, using first an empirical Edgeworth expansion and then a more traditional bootstrap approximation to the remainder. In principle, either direct calculation or computer algebra could be used to compute the Edgeworth component, but both methods would often be difficult to implement in practice, not least because of the sheer algebraic complexity of a general Edgeworth expansion. In the present paper we show that a simple but nonstandard Monte Carlo technique is a competitive alternative. It exploits properties of Edgeworth expansions, in particular their parity and the degrees of their polynomial terms, to develop particularly accurate approximations.     

Fractal analysis of surface roughness by using spatial data

We develop fractal methodology for data taking the form of surfaces. An advantage of fractal analysis is that it partitions roughness characteristics of a surface into a scale-free component (fractal dimension) and properties that depend purely on scale. Particular emphasis is given to anisotropy where we show that, for many surfaces, the fractal dimension of line transects across a surface must either be constant in every direction or be constant in each direction except one. This virtual direction invariance of fractal dimension provides another canonical feature of fractal analysis, complementing its scale invariance properties and enhancing its attractiveness as a method for summarizing properties of roughness. The dependence of roughness on direction may be explained in terms of scale rather than dimension and can vary with orientation. Scale may be described by a smooth periodic function and may be estimated nonparametrically. Our results and techniques are applied to analyse data on the surfaces of soil and plastic food wrapping. For the soil data, interest centres on the effect of surface roughness on retention of rain-water, and data are recorded as a series of digital images over time. Our analysis captures the way in which both the fractal dimension and the scale change with rainfall, or equivalently with time. The food wrapping data are on a much finer scale than the soil data and are particularly anisotropic. The analysis allows us to determine the manufacturing process which produces the smoothest wrapping, with least tendency for micro-organisms to adhere.     

Extended-family resources and racial inequality in the transition to homeownership

We use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how access to financial resources in the extended family affects the accumulation of wealth among non-owners and how these resources subsequently affect transitioning into homeownership. Our findings show that economic conditions of the extended family have substantial effects on non-owners’ wealth accumulation and likelihood of becoming homeowners, even after adjusting for individual sociodemographic and economic characteristics. We find significant effects of extended-family wealth for both black and white households, but effects of extended-family income insufficiency for blacks only. Consequently, limited access to wealth and greater level of poverty in the extended family hamper blacks’ transition to homeownership. Our results show that the level of extended-family wealth necessary for black householders to equalize their likelihood of becoming homeowners with whites is very high. In fact, our findings indicate that white householders embedded in extended families with no net wealth are just as likely to make the transition to ownership as are black householders with affluent extended families. These findings support arguments related to the importance of extended-family resources in processes of residential attainment but also point to important racial differences in not only levels but also consequences of these family resources.