This article explores youth drinking in Zurich, Switzerland, on both public squares away from nightlife areas, referred to as ‘square street drinking’ and on the street within the vicinity of nightclubs, defined as ‘club street drinking’. Taking a relational space approach, the analysis adds a social perspective to the dominant economicpolitical perspective to drinking in urban nightli…
Urban residential neighbourhoods, including migrant neighbourhoods, have become important incubation zones for small businesses in recent years and policy-makers and academics alike are wondering which local factors affect this development. This paper analyses the extent to which migrant neighbourhood characteristics related to the built environment and the local regulations matter in determini…
Abstract This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban,London and New York City. The paper is drawn directly from Chapter 8 of C…
This paper reviews what local governments in more than 50 cities are doing with regard to disaster risk reduction. It draws on the reports of their participation in the global Making Cities Resilient Campaign and its 10 “essential” components, and on interviews with city mayors or managers. These show how resilience to disasters is being conceived and addressed by local governments,especia…
The relationship between the built environment and vulnerability and resilience is a little-studied area of research, and demands an exploration of constraints and windows of opportunity. Given gender roles and the division of labour between women and men within urban poor households, the impacts of climate extremes are likely to be gendered. But conceptualizing gender only in terms of the vul…
This paper is a report on one of three related case studies in Latin America and shows the progress in the city of Chetumal, and the larger state of which it is the capital (Quintana Roo), in disaster response, especially with regard to cyclones. It also shows the progress in land use and ecological planning through the development of certain tools, which have changed the approach from one of …
The relationship between “coping” and “resilience” increasingly features in academic, policy and practical discussions on adaptation to climate change in urban areas. This paper examines this relationship in the context of households in “extreme poverty” in the city of Khulna, Bangladesh. It draws on a quantitative data set based on 550 household interviews in low-income and informa…
This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broaden political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed ‘posthumanism’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial p…
This paper asks how Indigenous ways of being and knowing can become legitimized within western theorizations of ontology, given the ongoing (neo)colonial relations that shape geographic knowledge production. My analysis emerges within my narrative accounts of being a Kwakwaka’wakw scholar in two spaces of knowledge production: a geography conference and a potlatch. Through these stories, I en…
This short reflection on my writing practice pivots off Roland Barthes’ announcement, in his last lecture course The Preparation of the Novel 1978–80, that he wanted ‘to track the Work from its Projection to it’s accomplishment: in other words, from Wanting-to-Write to Being-Able-to- Write, or from the Desire-to-Write to the Fact-of-Writing’. Here I reflect how Barthes, through animat…
For most academic geographers writing remains the primary means through which we communicate our work. Typically, of course, in monographs and journal articles, but with ongoing creative efforts to engage geographical audiences through practices beyond academic publishing – something cultural geographies in practice has long featured – that writing sees a myriad of expressions.1 Nevertheles…
This contribution is a reflection on the process of becoming a poet as a geographer. It charts my journey into the world of poetry and reflects on the cross-overs between academic geography and poetic practice in the past. It considers the way in which geography and poetry can inform each other in the practice of writing creatively, and tentatively suggests how this engagement might influence m…
This article examines the period leading up to the establishment of the Schefferville iron mine in subarctic Québec, Canada, with a focus on the years 1937–54. The beginning of iron ore mining at Schefferville was a decisive moment in the growth of the modern Québec state, opening the way for the industrial exploitation of the province’s natural resources – mineral and otherwise – in …
The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two ‘ontological�…
The islands in the delta of the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan have for a very long time been of little interest to anybody. It was a hostile environment for human settlement, exploitable resources were limited and nobody could think of options for alternative forms of land use. The area was classified as ‘marginal or empty land’. Things started to change dramatically in the 1990’…
A persistent problem in the design of bipolar attitude questions is whether or not to include a middle response alternative. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that people might hold opinions which are ‘neutral’ with regard to issues of public controversy. On the other, question designers suspect that offering a mid-point may attract respondents with no opinion, or those who lean t…
Although agree–disagree (AD) rating scales suffer from acquiescence response bias, entail enhanced cognitive burden, and yield data of lower quality, these scales remain popular with researchers due to practical considerations (e.g., ease of item preparation, speed of administration, and reduced administration costs). This article shows that if researchers want to useADscales, they should off…
