The disintegration of tribal solidarity among American sociologists: Implications for knowledge accumulation

Conclusion Sociology in America scores low on all those organizational dimensions that produce cumulative knowledge. The ratio of skepticism to trust is high; the selection of facts is heavily influenced by the rituals of diverse tribes and ideological cults; the use of instrumentation to observe and report facts is limited; the consensus over valid facts is horizontal rather than hierarchical; the mutual monitoring of knowledge often degenerates into games of rhetoric or, if not rhetoric, to mutual ignorance about the knowledge claims of rival tribes; the barriers separating sociologists from the lay public are porous; and the necessary material, symbolic, cultural, and organizational resources needed to sustain the discipline are unstable and typically in short supply. This situation is tragic because most of the problems confronting humans are organizational in nature; and yet, the science of social organization is not a major player in policy decisions. Indeed, policy is influenced more by ideological and political rhetoric, or even worse, by disciplines such as economics which have an inadequate theory and psychology which has no theory of the structure and collectivity. This exclusion of sociology from important policy decisions is the result of the perceived failures of the discipline to cumulate knowledge and to possess knowledge that would be useful to clients.     

Toward a General Sociological Theory of Emotions

Key ideas from expectation-states theory, symbolic interactionism, dramaturgical analysis, power-status theories, attribution theory, and psychoanalytic theories are combined in an effort to generate a more general theory of emotional arousal in face-to-face interaction. The level of emotional arousal in interaction is seen to reflect the degree of incongruity between expectations, including expectations for confirmation of self, and actual experiences. Such arousal involves the conversion of primary emotions into first and second-order combinations. The nature of emotional arousal is, however, further complicated by the activation of defense mechanisms and attribution processes. The composite theory is formalized into a series of propositions which can serve as hypotheses for empirical tests.     

Targeting Social Expenditure in New Zealand: An Evaluation of the Current Policy Regime

This paper provides a brief account of how social expenditure in New Zealand has been targeted (i.e. means-tested) since the late nineteenth century, outlines the policy framework at the dawn of the new millennium, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the current targeting regime. It is argued that the existing policy settings are open to challenge on a number of counts. In particular, they are complex, inconsistent and relatively intrusive, they impose significant administrative and compliance costs, and they generate considerable incentive problems. Nor has the greater reliance on targeting since the mid-1980s prevented an increase in relative poverty and inequality. Given this situation, the paper outlines some possible reforms.     

The Effect of Non-Stationarity on Extreme Sea-Level Estimation

The sea-level is the composition of astronomical tidal and meteorological surge processes. It exhibits temporal non-stationarity due to a combination of long-term trend in the mean level, the deterministic tidal component, surge seasonality and interactions between the tide and surge. We assess the effect of these non-stationarities on the estimation of the distribution of extreme sea-levels. This is important for coastal flood assessment as the traditional method of analysis assumes that, once the trend has been removed, extreme sea-levels are from a stationary sequence. We compare the traditional approach with a recently proposed alternative that incorporates the knowledge of the tidal component and its associated interactions, by applying them to 22 UK data sites and through a simulation study. Our main finding is that if the tidal non-stationarity is ignored then a substantial underestimation of extreme sea-levels results for most sites. In contrast, if surge seasonality and the tide–surge interaction are not modelled the traditional approach produces little additional bias. The alternative method is found to perform well but requires substantially more statistical modelling and better data quality.     

Frequency Domain Log-linear Models; Air Pollution and Mortality

Motivated by a study of the association between counts of daily mortality and air pollution, we present a frequency domain estimation approach for log-linear models that accounts for both overdispersion and autocorrelation. The methods also allow for the discounting or downweighting of information at particular frequencies at which, for example, confounding variables are likely to have greatest influence. This allows flexible sensitivity analyses to be carried out to assess the possible effect of confounders on the estimated effect. We apply the methods to estimate the association between counts of mortality and the concentration of airborne particles in Philadelphia, USA, for the years 1974–1988. We obtain an estimated effect of particulate air pollution on mortality that is significantly greater than zero but less than that obtained by a standard log-linear analysis.     

Seeing systems in health care organizations

"Systems" in health care organizations are difficult to visualize and understand by people across the organization. Systems exist as behaviors that have reasons and consequences rather than strict, linear cause and effect relationships. Learn how to sketch and see the systems at work in health care, and how to change them to help end the blame game.     

用故事来说服人

每个领导人都要面对这样一个难堪的现实:在说服听众接 受你的观点之前,必须先让他们有动力来聆听观点。劈 头盖脸地给他们一大堆事实与数据无济于事,炫耀企业 资历也不过令他们熟视无睹。领导人需要尝试最基本的沟通形 式:讲故事。 枯燥的数字和要点会让听众茫然失措,但他们能够看到,故 事“主人公”的遭遇反映出自己的欲望与担忧。合适的故事能为 你要表达的主旨设定背景,并建立展开主题的框架,而最重要 的是,它能在你和听众之间创建起“同理心”联系 从而一举说服听众。     

Characterization of children's verbal input in a forager-farmer population using long-form audio recordings and diverse input definitions

There is little systematically collected quantitative empirical data on how much linguistic input children in small-scale societies encounter, with some estimates suggesting low levels of directed speech. We report on an ecologically-valid analysis of speech experienced over the course of a day by young children (N = 24, 6–58 months old, 33% female) in a forager-horticulturalist population of lowland Bolivia. A permissive definition of input (i.e., including overlapping, background, and non-linguistic vocalizations) leads to massive changes in terms of input quantity, including a quadrupling of the estimate for overall input compared to a restrictive definition (only near and clear speech), while who talked to and around a focal child is relatively stable across input definitions. We discuss implications of these results for theoretical and empirical research into language acquisition.