Disability benefits have become an increasingly prominent source of cash assistance for impoverished American citizens over the past two decades. This development coincided with cuts and ...market-oriented reforms to state and federal welfare programs, characteristic of the wider political-economic trends collectively referred to as neoliberalism. Recent research has argued that contemporary discourses on ‘disability fraudsters’ and ‘malingerers’ associated with this shift represent the latest manifestation of age-old stigmatization of the ‘undeserving poor’. Few studies, however, have investigated how the system of disability benefits, as well as these stigmatizing discourses, shapes the lived experience of disabling physical illness in today's United States. Here we present qualitative data from 64 semi-structured interviews with low-income individuals living with HIV and/or type 2 diabetes mellitus to explore the experience of long-term, work-limiting disability in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interviews were conducted between April and December 2014. Participants explained how they had encountered what they perceived to be excessive, obstructive, and penalizing bureaucracy from social institutions, leading to destitution and poor mental health. They also described being stigmatized as disabled for living with chronic ill health, and simultaneously stigmatized as shirking and malingering for claiming disability benefits as a result. Notably, this latter form of stigma appeared to be exacerbated by the bureaucracy of the administrating institutions. Participants also described intersections of health-related stigma with stigmas of poverty, gender, sexual orientation, and race. The data reveal a complex picture of poverty and intersectional stigma in this population, potentiated by a convoluted and inflexible bureaucracy governing the system of disability benefits. We discuss how these findings reflect the historical context of neoliberal cuts and reforms to social institutions, and add to ongoing debate around the future of public social provision for impoverished and chronically ill citizens under neoliberalism.
•Provides novel insights into work-limiting chronic illness in today's US.•Documents the bureaucracy and stigma embedded in the US disability benefits system.•Takes a structural, intersectional approach to analyzing participants' experiences.•Analyzes qualitative data in the historical context of neoliberal welfare reform.•Advises on mitigating the collateral damage of the current benefits system.
To confront the climate crisis requires fundamental system change in order to break the convention of relentless economic exploitation of nature. In this Special Issue we extend understanding of the ...opportunities for an organizing perspective on sustainability in order that organization studies might contribute more effectively to the challenges of organizing sustainably. This organizing perspective is particularly sensitive to (1) a variety of forms and practices of sustainable organizing in different societal spheres and on different levels, (2) the social institutions, logics and value systems in which these forms and practices are embedded, (3) the power and politics of promoting (or blocking) sustainable organization, and (4) the ways in which work, voice, participation, and inclusion are organized and contribute to developing societal capabilities. These features formed the basis of our original call for papers and we review selected literature on sustainability, including the contribution of organization studies and the articles in this Special Issue, through this organizing perspective. In so doing we identify four key themes of a future research agenda that builds from the foundations of existing research and addresses key current limitations in both theory and practice: sustainability requires social justice; connecting local and global scale shifts; democratizing governance; and acting collectively. We conclude with some implications for our own scholarship in organization studies if we are to meet the twin challenges of the need for new theorizing in combination with devising practically relevant support for change.
Ways of explaining law Priel, Dan
MODERN LAW REVIEW,
March 2024, Letnik:
87, Številka:
2
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Some years ago, Ian Ayres was asked to participate in a symposium on the comparative merits of the methods of economics and sociology in relation to law. Discussions of methodology, he said, do not ...get a lot of attention, and rightly so: the proof should be in the pudding. By this measure, general jurisprudence is in trouble, because the impression ones gets is that the only topic that gets more attention than debates on methodology is laments over a subject that lost its way.
Julie Dickson, Elucidating Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 208 pp, hb £87.00
•Machine learning is aligned with inductive, cultural, and intersectionality research.•Word embeddings can visualize intersectional experiences of slavery and the Civil War.•Culture distinguished ...racial identities in the nineteenth century U.S.•The domestic category distinguished gender identities.•Black men were closer to discursive authority compared to white women.
Machine learning is a rapidly growing research paradigm. Despite its foundationally inductive mathematical assumptions, machine learning is currently developing alongside traditionally deductive inferential statistics but largely orthogonally to inductive, qualitative, cultural, and intersectional research—to its detriment. I argue that we can better realize the full potential of machine learning by leveraging the epistemological alignment between machine learning and inductive research. I empirically demonstrate this alignment through a word embedding model of first-person narratives of the nineteenth-century U.S. South. Situating social categories in relation to social institutions via an inductive computational analysis, I find that the cultural and economic spheres discursively distinguished by race in these narratives, the domestic sphere distinguished by gender, and Black men were afforded more discursive authority compared to white women. Even in a corpus over-representing abolitionist sentiment, I find white identities were afforded a status via culture not allowed Black identities.
► We investigated dispatching and relocation decisions of emergency service providers. ► ADP is powerful in solving the underlying stochastic and dynamic optimization problem. ► Average response time ...can be improved by using more flexible dispatching rules. ► Relocating ambulances proactively improves service quality. ► Essential to take into account time-dependent information.
Emergency service providers are supposed to locate ambulances such that in case of emergency patients can be reached in a time-efficient manner. Two fundamental decisions and choices need to be made real-time. First of all immediately after a request emerges an appropriate vehicle needs to be dispatched and send to the requests’ site. After having served a request the vehicle needs to be relocated to its next waiting location. We are going to propose a model and solve the underlying optimization problem using approximate dynamic programming (ADP), an emerging and powerful tool for solving stochastic and dynamic problems typically arising in the field of operations research. Empirical tests based on real data from the city of Vienna indicate that by deviating from the classical dispatching rules the average response time can be decreased from 4.60 to 4.01 minutes, which corresponds to an improvement of 12.89%. Furthermore we are going to show that it is essential to consider time-dependent information such as travel times and changes with respect to the request volume explicitly. Ignoring the current time and its consequences thereafter during the stage of modeling and optimization leads to suboptimal decisions.
Why are some communities better than others at generating cooperative behavior? We argue that mutual dependence on collective social institutions (CSI) increases expectations of cooperation, a key ...building block for collective action. We examine the effects of mutual dependence by studying property rights institutions in rural Malawi and Zambia. We find that respondents expect their neighbors with customary property rights to be more cooperative than those with land titles—a situation of lower shared dependence on the CSI. A conjoint survey experiment with more than 7,000 respondents allows us to separate the impact of mutual dependence within the CSI from other salient characteristics, including migration status, wealth, and ethnicity. Additionally, we explore three forms of institutional obligations that help explain why reduced mutual dependence dampens expectations of cooperation. These findings provide a richer theoretical understanding of the preconditions for cooperative behavior and the interdependence that sustains collective action.
Fair division, a key concern in the design of many social institutions, has for 70 years been the subject of interdisciplinary research at the interface of mathematics, economics, and game theory. ...Motivated by the proliferation of moneyless transactions on the internet, the computer science community has recently taken a deep interest in fairness principles and practical division rules. The resulting literature brings a fresh concern for computational simplicity (scalable rules) and realistic implementation. In this review of the most salient fair division results of the past 30 years, I concentrate on division rules with the best potential for practical implementation. The critical design parameter is the message space that the agents must use to report their individual preferences. A simple preference domain is key both to realistic implementation and to the existence of division rules with strong normative and incentive properties. I discuss successively the one-dimensional single-peaked domain, Leontief utilities, ordinal ranking, dichotomous preferences, and additive utilities. Some of the theoretical results in the latter domain are already implemented in the user-friendly SPLIDDIT platform (
http: spliddit.org
).
The current worldwide COVID19 pandemic has required the rapid and drastic adoption of social distancing and protective measures as the leading method for reducing the spread of the disease and death. ...The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors associated with the adoption of such measures in a large sample of the Brazilian population. We relied on recreancy theory, which argues that confidence in the ability of social institutions and perceived vulnerability to the disease are central factors predicting the adoption of these behaviors. Our results, drawn from 7554 respondents, indicate that self-confidence in the ability to carry out these behaviors, confidence in the ability of social institutions such as the government, hospitals, health workers and the media to cope with the pandemic crisis, and risk perceptions are associated with the adoption of preventive behaviors. Our results expand the recreancy theory and show that beyond the main effects, the effect of perceived vulnerability depends on the values of self-confidence and confidence in social institutions. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.
•Confidence in Social Institutions increase adoption protective measures.•In Brazil, confidence in the government is negative related to adopting protective measures.•Self-Confidence increases use of protective measures.•Fear and perceived risk of infection increase the adoption of protective measures.
A New Climate for Society Jasanoff, Sheila
Theory, culture & society,
03/2010, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2-3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of
understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and
opportunities for the interpretive ...social sciences. Scientific assessments such as
those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped establish climate
change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from
meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from
embedded experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense and
undermines existing social institutions and ethical commitments at four levels:
communal, political, spatial and temporal. The article explores the tensions that
arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change
projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative
imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental
debates in which a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with
social responses to those representations is taking place. It suggests how the
interpretive social sciences can foster a more complex understanding of humanity’s
climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer a framework in
which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render
obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience.
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