Causality in Political Networks Fowler, James H.; Heaney, Michael T.; Nickerson, David W. ...
American politics research,
03/2011, Letnik:
39, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the ...legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.
Print‐based literacy is no longer sufficient for the global digital age. However, distribution of the resources needed to learn new literacies is unequal. The authors describe a qualitative case ...study conducted with teachers in Kenya who participated in a professional development series on new literacies and inquiry. The professional development involved an inquiry‐based literacy approach that is technology‐rich and learner‐centered. Three themes emerged from the data: shifting to learner‐centered pedagogies: “I’m inspired to improve my teaching”; change is slow but coming: “We need to be empowered with more information about new technologies”; and strategies for teaching new literacies: “Creating is better than just talking.” The discussion focuses on the enduring challenges for educational transformation in Kenya coupled with the substantive changes that are being made by pioneering Kenyan educators.
Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with middle-class sex workers, this essay considers the relationship between the class-privileged women and men who are increasingly finding their way into sex ...work and more generalized patterns of economic restructuring. How has the emergence of new communications technologies transformed the meaning and experience of sexual commerce for sex workers and their customers? What is the connection between the new `respectability' of sexual commerce and the new classes of individuals who now participate in commercial sexual transactions? This essay concludes by exploring some of the key transformations that are occurring within middle-class commercial sexual encounters, including the emergence of `bounded authenticity' (an authentic, yet bounded, interpersonal connection) as a particularly desirable and sought-after sexual commodity.
This article examines the Japanese cat café boom, which peaked in 2009 yet remains a significant retail phenomenon throughout Japan, and in particular Tokyo. How do humans encounter animals in ...contemporary Japan, not as private owners and companions, but as consumers seeking direct, sensory engagement with cats at a moment of profound social and economic anxieties? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tokyo, this article examines how cats have become a newly emergent commodity within the 'healing boom' that first emerged in recessionary-era 1990s Japan. Such healing commodities - therapeutic music, aromatherapy, robot interaction, among others - are designed to invoke an affective engagement with the consumer in order to cope with the uncertain and stressful conditions of life in still recessionary, and now post 3/11, Japan. I situate cat cafés within the increasing immaterialization of the economy in post-bubble Japan during which social relationships have become commodified and marketed to those who can afford it. Cats are the affective object through which patrons seek a sense of healing and relaxation.
Pierre Bourdieus sozialanthropologische Feldforschung ist bis heute wohl einzigartig geblieben. Wenig beachtet wurde bislang die Rolle der Fotografie dabei. Die fünfbändige Serie Visuelle Formen ...soziologischer Erkenntnis erschließt eine neue Sicht auf das Werk Bourdieus und zeigt anhand der frühen Algerien-Studien ein von Beginn an vom Bild kommendes Denken. Die Beiträge des einführenden Bandes dieser Serie führen den Dialog zwischen den Bildern der »Wirklichkeit« und jenen theoretischen Schlussfolgerungen, den Begriffen von »Habitus« und »Praxis«, für die Bourdieu später bekannt wurde, in exemplarischer Weise fort. Begleitet von reichem Bildmaterial zeigen sie unterschiedliche Aspekte der fotografisch dokumentierten Soziologie Algeriens und führen dabei in Bourdieus Forschungspraxis ein.
Studies on stylised language use have tended to focus on the creative exploitation of linguistic heteroglossia among urban multi-ethnic youth. This article argues that there are good reasons for ...exploring how such practices can also be initiated by norm-enforcing white adults such as teachers. I report on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in one mixed-ethnicity class at a Brussels Dutch-medium school and describe how one teacher often produced the creative, stylised language use one usually associates with younger speakers. The analysis emphasizes that while teacher stylisations provided alleviation from the friction between linguistic expectations and the reality of the classroom floor, they were also functional in maintaining the school linguistic policy inasmuch as they typified nonstylised, nonaccented, and standard language use as normal and expected. These findings suggest that stylisations can be closely tuned to linguistic normativity and reproductive of wider patterns of sociolinguistic stratification. (Stylisations, urban heteroglossia, crossing, classroom interaction, Brussels, Dutch, enregisterment)*
Yanomami raises questions central to the field of anthropology—questions concerning the practice of fieldwork, the production of knowledge, and anthropology's intellectual and ethical vision of ...itself. Using the Yanomami controversy—one of anthropology's most famous and explosive imbroglios—as its starting point, this book draws readers into not only reflecting on but refashioning the very heart and soul of the discipline. It is both the most up-to-date and thorough public discussion of the Yanomami controversy available and an innovative and searching assessment of the current state of anthropology.
Looks at power relations between professionals working in the network and questions if fieldwork is still relevant nowadays. IBSSMB Reproduced by permission of Bibliothèque de Sciences Po
Recent research on multimodal communication in the material world shows how things matter in social contexts and make a traceable difference in the unfolding of interactions. Interestingly enough, ...the artifacts typically used as tools of inquiry (i.e. the recording devices) are rarely deemed worthy of similar analytical attention, as if they were irrelevant or inconsequential to the organization of social interaction taking place in the field. Adopting a theoretical framework on distributed and hybrid agency, this article discusses and empirically shows how these objects play a crucial role in defining the institutional goal of the interaction and, therefore, contribute to the crafting of the data. The analysis of examples from a collection of references made to the recording devices in different research interactions illustrates the circumstances in which these references occur and the activities accomplished by participants by referring to these ‘embarrassing’ objects. In the discussion we propose that the analytical underestimation of the role of things ‘talked-into being’ in the research setting is consistent with and can contribute to a vision of research practices as a mirror of the social reality out there.
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