Occupy the government: Analyzing presidential and congressional discursive response to movement repression

I examine the role of Occupy Wall Street in shifting presidential and congressional discourse on economic fairness and inequality. Using data from 4646 presidential speeches and 1256 congressional records from 2009 to 2015, I test different mechanisms, including repression, media coverage, public opinion, and presidential agenda-setting by applying a novel combination of web scraping, natural language processing, and time series models. I suggest that movement success can be measured in its ability to shape discursive opportunity structures, and I argue that the role of the president should be at the forefront of social movements research. Ultimately, I demonstrate (1) that the repression of Occupy protesters not only predicts media coverage but also increases discursive opportunities through President Obama and Congress, (2) that media coverage of Occupy predicts presidential discourse, (3) that the president's rhetorical shift increases congressional response, and (4) that this change persists after the movement faltered.     

浅析社会工作的结构化过程

本文旨在分析社会工作的运行机制,试图溯源社会工作广泛的主客体关系,借助吉登斯的结构化理论,反思社会工作领域内的多重解释和二元对立,并将社会工作的运行机制归结到结构化的构成之中,在密布资源和规则的结构之中发现充满"实践意识"的行动者,从而感应社会工作发展的脉动。     

Placement Educators’ Experiences and Perspectives of Supervising International Social Work Students in Australia

International social work students in Australia have reported difficulties in finding quality placement opportunities and dealing with issues such as language and cultural barriers. While placement issues have been mostly investigated from a student perspective, this study explores the experiences and perspectives of placement educators towards supervising international social work students. It draws on an online survey of 83 placement educators working for an Australian university. The majority of placement educators reported that they supervised international students differently to domestic students. These differences were negatively framed as challenges involving students’ language competence, their understanding of cultural norms, and knowledge of Australian welfare systems. This framing implies that cultural and linguistic differences between international students and placement educators are viewed in terms of student deficiency rather than as a positive opportunity for mutual learning and professional development.     

Work as a cure for mental illnesses? Opportunism and seeking ways in psychology and psychiatry in the first decades of state socialism in Hungary

ABSTRACT

In Hungary, until the end of the 1940s, there were two main established methods of occupying the mentally ill who were fit for work. From the end of the nineteenth century, a lesser number of patients underwent work therapy in mental asylums, whereas the others were treated with so-called family therapy (otherwise known as the heterofamilial system), exploiting the capacities of families in the countryside. As an important part of this, the mentally ill helped in housekeeping and agricultural work. However, following the political and ideological turn of 1948, the latter form of treatment became debated, and then it was gradually superseded. Parallel to this process, work therapy came to be the most popular type of treatment for mental illnesses, as work formed the basis of the ideology of the communist state, and thus, healing through work harmonized with the general tendencies of the era. This article examines texts related to work therapy published in neurological–psychiatric and psychological journals and monographs between 1954 and 1964. However, although work therapy appeared to be the “handmaiden of ideology,” and even though it was supposed to fulfil a particular role, in reality, the role and perception of work therapy were a lot more complicated.     

Seventh-Grade Social Studies versus Social Meliorism

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), in the state of North Carolina, has gone through considerable recent effort to revise, support, and assess their seventh-grade social studies curriculum in an effort to serve three goals: comply with the Common Core State Standards (Common Core), comply with the North Carolina Essential Standards (Essential Standards), and create a curriculum that best serves students. Meanwhile, the curriculum theory of social meliorism was conceived of over a century ago. Since its inception it has influenced curriculum development and provided a foundation for many other curriculum theories that all start from an assumption that social meliorism holds to an accepted truth that the purpose of education is to improve society and address its injustices. Given contemporary discussions about how to achieve social justice, this is a philosophy that seems particularly meaningful when thinking about the ways that schools can help to accomplish the goals of social justice. I intend to investigate the seventh-grade social studies curriculum of WCPSS in 2014 and juxtapose it with the goals and ideals of social meliorism, determine how well the curriculum addresses the goals of that curriculum theory, and make suggestions for how a social meliorist might suggest modifying the curriculum to better serve the needs of society.     

