Making Muslims illegible: recoupling as an obstacle to religious enumeration in Germany

Theory and Society - Literature on categorization often invokes historical legacies to explain why states adhere to statistical categories that inadequately capture their population, and especially...     

Current Developments in Social Care Services for Older Adults in the Czech Republic: Trends Towards Deinstitutionalization and Marketization

ABSTRACT

Deinstitutionalization and marketization of eldercare has been delayed by 20 years in the Czech Republic compared to Western Europe, and it takes place in a completely different context, characterized by the legacy of communism, a growing older population, and less generous public subsidies. This study is the first in the Czech Republic to examine how deinstitutionalization and marketization effect implementation of these principles on the availability and quality of eldercare services at regional and municipal levels. A mixed-method approach was used, combining several data sources (policy documents, administrative data, statistics, expert panel, and secondary use of qualitative data). The findings suggest that the support for and availability of home-based care has declined, despite the ever-increasing number of older adults and policy preference for deinstitutionalization. Furthermore, home-based services have failed to adjust to growing care needs of older adults (e.g., inflexible schedules, limited provision of time-demanding care, inadequate staff composition). This situation occasioned an unintended outcome: the emergence of nonregistered, semilegal, for-profit nursing homes offering low-quality care and poor working conditions, and subject to no quality control. The health and even lives of older adults are at risk if they choose such services. Research is needed to study older adult decision making and offer them tools to identify and avoid questionable services.     

What is Behaviour? And (when) is Language Behaviour? A Metatheoretical Definition

Behaviour is central to many fields, but metatheoretical definitions specifying the most basic assumptions about what is considered behaviour and what is not are largely lacking. This transdisciplinary research explores the challenges in defining behaviour, highlighting anthropocentric biases and a frequent lack of differentiation from physiological and psychical phenomena. To meet these challenges, the article elaborates a metatheoretical definition of behaviour that is applicable across disciplines and that allows behaviours to be differentiated from other kinds of phenomena. This definition is used to explore the phenomena of language and to scrutinise whether and under what conditions language can be considered behaviour and why. The metatheoretical concept of two different levels of meaning conveyed in human language is introduced, highlighting that language inherently relies on behaviours and that the content of what‐is‐being‐said, in and of itself, can constitute (interpersonal) behaviour under particular conditions. The analyses reveal the ways in which language meaningfully extends human's behavioural possibilities, pushing them far beyond anything enabled by non‐language behaviours. These novel metatheoretical concepts can complement and expand on existing theories about behaviour and language and contribute a novel piece of theoretical explanation regarding the crucial role that language has played in human evolution.     

论《圣经》对文革后几位朦胧诗人的影响

20世纪初,《圣经》被新文化运动先驱作为启蒙民心的精神工具,对五四新文化和新文学运动都产生了巨大的影响.文革后的朦胧诗人遭遇了理想的幻灭,在西方现代派思潮的吸引下,一反现代文学作家对待《圣经》的实用态度,而产生了准神学意义上的十字架情结:舒婷在《最后的挽歌》中渴望着灵魂的救赎、顾城在《英儿》中幻演着耶稣、海子更是用他的创作和青春的生命来模拟《圣经》.     

Why women don’t report sexual harassment: A case study of an elite military institution

Sexual harassment affects the lives of women in a variety of organizational settings, and the United States military has been no exception. While several studies have documented the prevalence of women’s experiences with harassment among both the enlisted and officer ranks, little is known about women who are being trained to serve as future officers while attending the U.S. Department of Defense service academies. This paper summarizes the findings of a case study of the U.S. Naval Academy to examine the extent to which women experience sexually harassing behaviors and to analyze women's responses to harassment, focusing specifically on their reasons for not filing grievances. Drawing from survey and interview data, findings reveal that 96.8 percent of Academy women experienced some form of sexual harassment within a six-month period, while 48.4 percent reported experiencing harassment on a recurring basis. Despite the pervasiveness of harassment as well as the Academy’s provision of avenues for filing grievances, only 26 cases were formally reported within a five-year period. Women discussed two potential consequences of filing grievances, both of which prevented them from reporting incidents: the perception that nothing would be done and the possibility of negative repercussions, including social ostracism and retaliation. Moreover, the aforementioned consequences appear to be linked to the following aspects of Academy life: the midshipman chain of command as the dominant form of social organization, an informal code of silence that permeates Academy culture, and women's status as outsiders in a male-dominated institution. These findings suggest that any meaningful attempt to assist Academy students in responding to harassment should include policies that address women's social isolation as well as eliminating the student chain of command as a primary course of action in filing grievances. Jana L. Pershing is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at San Diego State University. Her recent articles have appeared in Sociological Perspectives (2003), Deviant Behavior (2002), and Armed Forces & Society (2001). The present article is based on a larger research project that examines social control within elite military institutions. She can be reached at jpershin@mail.sdsu.edu.     

Computer experiments with functional inputs and scalar outputs by a norm-based approach

A framework for designing and analyzing computer experiments is presented, which is constructed for dealing with functional and scalar inputs and scalar outputs. For designing experiments with both functional and scalar inputs, a two-stage approach is suggested. The first stage consists of constructing a candidate set for each functional input. During the second stage, an optimal combination of the found candidate sets and a Latin hypercube for the scalar inputs is sought. The resulting designs can be considered to be generalizations of Latin hypercubes. Gaussian process models are explored as metamodel. The functional inputs are incorporated into the Kriging model by applying norms in order to define distances between two functional inputs. We propose the use of B-splines to make the calculation of these norms computationally feasible.     

Daily street life in the inner city of Prague under transformation: the visual experience of socio-spatial differentiation and temporal rhythms

The paper is concerned with the everyday manifestation of increasing social, lifestyle and cultural diversity in the transforming inner city of Prague. The Smíchov neighbourhood and particularly its central hub, the Anděl junction, were chosen as the focus of the study. The regeneration dynamics during the post-socialist transformation make this place particularly interesting for an inquiry into the interplay of the social and physical environment, into the interactions of changing urban landscapes and people's everyday practices. Particular attention is paid to the character of ordinary daily street life, to the users of urban space and to the manifestation of close-knit social, spatial and temporal diversity in the close vicinity of the Anděl hub. The paper concludes with the necessity of including the temporal dimension of space in urban planning and design practice. Methodologically the case study derives principally from direct observation of neighbourhood life and users, but also draws on the extensive research previously conducted in the neighbourhood by the authors and from intensive experience of living in the area.     

Infant locomotion shapes proximity to adults during everyday play in the U.S.

Learning to walk expands infants’ access to the physical environment and prompts changes in their communicative behaviors. However, little is known about whether walking also shapes infants’ proximity to their adult social partners during everyday activities at home. Here we followed 89 infants (42 boys, 47 girls; 92% White, not Hispanic or Latino) longitudinally and documented connections between infant locomotion and infant-adult proximity on two timescales: (1) across developmental time, by comparing data from a session when infants could only crawl to a later session when they could walk (M walk onset = 12.15 months, range = 8-15); and (2) in real time, by testing whether the amount of time that infants spent in motion (regardless of their locomotor status) related to their interpersonal distance to adults. The developmental transition to walking corresponded to a significant, but modest, decrease in infant-adult proximity. Infants’ moment-to-moment locomotion, however, was strongly related to patterns of interpersonal distance: infants who spent more time in motion spent less time near adults and instigated more proximity transitions, resulting in shorter and more dispersed bouts of proximity throughout sessions. Findings shed new light on how infants’ motor achievements can reverberate across other domains of development, and how changes in infant development that researchers often observe over months arise from infants’ moment-to-moment experiences.