Social Inequality and the Perceived Income Justice Gap

This paper attempts to answer the question whether justice evaluations of income inequality in a society are determined more by country differences or by the social position an observer occupies. In very general terms what we study is whether, in shaping justice beliefs, cultural factors are more important than social-structural ones, or vice versa. In view of transformation societies, country differences are conflated with differences in the transformation processes the countries are experiencing. This is why we distinguish different types of transmations with regard to the postcommunist countries of Eastern and Central Europe testing empirically whether these transformation types exert influence on the justice beliefs, and how this influence compares to that of positional effects. With International Social Justice Project (ISJP) data of 1991 and 1996, we study the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and—as a western referent society—West Germany. Main results are that in the early phase of transformation the different transformation types as well as social positions matter in shaping justice evaluations, over time, however, the types of transformation clearly lose influence. In 1996, compared to 5 years earlier, the countries have become similar in that most of the variation in the perception of the income justice must now be attributed to the positional differences of individuals. We conclude that the characteristics of the transformation processes decrease in importance for determining public views about social justice. In this respect, the transformation societies of Eastern and Central Europe may well be on the route to becoming more like western societies.     

Semiformal Organizations and Control During the COVID-19 Crisis in China

Scholars often compare China and Western societies in terms of dichotomous forms of control—formal and informal. Recent research indicates a nuanced form of social control—semiformal. Using a survey data collected during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in China, this study investigated the prevalence and importance of semiformal organizations, formal organizations, and informal groups participating in social control and social service and the predictors of the perceived importance of these three forms of social control mechanisms. Findings from this study revealed that formal organizations, the semiformal organizations, and informal groups all participated in community control and service. Semiformal organizations had the highest level of participation. This study found that education and age are the two major predictors of the views on the importance of formal, informal, and semiformal control and control mechanisms.

     

Public Beliefs in the Causes of Wealth and Poverty and Legitimization of Inequalities in Russia and Estonia

The article analyzes the attributions of the causes of poverty and wealth in Russia and Estonia in 1991 and 1996 and their determinants. Among the latter are the perceived actual justice of the society, the perceived size of the middle class, and the personal position in the system of inequalities. Despite the economic hardships and a rise in inequalities in both countries, individualistic explanations of wealth and poverty have increased over the 5 years between the surveys. At the same time respondents in both countries demonstrated a growing awareness of the importance of starting positions and connections to achieve wealth. The perceived middle class has a significant effect on attributions of poverty but not on wealth. Russians in Estonia have a particular bias against wealth, whereas non-Russians in Russia are more likely to justify wealth on the basis of individual merit. Explanations of poverty and wealth in Estonia are more rooted in the factors of socialization (age, education, and gender), whereas in Russia they are more rooted in the changes in the family financial circumstances between 1991 and 1996. There was a general increase in support for government intervention in distribution in both countries.     

Social justice jurisprudence of clinical education programme: A paradigm shift from legal education to justice education

The legal profession has remained relevant in bringing about positive transformation in society — with leaders, policymakers, and change makers around the world mostly possessing a background in the law. That said, the trust, and positive image, enjoyed by legal professionals continues on a declining path. Considered more glamorous, the legal profession has gone astray from the path of social justice. In this article, I argue that the negative perception of legal professionals is, in large part, because of the way legal professionals are taught and trained in law schools. I argue that legal teaching pedagogy in South Asia, and generally in developing countries, is a product of colonial structure. Even after the so-called decolonisation movement, law schools and universities, for example in South Asia, institutionalised a legal pedagogy unsuited to the epistemic actualities of their societies. A law student in South Asia was and continues to be taught the Western conception of what the law is and its relationship to justice. In a legal culture carrying the transplanted laws of the colonisers, the students of developing countries are meticulously trained in the technical skills of reasoning and interpretation by applying Eurocentric guidelines of positivist construction. In light of this, I propose a shift in legal education: to transform the existing legal education and pedagogy into ‘justice education’. I focus on the ancient principles — located in the Eastern legal philosophy — of empirical reasoning and the importance of the human nature of sociability in arriving at social justice. To combat the tendency of insulating law students from societal problems, I propose a social justice-driven legal pedagogy. I have also reflected on some practices that ‘are’ and highlighted other practices that ‘ought to be’. My thesis connotes that the legal profession has an innate role in building the capability of individuals who are deprived and excluded. In line with it, I present examples of scalable clinical legal education being practised specially by the Kathmandu School of Law that can create multidimensional legal professionalism.

