Frontiers in Sociology最新文献

Corruption, a global phenomenon, affects countries worldwide, transcending geographic and political boundaries, and continues to escalate, partly due to the inefficiency of financial and legal institutions and lack of enforcement. This has significant implications for Africa, hindering democracy, development, and poverty alleviation efforts. Defined as the intentional misuse of official authority for personal benefit, corruption is often fueled by public sector financial managers or accounting officers embezzling funds. The increasing pressure on these officers to justify public fund usage, coupled with expectations for effective service delivery, may contribute to corrupt practices. This article presents a systematic literature review focused on evaluating policies and regulations to control corruption among accounting officers in South Africa's public sector. The public sector in South Africa has recently seen a rise in corruption cases, with numerous incidents involving corrupt government officers, including accounting officers, gaining media attention. This situation prompted the need for the study, which systematically reviewed existing literature to identify gaps and weaknesses in current policies and regulations. The findings revealed non-compliance with anti- corruption policies and regulations, along with a lack of accountability among accounting officers. Additionally, the study observed that punishment measures for those implicated in misusing public funds are inconsistently implemented, highlighting a significant gap between policy and practice. These findings are critical for government policymakers, as they reveal areas needing improvement in anti-corruption policies and regulations. Issues identified include unqualified officers, poor delegation, embezzlement, and non-compliance. The study recommends that the government consistently apply strict measures against officials guilty of corruption, holding them accountable for their actions. It also advocates for the implementation of effective monitoring and evaluation systems to enforce anti-corruption policies and bridge the policy-practice gap. Emphasizing that good planning is as crucial as the implementation structures themselves, the study suggests that effective functioning requires both elements to work in tandem.

Leadership development and succession planning is a valuable strategy for closing the gender gap and providing an equal chance for males and females to be trained and involved in leadership roles. This strategy is an incredibly effective tool in higher education, where there is a significant disparity between male and female academic leaders. Despite its effectiveness, succession planning remained an overlooked component of the higher education system. Further research studies enhance our understanding of the current state of succession planning and the factors that affect the recruitment and selection of future academic leaders. Hence, this study aims to identify the current women's leadership development and succession planning practices in public and private universities in Saudi Arabia. A qualitative study was conducted in a Saudi Arabian higher education setting. The interest in Saudi Arabia stems from the fact that succession planning is less likely to be practiced since gender discrimination is apparent when assigning leadership positions. Results indicate that top powers typically select leaders since succession planning is absent in Saudi Arabia's higher education institutions. In this circumstance, networking and relationships play a significant role, as these institutions have no formalized succession planning process. In a highly gender-segregated society like Saudi Arabia, women are deprived of expanding their networks and showcasing capabilities to male decision-makers. The results of this study further identified the underlying components of the women's leadership and succession planning process in the Saudi Arabian setting. This study contributes to leadership and succession planning knowledge and its implications, which may extend opportunities for practitioners, consultants, and policymakers to include women in higher education succession planning.

Objectives: The role of the current research is to set up a conceptual and analytical framework of the security, democracy and human rights linkage in contemporary society mainly based on the indexing, monitoring and research of online content for the period 1945-2019.

Methods and methodology: Due to the focused timeline outlining the scientific research for the period 1945-2019, the paper favors both quantitative and qualitative approaches that follow a systemic framework of several thematic clusters which act as supporting pillars of analytical research by using Google Ngrams: (a) norms and constitutional values and principles; (b) civil and legal liberties; (c) human and individual approaches; (d) institutional governance and organizational establishment; (e) freedoms, civil and political rights.

Results and discussions: The research results explore the variations in the frequency of appearances of the selected concepts in the specialized literature indexed by the Google platform indicating essential aspects of the conceptual and theoretical evolutions in strict dependence to the significant resolutions of the Security Council of the United Nations adopted in the same period and focusing on three central concepts: security, democracy and human rights. The spectrum of research singles out fifteen figures and an integrated analysis of contextual, historical, political, institutional, legal and social factors.

