‘Mafia Baroque’: post‐socialist architecture and urban planning in Bulgaria

This paper traces the reception of the architectural style known as ‘Mafia Baroque’ within the professions of architecture and urban planning in Bulgaria. The debate within these professions was strongly linked to the general decline of power among former intellectual elites and the specific decline of architects and planners, who were sidelined as arbiters of ‘good taste’ and disempowered as regulators of urban growth. The reaction to this style also highlights the rise in public concern over corruption and organized crime and dissatisfaction with post‐socialist urbanization. This paper chronicles the extent of changes in construction and regulation in Bulgaria during the 1990s and argues that planners and architects were challenged not only by their professional marginalization but also by a deeper embarrassment over cultural change. It then relates this debate to broader post‐socialist anxieties over insufficient regulation of urbanization and fear of failing to meet Western European goals for economic and political change.     

The ILO and the right to strike

The author argues that the June 2012 challenge by the ILO Employers' group to the hitherto generally accepted view regarding the right to strike under the Freedom of Association Convention, No. 87, is at odds with the historical understanding of the framework in which the Convention is embedded. She demonstrates how the ILO constituents have consistently recognized that there is a positive right to strike, which is inextricably linked to – and an inevitable corollary of – the right to freedom of association. The article also analyses the relative roles of the ILO supervisory bodies in this regard.     

Income inequality,poverty and crime across nations

We examine the relationship between income inequality, poverty, and different types of crime. Our results are consistent with recent research in showing that inequality is unrelated to homicide rates when poverty is controlled. In our multi‐level analyses of the International Crime Victimization Survey we find that inequality is unrelated to assault, robbery, burglary, and theft when poverty is controlled. We argue that there are also theoretical reasons to doubt that the level of income inequality of a country affects the likelihood of criminal behaviour.     

Changing men,changing times – fathers and sons from an experimental gender equality study

The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for addressing intergenerational transmission, historical change and agency. The framework will be employed to analyse the findings from a longitudinal follow‐up study over two generations of men, where couples from Norway participated in an experimental research study, the Work‐Sharing Couples Project, which aimed to promote egalitarian work–family adaptations in the early 1970s. The original study was based on both spouses working part‐time and shift parenting. The follow‐up study concluded that the untraditional work–family arrangement had not been passed on to the sons. The article develops a multidimensional analysis of the work–family adaptations of men in two generations: the untraditional adaptation of fathers in the 1970s; and the neo‐traditional adaptations of sons in the 2000s. In developing a four‐dimensional approach to intergenerational transmission and social change, the article contributes to the study of intergenerational transmission through the comparison of situated agency in different generations and time/spaces. Taking into account different aspects of time and space, personal biography, discursive and material structures of opportunity, and intergenerational dynamics at the family level as well as at social level, the article contributes to theorizing longitudinal qualitative research by linking the micro‐level to the macro‐level.     

The classing gaze and its gendering effects: (dis)‐respectability,emotional (in)‐competency,and the counselling experiences of domestically violent Taiwanese men

Research on domestically violent men typically takes an oppositional logic of gender. While the significance of class in researching domestically violent men is identified, class and gender are often treated as separate entities that do not complicate each other. Drawing upon group observations and in‐depth interviews, this paper identifies how intersections of class and gender manifest in the counselling experiences of domestically violent Taiwanese men. From a Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the authors analyse (1) how class distinctions serve to (re)produce gendered hierarchy; (2) how contradictory experiences of gender reveal a relational understanding of class; and (3) how the gendered nature of domestically violent men is inscribed with a meaning of (working) class specificity for maintaining middle‐class ‘purity’. In analysing men's multiple and conflicting experiences, this paper contributes to research on domestically violent men by showing how class and gender are actively constructed and not produced in a monolithic/invariant way.     

Interacting mechanisms of time inconsistency

We interact two prominent behavioral mechanisms of time inconsistency that have been used to study inadequate saving: hyperbolic discounting and short-term planning. Hyperbolic discounting is a conventional way to model impulsive decision making, and short planning horizons have been used to represent myopia. One might expect that interacting both mechanisms within the same model would compound the inadequacy of saving. However, our key finding takes the form of a paradox: hyperbolic discounting does not affect consumption and saving allocations if the planning horizon is short and fixed, although it will affect allocations if the planning horizon is equal to the remaining life span. We demonstrate analytically that this finding is robust to the shape of the disposable income path, to the coarseness of the time grid, and to alternative forms of the period utility function.     

Accounting for the Performance of Environmentally Significant Behavior: The Symbolic Significance of Recycling

The scientific community has pronounced climate change unequivocal and its consequences disastrous. Yet Americans' behavioral response to the global social problem of environmental degradation has been largely confined to the individual act of recycling. This article examines why Americans are not doing more to address climate change and other environmental issues. Taking a cognitive sociological perspective, I describe how Americans think about environmental issues and pro‐environmental behavior. I draw on Swidler's concept of a “cultural tool kit,” to examine the cultural narratives Americans use to account for the small amount of pro‐environmental behavior they perform. The act of recycling functions as a synecdoche for pro‐environmental behavior in general, allowing individuals to over‐claim the significance of a modest amount of pro‐environmental behavior. I argue that Americans' failure to engage with environmental issues at a collective level is rooted in the individualized culture of American environmentalism.     

Fragments of Modernization: Domestic Spaces Indicating Traditional Dialects in a Modern Speech

This article examines the change in Turkish domestic space through modernization and, in particular, the artifact of lace, as a nonchanging object in Turkish home in its relationship with the “traditional” and the “modern” domestic settings. Thereby it investigates how traditional and modern settings are defined in Turkish society and, this leads to a further analysis of the modernization process in Turkey within the scope of Turkish house and its domestic settings. The aim of the article is to analyze lace as an agent, which is an actant of the change in domestic settings, to read the connection between the daily life of people and social lives of artifacts. Therefore, examining the dialogue of lace with traditional and modern domestic settings provides to deconstruct the network of the artifact, the house and the individual during the modernization process that Turkish society has been through. The theoretical perspective of the article relies on a material‐semiotic approach with an emphasis on Latour's Actor‐Network Theory and, the methodology of the article is based on ethnography: It includes observations and semi‐structured interviews conducted with people from different social environments focusing on the meaning and the use of lace in domestic environment.     

Fighting with Oneself to Maintain the Interaction Order: A Sociological Approach to Self‐Injury Daily Process

This article proposes an interactionist approach to self‐injury behavior in youth. Mostly based on in‐depth interviews with seventy people who self‐harm or who have self‐harmed at some point in their lives, it describes the process of daily self‐injuring. It shows that this practice consists less in the self‐harm in itself than in a liminal emotional state, composed of several successive steps, and that self‐injury makes sense because concerned individuals subjectively see it as the most practical of known activities for releasing emotional troubles, then maintaining the interaction order surrounding them.     

Droit du travail,chômage et part salariale: l'expérience de six pays de l'OCDE, 1970–2010

Utilisant des données sur le droit du travail dans six pays (Allemagne, Etats‐Unis, France, Japon, Royaume‐Uni et Suède) entre 1970 et 2010, les auteurs évaluent les effets de la réglementation du travail sur le chômage et la part du travail dans le revenu national. Leur méthode montre la différence entre les effets à court et à long terme des changements de réglementation: la législation protectrice des travailleurs n'est pas associée de façon systématique avec le chômage, mais est corrélée positivement avec la part du travail dans le revenu national. Les dispositions relatives au temps de travail et la représentation des salariés ont des effets bénéfiques tant sur l'efficacité que sur la répartition.