This article examines the problem of response error in survey earnings data. Comparing workers’ earnings reports in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to their detailed W-2 earnings records from the Social Security Administration, we employ ordinary least squares (OLS) and quantile regression models to assess the effects of earnings determinants and d…
This special issue of Sociological Methods & Research contributes to recent trends in studies that exploit the availability of multiple measures in sample surveys in order to detect the level and patterning to measurement errors. Articles in this volume focus on topics in one of (or some combination of) the three areas: (1) those that develop and test theoretical hypotheses regarding the behavi…
It is common to come across interviews, both transcribed and recorded, that were conducted according to remarkably different strategies that seem to contrast with the recommendations and indications of a large part of the literature on this subject. To understand the reasons behind these different strategies, I will present the outcomes of a study carried out among Italian sociologists who base…
In January 2011 (BMS issue 109), this journal published our article on a new process for developing a structural hypothesis, using a matrix approach and multi-dimensional data analysis techniques (Cohen and Tresser, 2011). The present article continues to develop the matrix assisted hypothesis construction method (matrix method for short) and offers directions for research utilizing this approa…
This article reports an investigation of errors of measurement in self-reports of financial data in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), one of the major social science data resources available to those who study the demography and economics of aging. Results indicate significantly lower levels of reporting reliability of the composite variables in the HRS relative to those found for ‘‘su…
Background: Because of high mutation rates, new drugresistant viruses are rapidly evolving, thus making the necessary control of influenza virus infection difficult.Methods: We screened a constrained cysteine-rich peptide library mimicking m-conotoxins from Conus geographus and a proline-rich peptide library mimicking lebocin 1 and 2 from Bombyx mori by using influenza virus RNA polymerase (…
Abstract We discuss how the Arab Spring is a reflection of the resiliency of the human rights regime. In order to accomplish this, we explore the extent to which the Arab Spring represents norm diffusion among Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states. Specifically, we examine the cases of Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain and consider how economic and demographic changes created space for human r…
Abstract Recently, the idea that all rights are positive and costly has come to prominence in international human rights law. This has been taken to imply that there are no reasons to object to providing economic, social, and cultural rights with the same level of protection than civil and political rights. The present contribution aims to reject this undifferentiated view. It argues that eve…
Abstract The ‘dignity and worth of the human person’ emphasised in international human rights instruments resonate strongly in relation to the world’s ageing population, which is projected to be the fastest growing population group in the world and often among the most vulnerable. While elderly persons as a group are heterogeneous and their socio-economic life situation varies significa…
This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world’. It goes beyond hope and suggests how we may do this. The how is a critical question at a time when rapid change is impacting on all societies. What will be the human outcomes of political turmoil in the Middle East and elsewhere?…
In the past three decades there have been dramatic changes in the fortunes of cities and regions, in beliefs about the role of markets and states in society, and in the theories used by social scientists to account for these changes. Many of the cities experiencing crisis in the 1970s have undergone revitalization, while others have continued to decline. In Europe and North America new pol…
This book had its genesis in a research collective, the International Tourism Research Group (ITRG), funded by the Council for European Studies. Although tourism had become an increasingly important sector of the global economy and shaper of cities, scholarship had yet to treat it with the seriousness accorded to other urban topics. Our aim was to place tourism within a theoretical perspective …
The contributors to this volume make a crucial and forceful point. There are numerous theories and methodologies that can be used to yield research findings about the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to make a positive difference in people’s lives. Whether the findings in any particular research project actually contribute in this way depends on multiple factors,…
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explore the current and historical state of accounting for biodiversity in Kalimantan (Borneo). It is also to evaluate various models for stand-alone biodiversity reporting in the context of the work undertaken in Kalimantan by the United Nations Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (…