Conclusion: The research aims to expand the field of reference and analysis of the three notions of security, democracy and human rights by integrating the multifactorial and multi-conditional analysis for the interpretation of the results of the fifteen figures. In the broader framework of online monitoring and complementarily with the spectrum of UNSC resolutions, the research will use contemporary topics, intensely debated, used and monitored, focusing on the conceptual and linguistic study and on the relationship between the analytical inventory of scientific research and the international decision-making spectrum. This relationship is mediated by the lexicon of politics and the sociology of international relations, which reflected a growing evolutionary linguistic semantics since 1945, the year of the establishment of the United Nations.

The presence of a mining company in an area affects the living conditions of the surrounding community from an environmental, social, and economic perspective. This research aims to contribute to the literature on social perceptions concerning mining company operations by assessing the local societies' rate of rejection or acceptance of a mining company's extension of operating permit, along with reasons that justify the decision. We conducted semi-structured interviews with seven interest groups in four sub-districts in East Luwu Regency, comprising 79 participants. This research uses a combination of quantitative data collection and in-depth qualitative interviews to strengthen the sources' reasons for providing answers. The results show a high rejection rate expressed by communities living in the sub-districts where mining companies operate, alongside a strong preference for extending operating permits for sites that are of greater distance to the smelters. If the business permit is ultimately transferred to the existing company, it may exacerbate community tensions and resistance. In that case, the local community wants several priority improvements, namely, increasing the number of workers working in the factory, further boosting economic growth and empowerment programs carried out in affected areas, and improving post-mining environmental management. Therefore, this study contributes to the discourse of local community perceptions in mining areas, which may affect mining operations in the future.

We studied the gender achievement gap in grades and standardised test scores in Finland, where the gender differences are largest among OECD countries. We compared the gender achievement gap in standardised test scores from PISA surveys and grades from high-quality school registers in literacy. Furthermore, we analysed how grades differ from standardised test scores by family background and students' SES composition of the schools. By using the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method, we explored how different characteristics between girls and boys explain gender differences in grading. Our findings indicate that boys' grades were lower than can be expected based on standardised test scores. The gender gap in grades was explained by boys' lower reading interests, effort put into schoolwork, and conscientiousness on homework. However, even adjusting for schooling characteristics and competence, boys have lower grades than test scores in schools that have low SES student composition.

Courthouses, as public edifices, serve as the physical backdrop for the administration of justice. Simultaneously, they are spaces inhabited and visited by a diverse array of court users, ranging from judicial professionals to litigants. This article explores the nuanced interplay between courthouse spaces and the emotional experiences they generate. It starts by surveying existing studies that examine such an intricate relationship. Then, and by drawing from a sample of interviews conducted across two distinct time periods (2010-2011 and 2017-2019) in Portugal, the article delves into the lived experiences of judges, prosecutors, and litigants. Their narratives provide a multifaceted view of the emotional experiences associated with the Portuguese (Family) Court buildings. To analyse these experiences, I turn to Henri Lefebvre's concept of lived space. Lived space refers to the emotions, memories, and interactions within a particular spatial context. Such dimension, in relation to courthouses, directly connects to the lived experience of legitimacy loss and low self-esteem affecting decision-making, on the one hand, and estrangement and rights' exclusion, on the other hand, felt by those subjects. By investigating how the spatial configurations of courthouses shape our emotions, we gain insights into the profound impact of such built environments on our understanding of the justice system, and the physical and symbolic obstacles in accessing it.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1406156.].

Little research has been done on conceptualizing gender-based violence (GBV) against immigrant and refugee women as a continuum of violence. The objective of the larger study was to understand gender-based violence in migration and analyze the ways in which discriminations and inequalities interact to increase vulnerability and decrease access to supports and services for some women. Using (a) the concept of continuum of [sexual] violence and (b) intersectionality, we demonstrate the need to both document the range of violence in women's lives and the tactics of victimization among immigrant and refugee women and show how they are different than the cumulated literature showing victimization tactics against the Canadian-born population. Using semi-structured interviews via phone or video, we asked professionals (N = 43) who worked with migrant women across Canada about forms of GBV experienced in the immigrant and refugee populations they worked with. Participants reported that non-physical forms of violence are more normalized, but also more commonly experienced than physical forms of violence in Canada. Additionally, intersecting social identities impact both the distinct and amplified forms of GBV immigrant and refugee women experienced. Results contribute theoretically and empirically to the conceptualization of the GBV experiences by immigrant and refugee women in Canada.