Bottom-level organizational changes within entrepreneurial and engaged models of university: insights from Italy

We analyze the way in which individual academics and research groups organize their third mission activities before and after the institutionalization of third mission strategies by the university governing body. Drawing on the literature, we put forward an interpretative framework that links central entrepreneurial or engaged strategies with the way academics organize their third mission activities. Then, we propose an application of this frame to the case of the University of Florence (Italy), before and after its transition to more structured entrepreneurial and engaged models. We use a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. A cluster analysis allows identifying different types of academics involved in the third mission based on the way they organize their activities. Furthermore, a set of interviews to academics complements the comparison and the interpretation of the clusters obtained. The following paths of change emerge: (1) increased proportion of academics involved in third mission activities; (2) bottom-level initiatives that are aligned with central strategies; and (3) increased heterogeneity of bottom-level organization forms, with a relative loss of importance of the group dimension with respect to the individual academics and an increased specialization of research groups.

     

Societal Actors Shape Collective Identities of Minorities: Procedural Fairness Climate Effects on Identification,Subjective Well-Being and Psychological Health

In the present studies, we aimed to show that the perceived procedural fairness of societal actors’ multicultural decisions promotes ethnic minority members’ societal identification. These enhanced identification levels, in turn, contribute to better psychological health and well-being. Firstly, a vignette study in a sample of African Americans explored the effect of procedural fairness climate on identification. The second and third studies used self-report questionnaires. Study 2 consisted of a sample of sojourners in a university context, Study 3 analyzed online data through an African American sample. The studies provided evidence for the effect of procedural fairness climate on increased societal identification, which in turn mediates the fairness effect on increased well-being and psychological health. Societal actors can use procedural fairness to increase well-being when making decisions that involve ethnic minorities.

     

Perceptions of Problem Behavior in Adolescents’ Families: Perceiver,Target, and Family Effects

Considerable research has focused on the reliability and validity of informant reports of family behavior, especially maternal reports of adolescent problem behavior. None of these studies, however, has based their orientation on a theoretical model of interpersonal perception. In this study we used the social relations model (SRM) to examine family members’ reports of each others’ externalizing and internalizing problem behavior. Two parents and two adolescents in 69 families rated each others’ behavior within a round-robin design. SRM analysis showed that within-family perceptions of externalizing and internalizing behaviors are consistently due to three sources of variance; perceiver, target, and family effects. A family/contextual effect on informant reports of problem behavior has not been previously reported.     

The Role of Public Sociology in the Development of Cultural Policies in Chile: a Transformation of Cultural Expertise

This paper seeks to analyze the policies on the cultural field implemented in Chile in recent years, explaining how expertise became fundamental and, more specifically, how this expertise evolved from that of an expert intellectual to that of an expert professional. The paper is based on the general hypothesis that the cultural field needs to be viewed in the context of a growing differentiation and autonomization of Chilean society, but that there are some interesting nuances to its evolution, particularly with regard to the transformation of expertise. This article argues that the expert in culture has a twofold nature, which is illustrated through drawing a timeline from the 1980s to the present, marking certain milestones in Chile’s national and cultural history. This timeline incorporates the intellectual work of two of Chile’s most important contemporary sociologists and experts in culture and cultural policies, Manuel Antonio Garretón and José Joaquín Brunner. A sample of their publications is analyzed and then contrasted to documents on cultural policy since the approval of the country’s institutional framework for culture in 2003, when the National Council for Culture and the Arts was created, gauging the influence of the expert intellectual on this new institutional framework and the thrust of public policies on culture. The paper concludes that the figure of the expert in culture has shifted from the “expert intellectual” to the expert of a professional kind, although the theoretical work of the former has continued to influence the debate around cultural policies to this day.     

The Influences of Family and Place on Rural Adolescents’ Educational Aspirations and Post-secondary Enrollment

Despite the large contingent of students living in rural areas, existing research on the processes that precede the college enrollment of rural adolescents is limited. With a particular focus on gender, this study investigated rural adolescents’ perceptions of family and place and how these perceptions related to their educational aspirations and subsequent college enrollment using a nationwide sample of rural adolescents (N?=?3456; 52.5% female). Female adolescents reported higher academic achievement, educational aspirations, parental expectations, and family responsibility and enrolled in two-year and four-year institutions at greater rates compared to male adolescents, who reported significantly higher rural identity and perceptions of job opportunities in the rural community. Utilizing a multiple group moderated mediation approach, the results provided evidence that adolescents’ increased perceptions of their parents’ educational expectations were associated with increased educational aspirations and college enrollment and that adolescents’ increased perceptions of job opportunities in their rural community were associated with decreased educational aspirations. In addition, the results showed that gender moderated the relation between perceptions of job opportunities in the rural community and postsecondary enrollment. These findings highlight how the developmental resources of family and place relate to adolescents’ educational aspirations and subsequent postsecondary enrollment.     

Passport to Parenthood: Reproductive Pathways In and Out of Denmark

Denmark has become a destination for single women, lesbians, and heterosexual couples wanting donated sperm. At the moment, women from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, and the UK travel to Denmark. Simultaneously, waiting lists for donated eggs and age restrictions are prime motivations for infertile Danish women and heterosexual couples to leave Denmark and travel to Spain, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, and Greece for egg donation. Informed by Donna Haraway’s notion of “the apparatus of bodily production”, Marcia Inhorn’s development of “reproductive flows”, and the use of Adele Clarke’s “situational analysis”, this paper explores the question: How do global reproductive pathways in and out of Denmark emerge when fertility travellers narrate, negotiate, and cross national borders to go through fertility treatment? Methodologically, we use a multi-sited and multi-modal approach centring on interviews with fertility travellers moving to and from Denmark in combination with ethnographic observations carried out in Danish and Spanish fertility clinics and an analysis of legal regulations. The paper concludes by discussing how the concept of reproductive pathways helps to theorize transnational movements of bodies and contributes to feminist scholarship on transnational reproductive travel.     

Gender Discrimination in Microfinance? Some Evidence from Uganda

Abstract

Microfinance literature has proved the existence of gender discriminatory practices against women in some specific contexts. Discrimination is often explored from the access side (loans approved or denied). Following Agier and Szafarz (2013), we deviate from this practice and use the variable loan size, considering up to four loans for each client. Drawing on data from a microfinance programme in Uganda, we find no evidence of gender discrimination against women clients, even though our results show that the loan size is influenced by personal characteristics and that women, in contrast to men, are rewarded according to their credit history.