Thumbs up for privacy?: Differences in online self-disclosure behavior across national cultures

This study investigates relationships between national-level culture and online self-disclosure behavior. We operationalize culture through the GLOBE dimensions, a set of nine variables measuring cultural practices and another nine measuring values. Our observations of self-disclosure come from the privacy settings of approximately 200,000 randomly sampled Facebook users who designated a geographical network in 2009. We model privacy awareness as a function of one or more GLOBE variables with demographic covariates, evaluating the relative influence of each factor. In the top-performing models, we find that the majority of the cultural dimensions are significantly related to privacy awareness behavior. We also find that the hypothesized directions of several of these relationships, based largely on cultural attitudes towards threat mitigation, are confirmed.     

社会需求视角下地方高校行政管理本科的课程设置

地方高校行政管理专业的课程体系普遍存在课程设置结构比例失调,教师知识背景影响课程设置以及课程设置的市场化与功利化倾向等问题。因此,为了有效回应社会的人才需求变化,地方高校管理者和教育者必须积极优化课程设置结构比例,加强与其他学科间的渗透交融以及提升课程的实用性,以期通过重构课程体系,培养适合区域经济发展所需要的人才。     

Social network and family business: Uncovering hybrid family firms

What does it mean for a private enterprise in China to be embedded in a family? Our purpose here is twofold: (1) use social network analysis to describe what it means for a firm to be embedded in a family, (2) reveal from the application a new kind of firm, not family, yet akin to family. Armed with data on a large probability sample of private enterprises — a third of which meet ownership and employment criteria of being family businesses — we uncover a category of “hybrid family firms” that look modern in the style of firms that exclude family, but operate socially in ways similar to family firms. Our conclusion from summary statistics on the sample is that there are no differences in average performance level or network advantage for the three categories of businesses: family firms, hybrid family firms, and family-excluded firms. The fact that CEOs of family firms and hybrid family firms more often turn to family as key business contacts is a fact about network composition that raises no question about network mechanisms. Whether the CEO turns to more or fewer family contacts, government help is more likely with stronger political connections, and business success and survival are more likely with a large, open network. That said, the look-modern, act-traditional hybrid family firms stand alone in prospering with a CEO embedded in a closed business network. Recognition of hybrid family firms adds to the literature’s illustrations of social network analysis used to distinguish types of businesses and business people, and extends the population of organizations within which governance and strategy are likely to be better understood when viewed through a family logic.     

The arithmetic of outcome editing in financial and social domains

Outcome editing refers to a set of mental rules that people apply when deciding whether to evaluate multiple outcomes jointly or separately, which subsequently affects choice. In a large-scale online survey (n = 2062) we investigate whether individuals use the same outcome editing rules for financial outcomes (e.g., a lottery win) and social outcomes (e.g., a party with friends). We also test the role of numeric ability in explaining outcome editing. Our results show that people’s preferences for combining or separating events depend on whether those events are in the financial or the social domain. Specifically, individuals were more likely to segregate social outcomes than monetary outcomes, except for when all outcomes were negative. Moreover, numeric ability was associated with preferences for outcome editing in the financial domain but not in the social domain. Our findings extend the understanding of the arithmetic operations underlying outcome editing and suggest that people rely more on calculations when making choices involving multiple financial outcomes and more on feelings when making choices involving social outcomes.     

《泰王国民商法典》制定的历史背景

《泰王国民商法典》是在近代泰国法制改革的大背景下产生的，有着复杂的社会历史背景。曼谷王朝拉玛四世以前，泰国历经素可泰王朝、大城王朝和曼谷王朝的一部分，朝代更迭，历时漫长但在法制上却保持了相对稳定。1851年，曼谷王朝四世王拉玛四世（1851-1868）登基，拉开了泰国近代史的序幕。1852年1月，英国在第二次英缅战争之后，占领了缅甸，并觊觎泰国。1855年，英国派其驻香港的总督鲍林率使团到泰国与拉玛四世谈判，威逼泰国于1855年4月18日签订了《英暹条约》（史称《鲍林条约》）。这一个不平等条约彻底打开了泰国闭关自守的大门，欧洲列强以该条约为蓝本，威逼泰国签订了类似条约。泰国自此成为一个半殖民地国家，其法制也逐步西化，泰国的法制也这一时期完成了从古代法制向现代法制的转型。事实上，泰国法制现代化的过程，就是一个从理论到制度逐步西化的过程。《泰王国民商法典》就是在这样一个大的背景下产生的。