Essentials of Social Research is a short basic primer on social research methodology that will provide straightforward, clear answers to the key questions in research methods, such as: What are the components of scientific analysis? What is grounded theory? What constitutes a causal explanation? How believable are particular research findings? As an introductory primer, the book covers types of…
Disseminating cutting edge theories and empirical research in the field of industrial relations and conflict management, from an interdisciplinary approach, and firmly based in theories on human ehaviour in relation to work and organizations. Formally the series will publish monographs and contributed or edited volumes from leading psychology scholars. Specifically, the series integrates theori…
A preface generally tells the story of how a book came into being. This particular book is rooted in my previous work in macrosociology: notably, two earlier books in which I summarize the work of the big four in nineteenth-century sociology—Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—and of contemporary theorists who write in the tradition of these founders. In writing these books, I not only lear…
Abstract This article challenges a received wisdom in the liberal peace thesis, namely that the roots of the conjunction of liberalism and peace can be traced back to the idea of an essentially pacific commercial civil society in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. The article instead shows that the Scottish Enlightenment was committed to the idea of military virtue. Textual analysis …
Abstract. The study explained a model of employee social responsibility (ESR) as an antecedent to corporate competitiveness. It hypothesizes that ESR has significant effect on employee competitiveness (EC). Questionnaires were administered to a sample of 700 employees selected from a population of 5,595 from 20 classified hotels in the coastal region of Kenya using proportionate and systematic…
Community service is widely regarded as a fundamental experience in preparation for good citizenship, but it remains unclear whether common variants of service are consequential for civic outcomes. This study examines changes in the relative importance assigned to prosocial and egoistic values associated with service through different types of organizations, service prompted by external contin…
This article identifies the importance of educating social work studetits and enlisting social work faculty to embrace the university-commutiity engagement arena as a critical subñeld of commutiity practice. Through the letis of social work knowledge, values, atid skills, the authors present three case studies of social workers who are working in the university-community field. The authors off…
Abstract. The present research tested whether the Big Five personality dimensions—extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience—moderate the effects of income on life satisfaction. The authors analyzed data from three large-sample, nationally representative, longitudinal studies: the British Household Panel Survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel S…
Abstract. Four studies explored whether perspective-taking and empathy would be differentially effective in mixed-motive competitions depending on whether the critical skills for success were more cognitively or emotionally based. Study 1 demonstrated that individual differences in perspective-taking, but not empathy, predicted increased distributive and integrative performance in a multiple-r…
Abstract. Traditional models of emotion–health interactions have emphasized the deleterious effects of negative emotions on physical health. More recently, researchers have turned to potential benefits of positive emotions on physical health as well. Both lines of research, though, neglect the complex interplay between positive and negative emotions and how this interplay affects physical we…
Abstract. Ostracism is a common, yet painful social experience. Given the harmful consequences of ostracism, why would groups ostracize their members? Previous research suggests that ostracism is a form of social control used to influence those group members perceived as burdensome. The authors propose that individuals will ostracize a group member only when it is justified (i.e., the member s…
Abstract. Previous studies showed that washing one’s hand not only removes dirt from the body, it also weakens one’s guilt after immoral behavior, makes moral judgment of others’ misdeeds less severe, reduces post-decisional dissonance effects, and can help wash off bad luck. The present study broadens this scope by investigating the psychological impact of physical cleansing in a perfor…
Abstract. The article is a study of two tribal movements based on development-induced displacements in contemporary Orissa. In fact, all the two micro-movement studies are resistance movements against mining based heavy metal industries, e.g. against the Utkal Alumina International Ltd. (UAIL) at Kashipur and against the Vedanta Aluminium Ltd. (VAL) at Lanjigarh. Based on both primary and …
Abstract. The current study investigated the effect of distance on medium preferences in interpersonal communication. Five experiments showed that people’s preference for using pictures (vs. words) is increasingly higher when communicating with temporally, socially, or geographically proximal (vs. distal) others. In contrast, preference for words is increasingly higher when communicating wit…
Abstract. According to the resource-depletion model, self-control is a limited resource that is depleted after a period of exertion. Evidence consistent with this model indicates that self-control relies on glucose metabolism and glucose supplementation to depleted individuals replenishes self-control resources. In five experiments, we tested an alternative hypothesis that glucose in the oral …