Talking Prose All These Years: Agent‐Based Modeling as Process‐Oriented Analysis

This article considers the implications of an approach to computer simulation called agent‐based modeling for process‐oriented analysis. It argues that many theoretical and methodological debates found in the latter field can be effectively advanced by the former. The argument is presented and then extended using a ubiquitous agent‐based model proposed to improve understanding of ethnic residential segregation. The argument has three strands. The first is that theoretical and methodological debates are unlikely to progress unless they can be “cashed out” empirically. The second is that agent‐based modeling (and its distinctive methodology) has capabilities to do this that existing research methods lack and, in fact, that agent‐based models are a natural way to represent “social process” as apparently conceived by process‐oriented analysis. The third is that possibilities exist for productive synthesis between agent‐based modeling and process‐oriented analysis with the former clarifying, instantiating, and perhaps even testing notions of process developed by the latter.     

A critical evaluation of the commodification thesis

A recurring theme across the social sciences is that non‐capitalist production is disappearing albeit slowly and unevenly, and is being replaced by a commodified economy in which goods and services are produced by capitalist firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange. In this paper, however, I evaluate critically this commodification thesis. Even in the heartland of commoditisation ‐ the advanced economies. Large economic spaces are identified where alternative economic relations and motives prevail. Rather than view them as leftovers of pre‐capitalist formations, this paper argues that they are the result of both the contradictions inherent in the structural shifts associated with the pursuit of commodification as well as the existence of‘cultures of resistance’, As such, they are viewed as 'spaces of hope’which highlight the demonstrable construction and practice of alternative social relations and logic's of work outside profit‐motivated market‐oriented exchange.     

Campus attitudes toward alcohol and drugs in a deep southern university.

In our zeal to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, we may have a distorted picture of what the majority of college students actually think about alcohol and drug use. Students in this study done at a public university located in the Deep South report being generally intolerant of substance abuse.     

Every Dot has a Meaning

Family therapy in Australia has recently begun a conversation with the indigenous people of this country. Part of this dialogue has involved family therapists listening to the stories of violence and oppression perpetrated against the Aboriginal people under the name of “protection”. This article is part of the ongoing exchange between family therapists and Kooris documenting the suffering of “the stolen generation”. Here two young people removed from their families as small children and raised in the same Aboriginal children's home, speak personally through their art, of an agonising search for family and cultural identity.     

Household debt and financial assets: evidence from Germany, Great Britain and the USA

Summary.  We explore the determinants of debt, financial assets and net worth at the household level by using survey data for Germany, Great Britain and the USA. To identify which households are potentially vulnerable to adverse changes in the economic environment, we also explore the determinants of a range of measures of financial pressure: the probability that a household has negative net worth; the debt-to-income ratio; mortgage income gearing; the saving-to-income ratio. Our empirical findings suggest that the poorest and the youngest households are the most vulnerable to adverse changes in their financial circumstances.