Cultural citizenship

The paper argues that the development of citizenship rights in advanced societies has been cumulative but uneven. The extension of social/welfare rights has been arrested. Propelled by the claims formulated by some activists of new social movements, citizenship rights are currently expanding towards a new domain of cultural rights that involve the right to symbolic presence, dignifying representation, propagation of identity and maintenance of lifestyles. This reflects the crisis of welfarism, the ‘shrinking of the state’, and the expansion of the public spheres.     

Economics of transition: A review article

Milford Bateman et al., Business Cultures in Central & Eastern Europe. Oxford: Butterworth‐Heinemann, 1997, xxii + 238 pp., £18.99.

John L. Campbell & Ove K. Pedersen (eds), Legacies of Change, Transformations of Postcommunist European Economies. Berlin: Aldine De Gruyter, 1996, xii + 258 pp., DM48.00.

Mark Knell (ed.), Economics of Transition, Structural Adjustments and Growth Prospects in Eastern Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996, xii + 246 pp., £45.00.

Martin Myant et al., Successful Transformations? The Creation of Market Economies in Eastern Germany and the Czech Republic. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996 xiii + 267 pp., £49.95.     

Gender and Homosexuality as a Major Cultural Cleavage

In post‐modern society cultural cleavages are becoming at least as relevant as socio‐economic ones. They can only be properly researched by the survey method, which opens up a whole new area for both micro and macroanalysis. So, first, we pinpoint some of the main problems of research into value orientations. Second, we suggest a new analysis of attitudes towards gender and homosexuality, employing both micro and macro data. One key finding here is that attitudes towards gender and homosexuality are linked at the micro level, which explains some of the saliency of gender and homosexuality as a new emerging cleavage in advanced societies. At the macro level, the main finding is that attitudes towards gender and homosexuality are strongly embedded in cultural or civilisational differences among countries. The evidence suggests therefore that these attitudes do constitute a new cleavage in advanced societies.     

Soziale Identität und Ausländerfeindlichkeit

Berliner Journal für Soziologie - Identitätstheoretisch inspirierte Ansätze in der Gruppensoziologie — hier insbesondere die Theorie der sozialen Identität von Henri...     

Institution Building and Spillovers

This paper investigates the importance of institution building for economic growth in transition economies of Eastern Europe and CIS‐States. Using recent data, it shows that even in a Guardian State, institutions like property rights protection, administration efficiency, and general rule of low matter. They appear to be even more crucial for economic take‐off than standard economic factors like for example macroeconomic policy. Moreover, this paper finds that there are important spillover effects in institution building, and that countries which get one specific institution right, have also better chances to succeed in making other specific institutions work properly.     

Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden1

That organizational involvement has a positive impact on political action is a well‐established finding in empirical research around the world. To account for this, theorists since Tocqueville have pointed to the returns in human capital, in particular ‘civic skills’, yielded by associations. This article, by contrast, is a study of whether social capital theory can help explain the same effect. According to the logic of ‘weak ties’, organizational involvement provides bridging social capital by connecting the individual to a wider range of people. As a result, the input of requests for participation increases and this ultimately leads to more activity. Unspecified in this argument, however, is what aspect of associational memberships is most conducive to such weak ties: the sheer number of memberships, or the extent to which one's memberships provide links to people of dissimilar social origin. In an unprecedented empirical test based on survey data from Sweden in 1997, it is shown that being connected to multiple voluntary associations is what matters for political activity, not the extent to which one's memberships cut across social cleavages. Moreover, the social capital mechanism of recruitment is more important in explaining this effect than the human capital mechanism of civic skills, since the former can account for why even passive members, not just organizational activists, may become more prone to take political action.     

TWO CITIES Urban Migration and Settlement in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

This article examines how migrants settled and formed families in two Swedish towns—Linköping and Sundsvall—with different occupational structures during industrialization. Sex- and socio-economic differentials in the rural–urban and urban–urban migration are discussed, as well as persistence rates in the new urban environment among different social groups. Analysis of in-migration and marriage patterns shows that social and geographical endogamy are equally significant in the two towns. Migrants tended primarily to marry migrants and town-born primarily to marry town-born. Moreover, relatively closed marriage boundaries were found among the in-migrants: those that came from an urban background tended to find an “urban partner.”     

Artificial Intelligence and the Public Sector—Applications and Challenges

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have attracted great attention from researchers and practitioners and have opened up a broad range of beneficial opportunities for AI usage in the public sector. Against this background, there is an emerging need for a holistic understanding of the range and impact of AI-based applications and associated challenges. However, previous research considers AI applications and challenges only in isolation and fragmentarily. Given the lack of a comprehensive overview of AI-based applications and challenges for the public sector, our conceptual approach analyzes and compiles relevant insights from scientific literature to provide an integrative overview of AI applications and related challenges. Our results suggest 10 AI application areas, describing their value creation and functioning as well as specific public use cases. In addition, we identify four major dimensions of AI challenges. We finally discuss our findings, deriving implications for theory and practice and providing suggestions for future research.     

The Effects of Youth Mentoring Programs: A Meta-analysis of Outcome Studies

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Mentoring programs, which pair youth with caring, non-parental adults with the goal of promoting positive youth development, are an increasingly popular strategy...