The Death Penalty and Historical Change in Spain

This article studies the long duration of the death penalty in Spain until its abolition in the Constitution of 1978. After analysing the plurality of theoretical approaches and possibilities offered by archival sources and specialised historiography (particularly those produced by specialists in the history of law and social history), I synthesise the Spanish answers to the major questions posed in the international historiographical debate on this issue. I then review the formality and the religious and juridical content of these “ceremonies of torment” in order to understand the scope of the practice of the death penalty in processes of social change: what did political power transmit from the scaffolds and what type of social impact was generated by public executions? How did the institutions that exercised the death penalty evolve? Why, during the transition from the Old Regime to the liberal state, was the death penalty used more regularly than before? How many prisoners were in fact executed, for what crimes, and using what procedures and techniques? Finally, after confirming that in the decades straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the death penalty was on the decline, being counteracted by abolitionist discourse in the field of penal sentencing, I examine the functions played by political executions in the repressive dynamics of the Civil War and Francoism.     

Electricity consumption changes following solar adoption: Testing for a solar rebound

We use household-level data to explore residential electricity use patterns following installation of solar panels. Solar adoption leads to an increase in total electricity consumption relative to a matched non-adopting control group. Our point estimate translates to a rebound effect of 28.5%, suggesting that nearly a third of the electricity produced by a customer's solar panels is used for increased energy services, rather than reduced grid electricity consumption. We explore several potential drivers of an increase in electricity consumption. These results have important implications for electricity planning and policy, suggesting that rooftop solar stimulates additional demand for electricity.     

Leaving Chicago for Iowa's "Fields of Opportunity": Community Dispossession, Rootlessness, and the Quest for Somewhere to "Be OK"

In recent years, urban development and public housing demolition have posed challenges to the social and geographic rootedness of low-income African Americans in urban areas. In particular, in Chicago, widespread public housing demolition, occurring in the context of rapid gentrification, has contributed to increasing shortages of affordable low-income housing. This study uses in-depth interviews and participant observation to examine the migration experiences of men and women who have left urban neighborhoods and public housing developments in Chicago searching for affordable housing and economic opportunity in eastern Iowa. This particular analysis focuses on experiences of social and geographic "rootlessness" that emerged as a major theme in these interviews. Participants describe community dispossession in Chicago that has threatened not only the ties between individuals and their social support networks, but also connections and claims to the places in which these ties are rooted. Narratives that describe leaving Chicago in this context and then trying to get by as a stigmatized outsider in "someone else's city" speak to a process of dislocation that may disrupt critical social-support resources that are known to mitigate the consequences of structural disadvantage.     

The Development of Students' Mathematics Self‐Concept in Relation to Gender: Different Countries,Different Trajectories?

Gender differences in the development of children's and adolescents' academic self‐perceptions have received increasing attention in recent years. This study extends previous research by examining the development of mathematics self‐concept across grades 7–12 in three cultural settings: Australia (Sydney; N=1,333), the United States (Michigan; N=2,443), and Germany (four federal states; N=4,688). Results of latent growth curve models document very similar patterns of self‐concept development in males and females in the three settings. First, gender differences in favor of boys were observed at the beginning of the observation period (grade 7). Second, gender was not significantly related to self‐concept change in either group, meaning that initial differences persisted across time. Third, the results provided no evidence that the form of the longitudinal change trajectories for mathematics self‐concept differed across the cultural settings. This pattern of results is inconsistent with explanatory models that predict converging or diverging gender differences in mathematics self‐concept. Furthermore, the results indicate that self‐concept development may be highly similar across western cultural settings.     

Environmental education: A time of change,a time for change

We join the authors in this special issue in their call to embrace a culture of evaluation. Obstacles to change are formidable. Educators debate their purpose – provide knowledge or achieve environmental goals – and we have limited evidence of the effectiveness of environmental programs and policies. Change requires collaboration across organizations and disciplines, targeted capacity building, and building systems of assessment into programs that enable more sophisticated evaluations. As in other fields, an evidence-based movement will increase the credibility and effectiveness of environmental education. A culture of evaluation offers educators a solid platform to collaboratively and efficiently achieve society's environmental goals.     

Central State Steering of Local Collaboration: Assessing the Impact of Tools of Meta-governance in Homelessness Services in England

Much of the discussion of state steering of service delivery networks to encourage collaboration at the local level has been theoretical. This study builds on this analysis systematically to assess the relationship between meta-governance tools of central government steering and the extent of local collaboration, using the case of homelessness services in England. Contrary to the pessimist expectations of some contemporary theory, central government funding tools and facilitating the transfer of best practice encourages collaboration. However, simple information provision and authority based tools are only partially effective, risking tokenistic compliance. Authority tools are more effective when combined with other tools.

What Narrows the Stepgap? Closeness Between Parents and Adult (Step)Children in Germany

Using data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) based on 11,746 intergenerational family relationships, the present study examined differences in parental closeness across relations with multiple, coresidential, and non‐coresidential adolescent and adult children. Replicating previous research in a multilevel analysis across families, the authors found a strong positive effect of biological descent on closeness in comparison to adoptive and steprelations; this parental favoritism toward biological offspring was partly explained by selection via parental resources and attitudes. Supplemental within‐parent fixed effect analyses suggested that the relative disadvantage of stepchildren was offset by longer duration of the stepparent–stepchild relationship, lower household income, fewer children in the household, and high parental affirmation of familism.     

Social Workers as Boundary Spanners: Reframing our Professional Identity for Interprofessional Practice

One of the more difficult tasks for social work educators is socializing students into a professional identity. Social identity theory provides a lens to consider what is needed for a social work identity that will continue to be salient for students as they move into practice. Framing social workers as boundary spanners might offer students a professional identity that is congruent with core values, reflects what social workers do and places less emphasis on old debates about the profession. It also positions students well for work in the increasingly interprofessional realms of health and social care. I consider how social workers are well equipped to meet the demand created by ‘joined-up working’ for people with boundary-spanning expertise. Seeing ourselves as boundary spanners is one way to reconcile our professional and interprofessional identities, thereby increasing the chances that our students will continue to identify as social workers when they move into interprofessional practice.     

‘You Are Germany’– ‘I Am Australian’: The construction of national unity through diversity in select examples from Australia and Germany

This article explores the construction of national unity through diversity by analysing two case studies from Germany and Australia: the television campaign ‘You Are Germany’ and the song ‘I Am Australian’. It places both examples in a broader context of forging national unity through diversity and argues that diversity has occasionally been hijacked as a nationalist argument to advance national identity and unity. This study explores the different aspects of diversity appearing in both cases under study, identifies those parts of diversity being excluded and asks how national unity is being forged through recourse to diversity.