The role of local institutions in sustainable watershed management: lessons from India

The implementation and effective management of watershed-development projects is recognised as a strategy for rural development throughout the developing world. Several government and non-government agencies have launched watershed-development projects to tackle the challenges of soil conservation, improving land productivity, and economic upliftment of the rural poor for efficient use of natural resources. Participatory community-driven institutions of integrated watershed management are considered vital for the sustainability of natural resources. This study focuses on the impact of local institutions on watershed development in India and examines the degree of women's participation in relation to the effective management of natural resources and sustainable development.     

Inactive by Design? Neighborhood Design and Political Participation

Critics have long denounced the design of suburban communities for fostering political apathy. We disaggregate the concept of suburban design into four distinct attributes of neighborhoods. We then use tract-level Census data, the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, and multilevel models to measure the relationship between these design features and political participation. Certain design aspects common in suburban neighborhoods are powerful predictors of reduced political activity, illustrating a potential link between neighborhood design and politics. Yet low-density environments appear to facilitate some types of participation. Suburban designs vary, and so do their likely impacts on political participation.     

“Great Men,” Law,and the Social Construction of Technology

Is Alexander Graham Bell's fame owed to law and lawyers? Two recent histories argue that some popular tales of invention originated with lawyers and judges as part of patent litigation battles (Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday , Patently Contestable: Electrical Technologies and Inventor Identities on Trial in Britain [2013]; Christopher Beauchamp , Invented by Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent That Changed America [2015]). Bringing law into the historical project of understanding the social construction of technology, the authors unsettle “great man” narratives of invention. A tale of a recent patent war is a case study in the persistence of such narratives, highlighting the uses of legal storytelling (Ronald K. Fierstein , A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War [2015]). Together, these works invite consideration of the cultural power possessed by invention origin stories, the role of narratives in law and history, and the judicial performance of truth finding in Anglo‐American law .     

Developmental Markers in Adolescence: Implications for Studies of Pubertal Processes

There is inconsistency in the outcome measures of biological and psychosocial studies using measures of puberty as a predictor. For example, some studies show that maturational timing may have differential influences (positive, negative, or no effect) depending on the specific disorder, dimension of measure, and gender. Other studies have suggested that some effects may be more directly linked to pubertal stage or hormone concentrations rather than timing per se. This study outlines several conceptual and methodological issues that may be relevant to addressing these inconsistencies, in the context of examining data from a study of maturational hormones obtained from a unique longitudinal cohort of 24 girls (age 10.0 ± 1.6 years) and 36 boys (age 10.4 ± 1.6 years) in the early part of puberty, where the developmental trajectory of these hormones were tracked annually in 65% of the sample. We explored the contributions of measures of pubertal growth and sociodemographic factors on hormone concentrations. In brief, it appears that no single measure best captures the maturational processes during puberty and suggests that multiple processes are occurring in parallel. Several conceptual and methodological implications are discussed that may guide investigators in interpreting existing studies of pubertal timing and behavior as well as in conducting future studies.     

The village institutes experience in Turkey

This paper sheds light on the Village Institutes experience in Turkey from the late 1930s to the mid‐1940s. The Institutes have given rise to many academic and political controversies, and have remained an issue of confusion. This was owing partly to the lack of understanding of the real nature of the growing interest by the Kemalist elite in rural issues in the 1930s, and partly to the way that the power and importance of peasantist ideology had been underestimated, especially as it had gained wide currency amongst the governing elite in the 1930s and 1940s. This article begins by analyzing the historical and intellectual context of the period, and moves on to the development of the concept of the Village Institutes, assessing its most important and controversial characteristics. Finally, a new theoretical interpretation is offered within a critique of existing, widely‐held explanations that have dominated the theoretical literature on the issue for so long.     

Managerial Perspectives on Implicit Bias,Affirmative Action,and Merit

Public sector organizations concerned about gender inequality have increasingly sought to address the effect of implicit biases on merit‐based employment practices through bias training and affirmative action programs. Applying qualitative content analysis to interviews with 104 managers in three government agencies in which bias training and affirmative action were being implemented, the authors find that many managers acknowledge the existence of implicit biases and their potential to create unequal employment outcomes. However, this recognition of bias does not translate into support for affirmative action, which is seen by many managers to be an unacceptable violation of merit. The authors argue that implicit bias training and affirmative action are unlikely to create a cultural “tipping point” to progress gender equality without a critical reassessment of merit.     

The ‘Forgotten’ People: Turkey's Artisans in the 1950s

This paper intends to shed light into a social class, the Turkish artisans who were ignored by the mainstream historiography for a variety of reasons. Yet, they were the ones who formed the bulk of the middle-class in the following decades, helped shape the contours of Turkish politics and were seen as responsible for propogating the ideology of conservatism. In fact, without a thorough analyses of this social class, one could hardly grasped the evolution of the so-called modernization process Turkey underwent for the last half a century or so. By using parliamentary records, periodicals, newspapers and memoirs of the time as well as artisans' own journals, we trace the social and ideological demands of the Turkish artisans of the 1950s and bring about a comparative perspective by using the historical experiences of other countries. We argue that their conservatism should not be confused with the modern day conservatism since they represented a version of a peculiar form of progressive ideas and demands together with pro-Western and pro-capitalist inspirations.