     

Perceptions of Poverty and Wealth in Western and Post-Communist Countries

This paper analyzes the felt legitimacy of poverty and wealth in the United States, West Germany, The Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Russia. Several theories on poverty and wealth perception are discussed; of these, dominant ideology theory has been the most influential. This theory can predict the existence not only of a legitimizing ideology in a society, but also of challenging beliefs that incumbents of specific social positions hold. It is argued that poverty and wealth perceptions are more complex, however, involving at least three latent dimensions. Using data from the International Social Justice Project it is demonstrated that, regarding poverty, individuals distinguish between merited, unmerited, and fatalistic types of poverty. Merited poverty is poverty brought about by the individual's own doing or not doing, unmerited poverty is due to forces external to the individual, whereas fatalistic explanations attribute poverty to ascribed properties of the individual. For wealth also there are three causally relevant factors: in addition to merited und unmerited ones, a social capital factor that sees social contacts as a source for determining economic success. Using a structural equation approach and its group comparison option for comparing countries, the different explanations of poverty and wealth are translated into specific measurement models. Testing simultaneously with linear regression models show how preferences for particular explanations are shaped by stratification-related experiences and by the social position of an observer.     

Normative and rational choice accounts of human social behavior

Two approaches to the problem of explaining social order are compared: the rational choice approach (as represented in Coleman'sFoundations of Social Theory) and the normative or social control approach, in which rules and rule-following play the central role. Considered in terms of Coleman's own criteria for social theory, only the social control approach seems plausible. In particular, the rational choice approach is circular in that it necessarily presupposes the existence of rules and rule-following, while its pretense is to be able to explain social order in non-normative terms. The social control approach accounts for social order in terms of the existence of social rules and the innate capacity of human beings to learn to follow such rules.     

Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women: Comparing Greece and The United Kingdom

While Western societies are striving to become more honest about gender inequality, terms such as ‘violence against women’ have started to appear in policy debates in Asia and worldwide. The response is largely punitive. The option of restorative justice has been considered, but evidence on actual practice with these cases is scarce. Following international attempts to block restorative justice for violence against women cases, this paper argues that a better understanding needs to be developed before further steps are taken in any direction. The authors examined cases from their respective countries, Greece and the UK, to identify common elements, differences and minimum standards when applying restorative justice in cases of violence against women. An abstract implementation mode for further research is constructed.     

The Shadow Price of Social Change and Its Evaluation

This paper analyzes the “shadow price” of social transformation. For the first time, an attempt was made to determine the approaches to measuring this value with regard to nonmarket phenomena and processes, and to apply these approaches in an empirical analysis, based on a representative survey in Russia (N = 1,000) using experimental situations.

Specifically, it quantitatively evaluates (1) the degree of divergence between the real and the ideal structure of the time budget of several important domains of social life; (2) the ratio of social ills to social benefits; (3) individual public welfare functions; and (4) the social cost, legitimated by citizens, of reproducing two fundamental public goods: “the capacity to maintain ‘superpower’ status” and “the well-being of the future generations.”

The authors introduce and operationalize the novel concept of the socially suboptimal product of labor, that is, the product resulting from alienated (or unwilling) labor, and conversely, the product that could potentially result from using unutilized willing labor. In doing so we support the idea of distinguishing productive and unproductive forms within both the notion of labor and the notion of leisure. Aggregated estimates of these values show the share of gross domestic product (GDP) that could be optimized due to a redistribution of the time budget of the population between the main areas of life, according to ideal social preferences.

The balance of social benefits and social ills resulting from the life experiences and activities of individuals is empirically evaluated. We consider this balance, which is the sum of impacts of the social environment on the individual, as a suitable model for explaining how individuals make decisions about whether or not to participate in public life.

