Society最新文献

A series of personal reflections, springing from a neighborhood talk and exploring the way aging has been approached in literature by Cicero, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Borges, and Neruda. We age from the moment we are born, though we grasp its pathos as death nears.

The study examines the existential challenges of the University of Nigeria Nsukka academic staff (university faculty members of various ranks [1]) during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic–induced lockdown. The objective of the study is to examine these professors’ adaptive ingenuity for survival in the face of lockdown, withheld salaries, and other consequences of legalistic pursuit of collective bargaining between the government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities. A mixed-methods approach, combining interviews, focus group discussions, field observations, and documentary evidence, was adopted for data gathering. The collective bargaining theory was helpful in highlighting where both parties erred in the course of interpreting their bargaining rights. Our findings show that, left with no alternative of navigating between the twin challenges of lockdown and withheld salaries, the academic staff resorted to self-help financial collectivization. Again, we found that the Nigerian government’s style of legalistic pursuit of collective bargaining is not just power-centric, but a demonstration of power asymmetry. This does not offer a sustainable resolution to the labour conflict, as it poses a serious threat to the universal right-of-workers-to-strike and to manpower development. The study recommends that the principles of horizontal bargaining, cooperation, and complementarity should form the rallying point of government-labour relations at all times.

Sensitivity to harm has become a crisis, and the reasons for this remain unexplained. Across organizations, individuals express psychic damage from trauma to microaggressions. Some call this rise in harm-oriented claims a loss of resilience due to an excess of “coddling.” Although harm is innately social, sociologists have seldom studied the deeper sources of this crisis. I advance a theoretical model to explain how psychic harm functions. The article considers why an eagerness to be perceived as socially marginalized has become commonplace. With in-depth interviews, I illustrate micro-level mechanisms that explain the individual advantages to asserting such claims. These psychic harm mechanisms reveal that social science has fundamentally shifted how individuals understand the self, others, and interaction. New disciplinary discourses—comprising a new epistemology—have contributed to rewiring how younger educated generations understand themselves and others, and these generations tend to spread the new ways of knowing across society. Ferreting out different forms of harm begets demands for ever-more diverse forms of safety, which has profound implications for free speech. I suggest that social science’s pronounced efforts to diminish inequality through a conjoined moral and political epistemology ultimately create a new system of stratification.

The multiracial population is the fastest-growing demographic in American society, increasing at three times the rate of the population as a whole. Because the majority of multiracial and multiethnic individuals are children and adolescents, the issue has important implications for the future of American schools. Using Rockquemore and Brunsma’s racial identity taxonomy, I analyzed the interview and reading group response data of two Anglo-Latina students at a large research university in the mid-Atlantic region to determine which identity options they chose and how they experienced living as multiracial individuals in the USA. Emergent themes included the students’ identification with the fictional protagonist of Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, being assigned a racial identity by others that did not match their self-determined identity, a sense of loss, and the experience of racial discrimination.

Mental health disorders, particularly depression, are significant contributors to the global burden of disease. This study aims to explore the prevalence and consequences of depression among older adults, focusing on current challenges and effective interventions. This study used data for the older adult population (age 60 years and above) from the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI). Descriptive statistics along with logistic regression was used to examine the disease burdens and challenges, and to investigate the relationships between depression and the various socio-economic factors. Prevalence of depression was observed in 20.1% of the older adult population out of which more than half (51.3%) of the older adults were noted to be severely depressed. Percentage of the older adults suffering from depression was found to be increasing with age. The odds of females having depression were higher than males (OR = 2.71, p < 0.01) and the richest quintile older adults (OR = − 0.79, p < 0.05) were more likely to suffer from depression than the poorest quintile older adults. Only 1.9% depressed older adults sought out-patient care while for in-patient care this percentage was as low as 0.36%. The fact that 21.1% of the older adults sought out-patient depression treatment from pharmacists and traditional/folk healers reflects stigma. The mean out-of-pocket expenditure for in-patient care for depression was ₹18,002 (₹3305 public; 29,307 private) and that for out-patient care was ₹1176 (₹1062 public; 1340 private). Depression-stricken older adults have reported a lower quality of life. Depression in the older adults is a pervasive and severe issue in India, necessitating urgent attention and action from policymakers, healthcare providers, and society at large.

