Ethnic Classification and Culture: The Case of the Tujia in Hubei,China

Specific cultural practices, or their absence, definitively mark many ethnic identities. Why then are cultural practices frequently at odds with ethnic categories? The case of the Tujia, an ethnic minority in China, demonstrates the disjuncture between officially assigned ethnic categories, culture and local identity. It also suggests a potential explanation for why such disjunctures occur. State officials apparently classified Tujia in terms of actual cultural practices that were not important locally. There may be a general pattern that outsiders classify others based on culture while locals classify themselves based on socio-political experience.     

Going Green: The Process of Lifestyle Change1

This article draws on 40 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews of three groups of people who restrict their consumption in various ways: voluntary simplifiers, religious environmentalists, and green home owners. I identify common patterns in the emergence of green lifestyles across all groups. Green practices are not isolated decisions or actions, but components in an ongoing project. As a result, green lifestyles are often experienced as both a work in progress and a provisionally coherent life narrative. Furthermore, I explore bricolage, the cobbling together of resources at hand by nonexperts, as a mechanism for lifestyle change and expand the concept to include environmental practices and themes. I adopt a pragmatist perspective to understand lifestyle change as a deliberate process undertaken in response to a problem left underaddressed by current policies and practices. This article also weighs in on the debate in the sociology of culture over how culture influences action.     

Theory and the School‐to‐Work Transition: Are the Recommendations Suitable for Cultural Minorities?

The special June 1999 issue of The Career Development Quarterly that dealt with school‐to‐work transitions was an admirable attempt to link theory to practice. However, both the theories used and the practices suggested failed to take into account the special concerns of cultural minorities. Suggestions for improving theory and practice to make them more culturally sensitive are made in this reaction.     

The Viability of Readiness Assessment in Contributing to Improved Career Services: Response to Jepsen (2000)

This article responds to D. A. Jepsen's (2000) commentary on Sampson et al.'s theory‐based approach to using readiness assessment to improve career services (J. P. Sampson, G. W. Peterson, R. C. Reardon, & J. G. Lenz, 2000). Three topics are included in this response: the reliability, validity, and utility of readiness assessment measures; verbal ability and the use of cognitive information‐processing theory in practice; and the potential contribution of reflective evaluation in career decision making. This article concludes with recommended research questions to examine the impact of readiness assessment on the effectiveness of career service delivery.     

Emotional Language Used by Victims of Alleged Sexual Abuse During Forensic Investigation

Addressing the characteristics of children as witnesses has been a focus of many researchers; however, the emotion derived from children during investigative interviews is an understudied field that is vital for practitioners from various contexts. The current study explores the emotional language that children use during forensic investigations following suspected sexual abuse. The sample comprises 97 investigative interviews with children (N = 97) aged 3–14 years. These interviews were randomly selected from all forensic interviews carried out in Israel in 2011. All of the interviews were conducted in conformity with the National Institute of Child Health and Development Protocol, and the emotional language of the children was coded. The results reveal a limited overall presence of emotional language. Children hardly used positive emotional language and mainly employed negative emotional language. The interview phase and the age of the children greatly affected the use of emotional language, and gender and suspect familiarity had no effect on the children’s emotional language. The findings from the current study enhance existing knowledge on the emotional language of children during forensic investigations and highlight the study’s unique characteristics in the context of abuse, trauma, and forensic investigation. The results of this study demonstrate the need for including probes about emotions in investigative interviews and the addition of emotional language to coding schemes for investigative interviews.     

Diet of the crowned eagle (Stephanoaetus coronatus) in an urban landscape: potential for human-wildlife conflict?

Urban Ecosystems - The study of diet is pivotal in understanding a species, particularly for quantifying a predatory raptors’ economic niche and potential for human-wildlife conflict. The...     

A mediational model of workplace flexibility,work–family conflict,and perceived stress among caregivers of older adults

As an increasing number of employees become caregivers, the role of workplace resources in supporting caregivers has attracted the attention of researchers, employers, and policy-makers. Workplace flexibility is one type of resource that has attracted particular interest, with research exploring whether flexibility (that is, giving employees some control over when and/or where work gets done) is related to important outcomes for both employees and employers. This investigation develops and tests a mediational model explicating the process through which workplace flexibility – operationalized in three distinct ways – impacts caregiver stress among US employees. Using a sample of 211 caregivers from the National Study of the Changing Workforce (2008), results show that work-to-family conflict mediates the relationship between perceived workplace flexibility and caregiver stress as well as the relationship between access to flexible work options and caregivers stress. However, the mediational model is not supported when flexibility is operationalized as respondents’ formal use of flexible work options. Implications for employers and future research are discussed.     

The Strength of Strong and Weak Ties

Strong civil societies, composed of diverse community groups and nongovernmental organizations, are increasingly seen as neccessary for robust economic growth and effective democratic governance. Yet financial and other resources for civil society organizations typically are scarce.     

Funding for Social Movements

Funding is critical for social movements. Our understanding of the relationship between social movements and funders has been shaped by broader theories used to understand movement dynamics. This review examines our changing understanding of the role of funding for movements, paying particular attention to the relative costs and benefits of funding from different groups of actors, such as constituents, foundations, governments, and corporations. While these groups provide critical resources to movements, they can also potentially alter movements by channeling them into less contentious actions and more bureaucratized forms. I explore three current debates in the area of social movement funding. First, current work assesses the relationships of funding, particularly how the interactions between funders and funded groups shape the types of actions in which social movements can engage. Second, social movement funding is embedded within a larger context, and current work is attempting to better understand the role of this context by engaging in comparative research. Finally, debates surrounding the rising importance of corporate funding for movements focus on how these new streams of revenue could help (or hinder) social movement activities.     

International competition and the labor market prospects of union and nonunion workers

We investigate the relationship between international competition and the labor mar-ket prospects of a representative sample of British workers. Our analysis, which sets out the first explicit test of both the wage and employment implications of increased international competition, highlights an interesting asymmetry with competition neg-atively affecting the wage, but not the employment, prospects of unionized workers and the employment, but not the wage, prospects of nonunion workers. We have benefited from discussions with Monojit Chatterji, Michael Devereux, Lisa Grobar, Alan Man-ning, Chris Milner, and Ian Walker. Helpful comments were also received from seminar participants at the Universities of Aberdeen, City, Keele, and Loughborough. We are grateful to Daniel Kwok for excellent research assistance. The normal disclaimer applies.