Learning Culture Through Language

In order to begin the study of Chinese culture, we must first acknowledge that it i sso completely different from our own, that any cultural or political parallels that we draw between the     

Assessing the Status of Gender-Specific Programs through the Lens of Juvenile Justice Staff

The gender-specific approach for working with offenders gained momentum during the 1990s and has since been largely accepted by academics and practitioners. Despite numerous studies demonstrating a need for gender-responsive programs and policies within both adult and juvenile correctional systems, scant research has explored whether these services are meeting the intended goals. The current study addresses this through a qualitative analysis of 1 county juvenile court using in-depth interviews with staff. Findings reveal that in spite of the court's efforts to incorporate a gender-responsive approach, much work still remains regarding training staff and meeting girls' needs. Staff identified critical gaps in services and continued to perpetuate gendered norms and stereotypes. Included is a discussion as to why it has been difficult to effectively implement gender-specific programs.     

mStories: exploring semiotics and praxis of user-generated mobile stories

Innovations in information and communication technologies have allowed people to actively author multimodal content and engage in new meaning-making practices. New Literacies research has gone some way to understanding new meaning-making behaviours. However, this research often derives its understandings from studies undertaken with students enrolled in formal educational settings. Mobile technologies are increasingly situated outside such domains; the informal use of these devices by adults remains on the periphery of scholarly focus. mStories is a creative participatory digital mobile storytelling project. Taking a multidimensional perspective, this article presents the in-depth case analysis of one participant and their mStory. A semiotic analysis found that the user-generated content demonstrated complex and sophisticated multimodal sense relations. However, control over the textual or compositional meta-function of the text was determined largely by the computer interface, with users habituated to relinquishing authorial control over this element. Within this study, mobile literacy praxis was characteristically ad hoc and contextually embedded, and though mobile technology invites such practices, users were neither determined nor limited by this, and happily turned to other devices where necessary.     

The Sacrifices of Micro-Borrowers in Ghana – A Customer-Protection Perspective on Measuring Over-Indebtedness

This article measures the over-indebtedness of micro-borrowers. It defines over-indebtedness from a customer-protection perspective, based on the borrowers' sacrifices. We analyse the sacrifices borrowers experience and find that 30 per cent of borrowers are over-indebted. We then test risk management indicators of debt problems as predictors of over-indebtedness. Over-indebtedness is strongly related to delinquency and the debt-to-income ratio but not to debt amounts or to multiple borrowing. Although our model correctly predicts 72.6 per cent of cases, even the best indicators identify only a few over-indebted borrowers. Risk management is not enough to protect customers against over-indebtedness but the industry needs to measure customer experiences directly.     

The origins of the Vietnamese revolution: Taking the long view

Abstract

Americans knew little about Vietnam when they assumed command of the Indochina War in 1954. There were no American scholars who devoted their careers to its study, and, with the exception of Virginia Thompson's French Indochina and a few other works, there was no American body of work on the subject. And so, to better understand the political and social forces confronting them, Americans took possession of the entire French work on Vietnam as part of their legacy of war. Thus, as the first American scholars began to study the Vietnamese revolution, they built on the foundation laid by decades of French scholarly effort.     

Prompting democratic transitions from abroad: International donors and multi‐partyism in Tanzania

It is generally accepted that the international donor community influences the politics of recipient states. In particular, donor calls for political liberalization are seen to have had, and continue to have, effects upon democratization in countries dependent upon international economic assistance. Such democratic contingency tied to aid suggests that the continuation of aid flows, and possibly an increase in aid transfer sums, occurs in response to political liberalization. It also implies the threat of decreases in, or even cessation of, foreign aid should the recipient state fail to implement political reform. This research assesses the role that the donor community plays in recipient states’ transition to democracy, focusing on Tanzania as a case study. Tanzania, a major recipient of foreign aid, underwent fundamental political reform in 1992. This study combines analysis of fluctuations in bilateral aid flows to Tanzania with interpretations of the causal role played by donor pressure from the perspectives of representatives of the donor community as well as from members of Tanzania's political elite. These perspectives are derived from original interviews conducted by the author. The findings indicate no correlation between fluctuations in aid transfers and Tanzania's implementation of multi‐party democracy. Rather, it was the perception among the Tanzanian leadership of a direct linkage between donor aid disbursements and political liberalization that prompted the political transition.     

Racial history,legacy and economic development

For more than a century, white communities across the United States employed strategies to remain all-white, including violent acts, forcibly driving minorities out of town, and racist local ordinances. One particularly widespread and effective approach used by many towns to exclude certain groups of people from living there was the creation of a ‘sundown town’: towns that purposely signalled to African Americans and other non-white groups that they were not welcome within the city limits after dark. Crowe and Ceresola seek to understand how historical racial policies affect present-day community life and, in particular, one component of community with which many towns currently struggle: economic development. In exploring the effect of cultural legacy on perceptions of race and economic development in five mid-sized communities in central and southern Illinois—two former sundown towns and three without histories of racial exclusion—their study uses interviews, observation and content analysis to examine how historical legacy can carry over to the present and affect economic development. Overall, the findings suggest that the values and beliefs passed down through a community's legacy influences current local economic development.     

Making It Personal: Regime Type and Nuclear Proliferation

Study after study has found that regime type has little or no effect on states’ decisions to pursue nuclear weapons. We argue, however, that conventional approaches comparing the behavior of democracies to that of nondemocracies have resulted in incorrect inferences. We disaggregate types of nondemocracies and argue that leaders of highly centralized, “personalistic” dictatorships are particularly likely to view nuclear weapons as an attractive solution to their concerns about regime security and face fewer constraints in pursuing nuclear weapons than leaders of other types of regimes. Combining our more nuanced classification of regime type with a more theoretically appropriate empirical approach, we find that personalist regimes are substantially more likely to pursue nuclear weapons than other regime types. This finding is robust to different codings of proliferation dates and a range of modeling approaches and specifications and has significant implications for both theory and policy.     

Perceptions of Work-Life Balance Among Military Law Enforcement Personnel and their Spouses

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which military law enforcement agents and their spouses shared similar perceptions of work-life conflict and organizational support. One hundred seventy Special Agents in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and their spouses participated in the study. Survey results revealed that Agents and spouses shared very similar views regarding the Agents’ work-life conflict and organizational support. Agents had slightly more positive views of supervisory support than their spouses did. Agents perceived somewhat more work-to-family conflict, and considerably more family-to-work conflict than their spouses thought they did. Both Agents and their spouses perceived greater support for work-life balance from immediate supervisors than from the organization as a whole. Implications for managing work-life conflict are discussed.