“Individual public welfare functions” are assessed empirically, demonstrating that individual utility depends on personal and collective consumption. Empirical testing covered a wide range of nation-building areas with public investment in relevant types of merit and public goods.

Then the authors propose and test on empirical data an opportunity cost approach to evaluating socially legitimate amounts of funding for the fundamental social benefits “superpower” or “additional power” of the nation.

The cost of the public good “well-being of the future generations” is calculated for the Russian sample.

Finally, the estimates of the discount rates of human lives and “healthy and prosperous years of life” were obtained for Russia for the first time.

The findings of the study are relevant for the efficient management of complex socioeconomic systems. The authors strongly believe that revealing the structure of existing social preferences and estimating their impact on various areas of social life will help improve policymaking by explicitly taking into account the specifics of the real social contract between the state and society.     

THE PRIVATIZATION OF VIOLENCE*

Norbert Elias's (1939) work on “the civilizing process” highlighted the long‐term decline in violence within Western societies. A substantial amount of more recent anthropological and historical evidence suggests that violence has evolved not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well. In particular, the social characteristics of the parties to violence have changed over time. Drawing on Donald Black's (1976, 1993a) theoretical ideas on conflict management, the present paper proposes that as intimate social ties weakened and the state strengthened, collective and nonintimate forms of (nonpolitical) violence declined significantly. Consequently, violence increasingly became less public, more private. Pockets of residual public violence can, however, still be found within modern state societies. Privatization varies, then, across time and social space.     

Social Media Engagement of Berlin and Prague Museums

ABSTRACT

Attracting visitors and engaging them effectively in the highly competitive and saturated environment shaped by Web 2.0 and online social networking forces museums to creatively and purposefully examine channels for extended interaction with audiences. This exploratory and comparative research aims to compare the state of social media strategies across museums of two regions and to identify the influence of applied strategies on users’ reactions. The surveyed sample considers 296 museums from two European capitals—Berlin and Prague—whose activity has been observed during a three-month period. The findings identify the differences in the approaches of museums and suggest that the frequency and characteristics of published messages correlate to the level of fan reactions, facilitating targeted relationship-building possibilities with online audiences. They further imply that the museums can influence the engagement of visitors by focusing on the particular properties of their posts, both in the sense of post structure, media application, and underlying semantic features.     

Private Military and Security Companies and the Liberal Conception of Violence

Abstract

The institution of war is the broad framework of rules, norms, and organizations dedicated to the prevention, prosecution, and resolution of violent conflict between political entities. Important parts of that institution consist of the accountability arrangements that hold between armed forces, the political leaders who oversee and direct the use of those forces, and the people in whose name the leaders act and from whose ranks the members of the armed forces are drawn. Like other parts of the institution, these arrangements are responsive to changes in military technology and needs, to geopolitical facts, and to moral and political norms. In particular, they are sensitive to the forms that military organization takes. Since the emergence of modern states in Europe some 500 years ago, there have been three main such forms: private providers—in the form of mercenaries, in early modern Europe—then professional standing armies, which in turn developed into citizen armies. Although elements of the three organizations have coexisted in many armies, the citizen army model has dominated until recently. That model brought with it a particular conception of the accountability relations between the army, the state, and the people. The state had authority over and directed the army, which was accountable to it. In turn the state was accountable for its use of the army to the people, on whose behalf it acted.

The dominance of state authority over the military is now under strain, with the professional and private elements—in the form of private military and security companies (PMSCs)—having increasing importance. As those elements increase in power and presence, so it becomes more difficult to make the state accountable to the people for its use of the military, and more difficult for the people to act as a restraining force on the way in which the military used.

In this essay, I outline and assess these developments—with particular emphasis on the emergence of PMSCs—in the light of a liberal view of (political) violence. The essay focuses on the situation in the United States, which possesses by far the most important military force in the world today, and in which the use of PMSCs is most developed. The paper has three main sections and a brief conclusion: the first section sketches the liberal view of violence and its implications for organizations dedicated to its use; the second outlines the salient characteristics of the three historically dominant forms of armies; and the third looks at the current situation in which the three forms coexist uneasily.     

