”Technisierung und Subjektivierung. Zur Veränderung des Arbeitshandelns in der Wissensgesellschaft“ Workshop der Akademie für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Baden-Württemberg, 28./29.11.2002

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

“Get to Know the Unknown”: Understanding Religion and Advertising

The relationship between religion and advertising has mostly been theorized in terms of “religion in advertising” or “advertising as religion.” This article pursues two goals: First, it offers a substantial critique of previous studies of advertising and religion in order to take stock and discern future directions of research. Second, it presents the results of an empirical qualitative study of print advertisements which responds to some of the open questions of previous research. It shows that advertising partially fulfills religious functions, focusing on those to do with self-actualization and meaning making within an immanent horizon, and less so on community-related functions. Based on these results, I argue that in the study of religion and advertising, “religion” cannot be limited to specific religious traditions, but has to be understood more broadly. Also, the conventional distinction between “religion in advertising” and “advertising as religion” has to be overcome in order to understand the phenomenon.     

Exercising Privilege: The Cyclical Reproduction of Capital through Swim Club Membership

According to cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, social class is defined by the interplay and operation of various forms of capital, within the set of durable and objective relations in which the classed subject is located. Informed by Bourdieu's understanding of social class, this article details the empirical dimensions of upper‐middle‐class familial involvement at the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club. An institution prefigured on the practice and development of important physical skills, Valley View represents a site for the complex interplay of capitals (economic, social, cultural, and physical) complicit in the preservation and reproduction of members' upper‐middle‐class habitus, and corresponding elevated and privileged social status. Specifically, we discuss the findings of ethnographic fieldwork focused on the acquisition, transmission, and conversion of economic, social, cultural, and physical capital in and through member families' club involvement. We argue that Valley View operates as a distinctive cultural field, wherein embodied techniques and expressions of class‐based power and privilege contribute to the reproduction of social class differences, boundaries, and hierarchies, in such a way as to render them natural, and largely unacknowledged, effects of being.     

Cross-National Coverage of Water Handling: A Community Structure Approach

A cross-national community structure survey examined the relationship between national characteristics and newspaper coverage of water handling. Sampling all relevant 250+ word articles from September 1, 2000 (the implementation of UN Millennium Development Goal target 7c) to September 1, 2010 in 21 newspapers worldwide in NewsBank and AllAfrica databases yielded 394 articles. Articles were coded for visual/editorial “prominence” and “direction” (framing of clean water access as primarily “government responsibility,” “societal responsibility,” or “balanced/neutral” coverage), then combined to produce composite “Media Vector” scores for each newspaper (+.5241 to ?.3886, a range of .9127). Thirteen of 21 Media Vectors (60%) reflected coverage favoring government responsibility for water handling. Pearson correlations revealed the potency of 4 variable cluster scales (all α = .70+) as major correlates of water handling coverage: “female empowerment,” “vulnerability,” “privilege,” and “press freedom,” with three clusters connected to “societal” responsibility. Regression analysis reinforced the strong role of female empowerment in coverage emphasizing societal responsibility. Overall, indicators of privilege and press freedom followed suit, also linked to coverage emphasizing “societal” responsibility for water handling, whereas indicators of vulnerability instead correlated with more media emphasis on government responsibility.     

Domestic violence screening and service acceptance among adult victims in a dependency court setting

Many child welfare systems are unable to effectively identify and address co-occurring domestic violence and child maltreatment. In response, the Dependency Court Intervention Program for Family Violence implemented a protocol to identify indicators of domestic violence in families involved with child protection proceedings. This article highlights data that demonstrate the ability of an outreach and screening process to identify adult victims of domestic violence in dependency court and to offer them appropriate intervention services.     

THE TRAVELS OF A BANK DEPOSIT IN TURBULENT TIMES: THE IMPORTANCE OF DEPOSIT INSURANCE DESIGN FOR CROSS-BORDER DEPOSITS

We examine the impact of the existence on an explicit deposit insurance (DI) scheme and its design features on bilateral cross-border deposits (CBD) in a gravity model setting. We find that both the absolute quality of a country's DI and its relative quality vis-à-vis other countries' DI generally affect depositor behavior. However, during systemic banking crises, cross-border depositors primarily seek countries with the best DI schemes. Similarly, during the 2008–2009 great financial crisis, the emergency actions taken by the governments, which supply and maintain these safe havens, have led to substantial relocations of CBD. (JEL F34, G18)     

Racial/Ethnic Patterns of Kindergarten School Enrollment in the United States

Enrollment into unequal schools at the start of formal education is an important mechanism for the reproduction of racial/ethnic educational inequalities. We examine whether there are racial/ethnic differences in school enrollment options at kindergarten, the start of schooling. We use nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study‐Birth Cohort (ECLS‐B) to model whether parents seek information about their child's school before enrolling, whether parents move to a location so that a child can attend a certain school, or whether parents enroll their child in a school other than the assigned public school. Results indicate that enrollment patterns differ greatly across race/ethnicity. Whereas Black families are the most likely to seek information on a school's performance, White families are the most likely to use the elite option of choosing their residential location to access a particular school. These differences persist when controlling for socioeconomic status and sociogeographic location. Kindergarten enrollment patterns preserve the advantages of White families, perpetuating racial/ethnic disparities through multiple institutions and contributing to intergenerational processes of social stratification. Research should continue to examine specific educational consequences of housing inequities and residential segregation.     

Linearity,symmetry, and equidistance in semantic differential scales for measuring images of self and images of others

ABSTRACT

Violations of linearity, symmetry, and equidistance of scale points in semantic differential scales may be due to respondents failing to figure out antonyms, to a positivity bias, or to respondents curtailing their reading the options. Multiple correspondence analysis on data provided by a randomized between-subjects experiment (split-ballot), using a web survey of 537 German residents, shows that bipolar semantic differential scales allow for linear measurement and conceal no positivity bias, and that using not suitable adjective pairs in semantic differential scales destroys symmetry.