Soziale exklusion und exklusionsempfinden

Der Beitrag prüft die empirische Brauchbarkeit des zwischen Ungleichheitsund Armutsforschung vermittelnden Exklusionsbegriffs. Dazu wird die Unterscheidung zwischen einer „objektiven”, auf eine prek?re Lebenslage zurückgehende Exklusionskonstellation und einem „subjektiven”, den Einzelnen entbettenden Exklusionsempfinden gemacht. Als Dimensionen stressender Prekarit?t werden die Haushalts?konomie, die Erwerbssituation, die soziale Vernetzung, das Institutionenvertrauen und das psychophysische Wohlbefinden bestimmt; das Empfinden von Exklusion wird auf die Zugeh?rigkeit zum gesellschaftlichen Ganzen bezogen. So erh?lt das Exklusionsempfinden die Bedeutung einer ausschlaggebenden Bedingung, die einzelne Exklusionserfahrungen zu einem die ganze Person erfassenden Exklusionssyndrom zusammenfügt und zuspitzt. Vor diesem konzeptionellen Hintergrund wird über die Ergebnisse einer 2003 durchgeführten bundesweiten Telefonbefragung berichtet. Wie der Einzelne sich zum gedachten Ganzen der Gesellschaft verh?lt, ist nicht einfach Ausdruck seiner sozialen Lage. In Abkehr von allen impliziten Widerspiegelungstheorien wird das Gesamt von externen Ressourcen, stressenden Konstellationen und internen Ressourcen zur Erkl?rung des Exklusionsempfindens herangezogen. So kann eine begrifflich klare und empirisch stichhalte Unterscheidung zwischen benachteiligender Marginalit?tsposition und gef?hrdender Exklusionsauffassung gezogen werden.     

Psychological trauma from the perspective of medical history: from Paracelsus to Freud

Psychological traumatisation, as we understand it today, was—in terms of the history of ideas—anticipated by various approaches which have had a lasting impact on modern psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychosomatic medicine. On the one hand, there is the traditional concept of possession and exorcism with its impressive psychodynamics. On the other hand, there is the theory of the imagination, of an illusion in the sense of a pathogenic infection. Especially the pathological teachings of Paracelsus (sixteenth century) and Johann Baptist van Helmont (seventeenth century)—the latter having advanced the former’s alchemist approach—demonstrate the extent to which demonological, parasitological, and psychological ideas were amalgamated in their “ontological” notion of a disease. Only the introduction of hypnotism in the middle of the nineteenth century made possible a psychological or psychodynamic understanding of psychological trauma in the modern sense. Hypnotism was striving to strictly dissociate from the magical and natural philosophical speculations of mesmerism and its theory was quite compatible with the model representations of scientific medicine. Sigmund Freud was able to tie in his ideas of hysteria and neurosis with this concept and especially to define repression of (infantile) sexuality as the cause of a culturally ineluctable psychological trauma. Finally, a brief survey of medical history is given to explore artificial trauma as a healing factor.     

Statistical properties of the Hadamard product of random vectors

The variance of the Hadamard product of two linear combinations of a random vector is presented in terms of the mean and the variance of the random vector when a normal distribution is assumed. The mean and variance of the Hadamard product are further given for any distribution.     

Solar panels, shovels and the 'Net: Selective uses of technology in the homesteading movement

Although the dystopian and utopian academic literature on technology present either a pessimistic or optimistic picture of its societal impact, people's everyday uses of technology often counter such views. This paper examines the selective uses of technology, and particularly communications technology, in the everyday practices of homesteaders, or members of the 'back to the land' movement in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. Using an ethnographic approach, this study analyzes how homesteaders' ideology of voluntary simplicity informs their complex, everyday engagement with technology.     

Comparing long-term care systems: A multi-dimensional,actor-centred typology

Like other fields of social policy, the organization of long-term care (LTC) varies temporally and geographically. The present article aims to advance the comparison of LTC systems worldwide by proposing a conceptual framework to analyse variation, putting a special focus on analysing the role of public and private actor types. In a precluding literature review of existing LTC typologies, we find that there are various promising classification approaches, but with an overwhelming concentration on European countries and often constructed in-transparently and superficially. Building on the concept of the care/welfare mix, we develop a multi-dimensional, actor-centred typology of LTC systems. In doing so, we employ the methodological procedure of theoretically constructing a typological attribute space. We argue that three dimensions, that is service provision, financing and regulation, are crucial for differentiating types. Furthermore, we chose an actor-centred approach, asking who bears the main responsibility in each dimension. Five relevant types of corporate actors are distinguished: state, societal actors, private for-profit actors, private individual actors, and global actors. Finally, we present and discuss the resulting attribute space and further illustrated the typology's use by exemplarily classifying three countries.