Simple rules for the developing world

Much of the discussion in favor of simplicity of legal rules and against complex regulation is rooted in economically developed countries with strong state capacity. With economic development and state capacity comes the presumption that complex rules will be enforced. Therefore, analysis focuses on the administrative and error costs, and the unintended consequences of complex rules that are enforced. This paper argues that the Epsteinian insight is even more relevant to the developing world where countries often lack enough state capacity to even take on simple governance tasks. Developing countries often have less than 20 percent of the state capacity of developed countries. However, this does not mean they limit the regulatory structure to a fifth of the tasks. Under-enforcement or non-enforcement of complex rules imposes different costs and unintended consequences on society. Using examples from India, this paper highlights problems of enforcement swamping, deadweight loss, and corruption arising from the under-enforcement of complex rules. To avoid these problems, the paper concludes that a fortiori less developed countries should favor simple rules.

     

Changing household patterns of young couples in low- and middle-income countries

While young couples in Western societies generally form a new household, in low-income societies new unions are often incorporated into existing households. However, there is a growing tendency in the nuclearization of households as intergenerational co-residence is undermined by growing wage labour opportunities that provide incentives for rural–urban migration and because small nuclear families adapt better to urban societies characterized by high geographic and social mobility. The objective of this paper is therefore to jointly study for a selection of low- to middle-income countries the socioeconomic and demographic conditions of women aged 15–34 and their partners in relation to their household patterns with particular interest in the comparison of nuclear and extended households. The analysis will mainly rely on data from the Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series International database (https://international.ipums.org/international/) from which census samples for the last two or latest available census rounds for 18 countries have been extracted. Results showed that women being of older age (within the 15–34 range) and at the same time having attained at least primary school education, having a husband who does not work in the primary sector and who is neither much older nor much younger were all associated with living in a nuclear household. However, individual factors explained only a small part of the overall variation in the household arrangements of young couples, suggesting that differences between countries in these dimensions do not explain much of the difference in household structure. Rather, societal indicators like economic development and the average age at marriage – that were significant in our models – may explain better the overall slow transition towards the nuclear family.     

福利社会与发展中的斯堪的纳维亚福利国家

欧洲各国致力于福利国家的建设已逾百年,经历了两次世界大战.各国在社会投入水平和福利机构方面的巨大差异至今仍在,但是各国对于福利社会的可持续性的认可和公众对福利社会的高度承诺则是基本一致的.各福利社会有来自各方面的维系:中央政府或地方政府、公司企业、家庭和自发组织的机构.不同的福利社会体系与它们之间的关系长期以来对欧洲各福利国家有着不同的意义,形成了具有不同特点的福利制度.在20世纪最后十年里重建福利国家的痛苦过程中,经济增长和社会发展之间的关系一直是整个斯堪的纳维亚地区社会问题的争论热点.然而到目前为止,效率与平等之间的冲突大多得到了解决,在北欧五国都保持了福利政策的稳定.该地区独特的历史经验并不排斥发展中国家的政府和机构为了发展福利事业而积极推行普及政策所做出的努力.     

Sentiments of justice

In empirical research on social inequality one question remains largely open: Why are certain types of social inequalities legitimate or not? Three theoretical approaches to this question are discussed: the universalist, the cultural, and the interactionist approach. The interactionist approach is defended: Sentiments of justice can be predicted or deduced from the system in which the actors are located. It is important to know whether actors have reasons to be interested in the system of interaction in question, including reasons for approving the rules and the mode of its functioning. At the same time, the existence of an unrestricted residue must also be recognized: With good reasons one group of individuals can find that a certain state of affairs is just, another group that it is unjust. Because divergences of opinion are inescapable, certain questions pertaining to the issue of social justice can only be resolved by the method of regulated political debate. Questions of social justice can in no way be resolved a priori.     

