Culture as Values or Culture in Action? Street Codes and Student Violent Offending

ABSTRACT

The authors draw on two competing cultural perspectives—culture as values and culture in action—to examine the relationship between street codes and the propensity to violently victimize others. Specifically, they explore whether individual-level and school-level street codes, net of one another, are related to 3 types of violence: assault, robbery, and sexual battery. In addition, they consider whether these effects vary according to 3 contextual characteristics: (a) the location of the offending—in school versus out of school, (b) school-level economic disadvantage, and (c) school efficacy. Three-level ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using four waves of survey data from over 3,000 students nested within 103 schools. Results provide evidence that individual-level street codes are related to violent offending in a manner that is, largely speaking, not tied to context. However, there is some evidence that the effects of school-level street codes on offending differ between outside of school and in school settings and are conditioned by levels of school disadvantage and efficacy. Overall, some support is offered for both the culture-as-values and culture-in-action perspectives.     

Single,straight, wants kids: media framing of single,heterosexual fatherhood via assisted reproduction

The new reproductive technologies have made possible various postmodern family forms. I highlight an emerging form that has received little attention: single fathers by choice (SFCs), created by single men using egg donation and surrogacy. I focus on heterosexual SFCs, which have been largely ignored in the scholarly literature even as gay and lesbian parenthood have increasingly become topics of feminist inquiry. This type of fatherhood raises several important questions for gender and family scholars about the ‘traditional’ family, the relationship between masculinity and fatherhood, and men’s own desires for parenthood without a female partner. I analyze US media framing to explore cultural sense-making of SFCs. While media framing cannot tell us about men’s lived experiences as intentional single fathers, it does point to larger discourses that potentially impact these men as they engage in non-normative fathering. I identify three core themes within the media frames: (1) viewing men and women as similar, but ultimately different, (2) addressing the tension between bachelorhood and fatherhood, and (3) representing the gender of paternal desire in multiple, conflicting ways. Overall, I argue that further investigations of SFCs can illuminate issues about men’s desires for children and agency in becoming fathers.     

Call me Caitlyn: making and making over the ‘authentic’ transgender body in Anglo-American popular culture

A conception of transgender identity as an ‘authentic’ gendered core ‘trapped’ within a mismatched corporeality, and made tangible through corporeal transformations, has attained unprecedented legibility in contemporary Anglo-American media. Whilst pop-cultural articulations of this discourse have received some scholarly attention, the question of why this ‘wrong body’ paradigm has solidified as the normative explanation for gender transition within the popular media remains underexplored. This paper argues that this discourse has attained cultural pre-eminence through its convergence with a broader media and commercial zeitgeist, in which corporeal alteration and maintenance are perceived as means of accessing one’s ‘authentic’ self. I analyse the media representations of two transgender celebrities: Caitlyn Jenner and Nadia Almada, alongside the reality TV show TRANSform Me, exploring how these women’s gender transitions have been discursively aligned with a cultural imperative for all women, cisgender or trans, to display their authentic femininity through bodily work. This demonstrates how established tropes of authenticity-via-bodily transformation, have enabled transgender to become culturally legible through the wrong body trope. Problematically, I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of ‘acceptable’ transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain.     

发扬“工匠精神”对于振兴实体经济的现实意义

自2016年3月5日李克强总理作政府工作报告时首次正式提出"工匠精神"以来,党和国家领导人为振兴实体经济多次提出要发扬"工匠精神"。发扬"工匠精神"对于振兴实体经济有着重大的现实意义。我国实体经济在经济社会转型期表现出的发展缓慢问题,在国际市场上表现竞争力不强问题,根本原因之一就在于我国企业缺乏更多拥有"工匠精神"的高素质职工队伍。培育、关心尤其要大幅提高拥有"工匠精神"品牌职工的待遇和地位,是打造更多享誉世界的"中国品牌"的前提和基础。以弘扬"工匠精神"为目标的职工文化是振兴我国实体经济的有力抓手。     

Assessing Local Government Capacity for Implementing Sustainable Transportation: The Role of Political Culture

Transportation development increasingly relies on local governments to implement sustainable strategies, yet implementation success varies widely. This begs an important question, why are some cities successful and others not? In response, this study focuses on the political culture characteristics of city leadership and staff pertaining to sustainable transportation. Employing semi-structured interviews with officials in two case study cities—Pomona and Pasadena, California—the study identifies and traces the impact of cultural characteristics on network interactions and the resulting transportation innovation. Finally, this research suggests key political and department characteristics that contribute to political cultures that facilitate sustainable transportation development.     

Is Public Service Motivation Changeable? Integrative Modeling with Goal-Setting Theory

This study proposes that Public Service Motivation (PSM) can be changeable by unique characteristics of public organization. The proposition is applied for the integration between PSM theory and goal-setting theory that is inevitable to better understand the motivation phenomena for the organization. The integration model consists of two sub-mechanisms: 1) the moderating role of goal characteristics on the relationship between Public Service Motivation and work motivation, and 2) the mediating role of PSM on the relationship between goal characteristics and performance. The model suggests empirically testable five theoretical propositions with methodological strategies. Finally, theoretical implications and future study are discussed.     

Government and Corruption: Scylla and Charybdis

Using public sector employment and corruption perception data for 72 countries across the world, this article demonstrates that despite common notion countries with “smaller” governments do not tend to have lower corruption. Under general assumptions, one can demonstrate that there is an optimal size of public sector employment corresponding to the highest capital intensity. The model has several implications: lower optimal sizes of governments for labor intensive countries and higher sizes for capital intensive ones, possibility to reduce corruption paying a cost of suboptimal output, and a higher “price” of an oversized government for labor intensive countries.     

Organizing teachers in Pennsylvania, 1935–1941

ABSTRACT

By eliminating mandatory agency fees, the US Supreme Court’s Janus decision has created an opportunity for the American teachers’ unions to renew their commitment to organizing teachers. This article returns us to the pre-agency fee era, when on-the-ground organizational work was essential for building teachers’ unions. Drawing from archival documents, it shows how dedicated activists from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh reached out to Pennsylvania’s classroom teachers to draw them into the AFT during the later Depression years. It details the changes in their organizational strategy, the challenges organizers faced in the field, their successes and failures, and the work accomplished by a paid AFT organizer – Vivian Dahl – in 1938. Above all, it documents both the dividends of face-to-face interactions between organizers and prospective unionists and the difficulties of such work in an ideologically polarized political environment, among a group of workers dominated by the hierarchical ethos of professionalism.     

东亚文化与出版交流的实践与思考——东亚出版人会议的意义解读

东亚出版人会议紧扣着东亚文化与出版两大主题,从人的交流、书的交流到企划出版的交流这3个层面,既务虚也务实。一方面通过相互间的文化与理念的交流,期望了解彼此邻近却隔膜的现代化的心路历程;另一方面则通过共同出版"东亚人文书100",进行跨越国界的文化事业的交流。不过,中、日、韩3国所推荐的书目依然代表着各自不同的文化诉求,因此,如何通过文化的交流来重构东亚的价值和理念,还需要出版人的进一步努力。