This study investigates forum theater, an interactive, participatory type of theater, as a tool to better understand and combat gender-based violence (GBV) in Makusha, a densely populated mining community in Shurugwi, the Midlands region of Zimbabwe. Deeply impacted by rapid mining industry expansion, this community faces intensifying social tensions. At the core of the study lies an examination of the influence of forum theater on community attitudes and behaviors. Attention is paid to its role in empowering vulnerable segments of the community, especially women, and how it fosters resilience and resistance against GBV. The study discusses the transformative potential of forum theater in addressing deep-seated social issues and the urgency of creating inclusive and violence-free spaces in communities.

Martha Nussbaum’s approach to ethical and political philosophy — unlike that of certain of her notable contemporaries — is neither ahistorical nor concerned with augmenting or refining the historical record. Rather, its aim is learning what the deepest philosophical minds of the past have proposed as the fairest organisation of society, in terms of a balance between autonomy for individuals and communities, and an equitable distribution of global resources. Whilst she argues fundamentally for cosmopolitanism — hence prioritises the latter — she struggles, in her later work, to accommodate the former within such a global socio-political model. I suggest this is because she presupposes that patriotism is antecedent to, and generative of, a cosmopolitan outlook, when in fact each of these political values is irreducible, and antithetical, to the other. Nussbaum supposes this, I propose, because her work focuses on the conceptual subtleties of intellectual history, which are sadly seldom mirrored in the brutal history of facts.

The author reflects on 30 years of teaching business ethics at Harvard Business School. The paper presents tactical lessons for teaching courses in professional ethics and introduces “managerial pluralism.” This concept is akin to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism and directly addresses the complexity of ethical decision-making in business. Managerial pluralism also raises challenging questions about judgment, and the article argues that, while we can distinguish good and bad judgment, we fundamentally do not know what judgment is or how we make final judgments on complex moral and practical issues.

The purpose of this study is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the factors contributing to the current housing crisis in Greece and to offer a critical assessment of existing interventions on social policy. It focuses on the way in which the multiple crises over the past 15 years and their management have exacerbated social inequalities. Housing represents an illustrative case study. In terms of housing resources, a systematic process of reverse redistribution is attempted, from the lower and middle social classes towards higher ones, by the Greek governments. The framework for managing the existing challenges of housing precariousness, such as rising rents, non-performing loans, foreclosure auctions, energy poverty phenomena, and the privatization of the energy market, as well as the resulting landscapes of humanitarian crisis (homelessness and refugee management), all lead to a deterioration of housing conditions. This phenomenon is inherently connected with the values underlying neoliberal social policy.

Public goods are an anomaly in neoclassical economics, a form of ‘market failure’. They exist outside the efficient and equitable optimality of market exchange. It can be shown however that competitive markets are only efficient in short product cycles. Long-term objectives require social support. Corruption arises from the consequent private public interaction. Integrity, the absence of corruption, is a public good. Corruption has risen since the 1980s with privatization and outsourcing. How did European governments become honest in the first place? In the century after the 1770s, they moved from regarding public office as a form of private property to a conception of serving the public good. This integrity revolution was facilitated by Weberian bureaucracies, selected by academic merit and committed to impartiality by long-term incentives. The neoliberal revolution of the 1980s regarded bureaucracies as obstructive and slow. It admired the business corporation with its opaque procedures and charismatic leadership. Concurrently economics moved from neoclassical harmony theory to an asymmetric information model of ‘opportunism with guile’, providing doctrinal legitimacy for corruption. Corporate advertising is deliberately deceptive, and undermines the public good of trustworthiness. Digital platforms, powered by advertising, have subverted public discourse. Misinformation and disinformation have become prime risk factors for current societies. The practical operation of markets undermines the public goods of integrity and trustworthiness. The public good of a habitable climate cannot be achieved by market methods. For long-term payoffs, ‘free markets’ are a harmful delusion, inefficient, corrupt, impossible to achieve, and not sustainable.