Spatial patterns of homicide and political legitimacy in Europe*

Political legitimacy, or a state's “right to rule,” has been a concern for philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists for centuries. This paper examines the relationship between European states' level of political legitimacy and violence, as represented by their homicide rate. It is theorized that political illegitimacy affects homicide through deteriorating social institutions of control, violating the rules of reciprocity between the state and citizens, and/or creating an environment of “virtual statelessness” that encourages methods of “self-help.” Focusing on the modernized societies of Europe, where legitimacy may be more important to maintaining order, the present study reveals two important findings: political legitimate states have significantly lower levels of homicide, and high and low homicide rates in Europe are significantly clustered among post-Soviet states (high) and Western Europe (low).     

宪法社会公德条款的规范阐释

社会公德是人们在社会交往和公共生活中应当遵循的基本行为准则。传统社会公德要求人们相善其群,现代社会公德指向一种整合性的功能要求,在多元的个体道德取向和社会共同道德要求之间保持适度张力。宪法作为共同体的组织规则,需要在“个体—社会—国家”的整体框架中进行持续性整合。基于社会公德的整合作用,宪法将其纳入规范体系,促进其整合功能实现。宪法社会公德条款承载着个体实现社会化、维系社会共同体、作为个体与国家的联结中介等理想功能。然而,由于相关文本的规范品格未获充分确认,文本表述不够清晰,实施动力略显不足,导致其功能受到一定阻滞。应当在规范目标的导引下,依托宪法解释,确认宪法社会公德条款的规范品格,阐明其规范内涵,并夯实规范实施的社会基础,促进其理想功能的实现。     

Meeting the enemy: American exceptionalism and international law

Howard Zinn has been classified in a number of ways for his many social contributions. However, despite the breadth of his work, he has never been considered a criminologist. It is likely that this is the result of the inaccurate perceptions many Americans have about crime being a predominantly street‐level social problem. Zinn maintains that the social harms caused by those in positions of political and economic power are in fact crimes against humanity that are far more destructive and violent than the actions our legal system has historically deemed criminal. He also points to the ways our criminal justice system is unjust and ineffective, and has demonstrated how social inequality ensures that the disadvantaged will be further subordinated by the criminal justice system. Zinn’s critical contributions about the most significant sources of social harm, the unjust nature of the American justice system, and the influence of social inequality offer an unorthodox criminological perspective that deserves special consideration. His unconventional criminology calls for increasing social justice by means of political dissent, social resistance, and civil disobedience.     

Natural population movement and marriage restrictions and hindrances in Styria in the 17th to 19th centuries

To marry has never been an egalitarian option or everybody's wish. There have always been calculations or considerations, structural or individual hindrances and even societal restrictions for individuals to get married despite wishing to do so. Without any doubt and apart from the debate on determination or love and free choice in former times, to marry has always been a societal event, a mutual relationship between personal wishes and societal environmental expectations.

And apart from all the debates on paradoxes in modernization processes, it is clear that in pre-modern times societal marriage restrictions were widespread.

It is very unlikely that people should have been forbidden to marry because they should not have sexual contacts, just for morality reasons. The keys have been considerations and calculations on reproductivity, economic and social resources, social and human capital. This paper deals with aggregated vital data from four parishes in Styria, Austria, covering the outgoing 17th century until the end of the 19th century, in order to detect hints of marriage restrictions.

The paper proves the well-known variety of marriage systems in pre-industrial and pre-modern times. It supports the idea that the presence of marriage restrictions hindered population growth, but the absence of such restrictions did not automatically foster more societal transparency and developmental chances in a modern sense, as mortality and inequality were very strong factors in pre-modern agrarian societies. In the end, the question of marriage restrictions was apparently posed and answered by privileged groups.     

Prisoners,Prisons and Punishment in Small Societies

This paper aims to analyse the subject of prisoners, prisons and punishment in small societies. An attempt is made to compare the prison system in a small society (Iceland) with those of other larger societies, in particular those of other Nordic countries. Small institutions function better in many respects than larger ones. The problems that emerge, and there are problems in all prisons, are more visible and can therefore more easily be discussed and solved.