Hearts of Steel

This article looks at the way Arab male and female journalists in pan-Arab media negotiate their journalistic ethics with the aim of boosting their professional image while adding credibility to their news. Drawing on several examples of these male and female journalists, I seek to show how women adopt an un-emotional style when reporting news of pain and suffering, while male journalists emotionally engage with this type of news. The analysis draws on extensive interviews with male and female Arab journalists in pan-Arab media which are scattered inside and outside the Arab region. The discussion is informed by the current debate around detachment versus attachment in news reporting as well as the feminist media debate about the distinction between feminine and masculine values in mediating suffering.     

Competitive bidding — The probability of winning

A company bidding by sealed tender needs to know the relationship between their bid price and their chances of winning the contract. Previously published models for computing the probability of winning are examined and found to be inaccurate. The problem is reformulated, and a new general predictive model for computing the probability of winning is developed. The method of computation is illustrated by a simple worked example.     

THE EFFECT OF SAMPLE STRUCTURE ON ANALYTICAL SURVEYS1,2

The core of this paper is a dialogue between "Harry", an experienced survey statistician and "Fred", a young mathematical statistician. They have contrasting approaches to the problem of estimating a regression relationship from a stratified sample, but after one or two red herrings are dragged out, both realize that the situation is not as simple as they had supposed. The role played by the probabilities of selection is a central issue. Estimation sampling for means, totals, and ratios is also considered, and seen to be a special case of the general analytical sampling synthesis they had already agreed upon.     

The impact of child obesity on active parental consent in school-based survey research on healthy eating and physical activity

Previous studies have shown that active consent procedures result in sampling bias in surveys dealing with adolescent risk behaviors such as cigarette smoking and illicit drug use. To examine sampling bias from active consent procedures when the survey topic pertains to childhood obesity and associated health behaviors, the authors pair data obtained from both active and passive consent procedures. The authors find that parents of children who are overweight or at risk for being overweight are significantly less likely to give active consent. In addition, parents of children enrolled in lower grades are more reluctant to consent to participate.     

Family Therapy into the 21st Century: Can we Work our Way out of the Epistemological Maze?

Family therapy is a generic term used to describe a paradigm within the helping professions that encompasses a range of competing approaches which share a common view about the importance of family to maladaptive behaviours and disorders. The various family therapies have evolved rapidly over the last three decades, at a time when society has been attuned to innovation, and eager to try new products. Thus, they soon found a niche in the partial void created by the demise of some of the previously dominant psychological paradigms. While collectively the family therapies have been demonstrated to be generally efficacious as a treatment approach, the last two decades have witnessed an avalanche of theorising and conceptualising that has created an epistemological maze through which practitioners must find their way. In this paper we ask whether this trend is moving the family therapies too far away from the core issues involved in the helping professions.     

Productivity of highly skilled immigrants: economists in the postwar period

Prior work finds declining immigrant quality in the postwar period that is linked to source-country and skill-composition changes associated with the 1965 Immigration Act. This paper uses a unique panel of foreign- and native-born American Economic Association members to show that the highly skilled experienced a similar shift away from European migrants toward those from Asia. However, the findings do not indicate that this change in source-country composition has been accompanied by a decline in quality; rather, the most recent cohorts of foreign-born economists appear to be more productive than their native counterparts.     

Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.     

Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment,intoxication and collective life

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism.