L’université publique italienne est dans une situation difficile. En raison de problèmes structurels et des réformes récentes – qui ont aggravé la situation au lieu de la transformer –, le système ...universitaire italien est aujourd’hui sous-financé. Il accuse en plus des déséquilibres inquiétants par rapport à sa composition interne et sa dimension territoriale. Dans l’ensemble, le système universitaire italien a perdu presque un cinquième de ses membres au cours des dix dernières années : on ...
Building on cornerstone traditions in historical sociology, as well as work in environmental sociology and political-economic sociology, we theorize and investigate with moderation analysis how and ...why national militaries shape the effect of economic growth on carbon pollution. Militaries exert a substantial influence on the production and consumption patterns of economies, and the environmental demands required to support their evolving infrastructure. As far-reaching and distinct characteristics of contemporary militarization, we suggest that both the size and capital intensiveness of the world’s militaries enlarge the effect of economic growth on nations’ carbon emissions. In particular, we posit that each increases the extent to which the other amplifies the effect of economic growth on carbon pollution. To test our arguments, we estimate longitudinal models of emissions for 106 nations from 1990 to 2016. Across various model specifications, robustness checks, a range of sensitivity analyses, and counterfactual analysis, the findings consistently support our propositions. Beyond advancing the environment and economic growth literature in sociology, this study makes significant contributions to sociological research on climate change and the climate crisis, and it underscores the importance of considering the military in scholarship across the discipline.
Currently, two distinct bodies of scholarship address the increased volume and diversity of global return migration since the mid-1990s. The economic sociology of return, which assumes that return is ...voluntary, investigates how time living and working abroad affects returnees' labor market opportunities and the resulting implications for economic development. A second scholarship, the political sociology of return, recognizing the increasing role of both emigration and immigration states in controlling and managing migration, examines how state and institutional actors in countries of origin shape the reintegration experiences of deportees, rejected asylum seekers, and nonadmitted migrants forced home. We review these literatures independently, examining their research questions, methodologies, and findings, while also noting limitations and areas where additional research is needed. We then engage these literatures to provide an integrated path forward for researching and theorizing return migration-a synergized resource mobilization framework.
Abstract
How does racism and racial inequality manifest in contemporary markets? Leveraging insights from the sociology of race and economic sociology, I highlight how ratings and scores operate as ...key mechanisms institutionalizing racism in markets according to an epistemology of racial ignorance. While ratings and scores give a veneer of individualized objectivity, their actual inputs reflect decades of racial disadvantage. The use of such racialized inputs embeds historical racism in ratings allowing racial inequality to persist and escape cognition as seemingly race-neutral inputs “explain away” racial disparities. I demonstrate this argument using an original dataset to approximate the evaluative criteria used in rating city government creditworthiness. I show that cities with larger proportions of Black residents receive worse credit ratings when controlling for the non-racialized inputs in the evaluative criteria. This racial disparity only attenuates after the inclusion of the criterion median family income, which I argue is a fundamentally racialized input owing to the legacy of racism in the United States. Establishing this point provides key theoretical takeaways at the intersection of race and economic sociology as scores and ratings pervade more corners of social life and push up against the epistemological seams of how we understand and identify inequality.
Social entrepreneurship has recently received greater recognition from the public sector, as well as from scholars. However, the lack of a unifying paradigm in the field has lead to a proliferation ...of definitions. Moreover, several approaches of the phenomenon, as well as different schools of thought, have emerged in different regions of the world. At first glance, because of different conceptions of capitalism and of the government's role, there seems to be a difference between the American and the European conceptions of social entrepreneurship. The objective of this paper is to clarify the concepts of 'social entrepreneurship', 'social entrepreneur' and 'social entrepreneurship organization' and to examine whether there is a transatlantic divide in the way these are conceived and defined. After having justified the need for a definition, we present the different geographical perspectives. North American and European literatures on social entrepreneurship are critically analysed by means of Gartner's four differentiating aspects: the individual, the process, the organization and the environment. We show that there is no clear-cut transatlantic divide, but that, even within the US, different conceptions coexist. We propose definitions for the main concepts associated with social entrepreneurship and, finally, discuss implications for future research.
GLOBAL EVIDENCE ON ECONOMIC PREFERENCES Falk, Armin; Becker, Anke; Dohmen, Thomas ...
The Quarterly journal of economics,
11/2018, Volume:
133, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article studies the global variation in economic preferences. For this purpose, we present the Global Preference Survey (GPS), an experimentally validated survey data set of time preference, ...risk preference, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust from 80,000 people in 76 countries. The data reveal substantial heterogeneity in preferences across countries, but even larger within-country heterogeneity. Across individuals, preferences vary with age, gender, and cognitive ability, yet these relationships appear partly country specific. At the country level, the data reveal correlations between preferences and biogeographic and cultural variables, such as agricultural suitability, language structure, and religion. Variation in preferences is also correlated with economic outcomes and behaviors. Within countries and subnational regions, preferences are linked to individual savings decisions, labor market choices, and prosocial behaviors. Across countries, preferences vary with aggregate outcomes ranging from per capita income, to entrepreneurial activities, to the frequency of armed conflicts.
Abstract
We examine a determinant of cultural persistence that has emerged from a class of models in evolutionary anthropology: the similarity of the environment across generations. Within these ...models, when the environment is more stable across generations, the traits that have evolved up to the previous generation are more likely to be suitable for the current generation. In equilibrium, a greater value is placed on tradition and there is greater cultural persistence. We test this hypothesis by measuring the variability of climatic measures across 20-year generations from 500 to 1900. Employing a variety of tests that use different samples and empirical strategies, we find that populations with ancestors who lived in environments with more cross-generational instability place less importance on maintaining tradition today and exhibit less cultural persistence.
This article proposes a research programme devoted to examining 'processes of economization'. In the current instalment we introduce the notion of 'economization', which refers to the assembly and ...qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as 'economic' by social scientists and market actors. Through an analysis of selected works in anthropology, economics and sociology, we begin by discussing the importance, meaning and framing of economization, as we unravel its trace within a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. We show how in combination, these works have laid the foundations for the study of economization. The second instalment of the article, to appear in the next volume of Economy and Society, presents a preliminary picture of what it might mean to take processes of economization as a topic of empirical investigation. Given the vast terrain of relationships that produce its numerous trajectories, we will illustrate economization by focusing on only one of its modalities - the one that leads to the establishment of economic markets. With emphasis on the increasingly dominant role of materialities and economic knowledges in processes of market-making, we will analyse the extant work in social studies of 'marketization'. Marketization is but one case study of economization.
PREFERENCES FOR TRUTH-TELLING Abeler, Johannes; Nosenzo, Daniele; Raymond, Collin
Econometrica,
July 2019, Volume:
87, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Private information is at the heart of many economic activities. For decades, economists have assumed that individuals are willing to misreport private information if this maximizes their material ...payoff. We combine data from 90 experimental studies in economics, psychology, and sociology, and show that, in fact, people lie surprisingly little. We then formalize a wide range of potential explanations for the observed behavior, identify testable predictions that can distinguish between the models, and conduct new experiments to do so. Our empirical evidence suggests that a preference for being seen as honest and a preference for being honest are the main motivations for truth-telling.
Since the early twentieth century, psychologists have known that there is consensus in attributing social and personality characteristics from facial appearance. Recent studies have shown that ...surprisingly little time and effort are needed to arrive at this consensus. Here we review recent research on social attributions from faces. Section I outlines data-driven methods capable of identifying the perceptual basis of consensus in social attributions from faces (e.g., What makes a face look threatening?). Section II describes nonperceptual determinants of social attributions (e.g., person knowledge and incidental associations). Section III discusses evidence that attributions from faces predict important social outcomes in diverse domains (e.g., investment decisions and leader selection). In Section IV, we argue that the diagnostic validity of these attributions has been greatly overstated in the literature. In the final section, we offer an account of the functional significance of these attributions.
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