bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Culture and Globalization
Authors: Wherry Frederick F.
Published: May 2015

How should we define culture and globalization? How does each affect the other? And what are our shortcomings in understanding the heterogeneous outcomes for cultural production and expression in a globalizing world? This essay begins with foundational understandings among sociologists, political economists, and anthropologists regarding the facets of globalization and the way that it is shaped by and in turn shapes local cultures. The essay turns to the widely varied, disjointed attempts to explain the phenomenon and then offers suggestions for advancing studies of culture in the context of globalization.
Culture as Situated Cognition
Authors: Oyserman Daphna
Published: May 2015

Culture‐as‐situated‐cognition (CSC) theory proposes that culture can be thought of at three levels. At the highest level, culture is a human universal, a “good enough” solution to universal needs. At the intermediate level, culture is a specific meaning‐making framework, a “mindset” that influences what is attended to, which goals or mental procedure is salient. At the most proximal level, culture is a set of particular practices within a specific society, time, and place which influences what feels fluent and to‐be‐expected. Cross‐national comparisons demonstrate that differences exist. To understand what observed differences imply for underlying process, a situated cognition framework and experimental methods are needed. Indeed, individualistic and collectivistic mindsets are accessible cross‐culturally, so both can be primed. Whether an individualistic or collectivistic cultural mindset is salient in the moment matters, resulting in downstream consequences for meaning making, self‐processes, willingness to invest in relationships, and for complex mental procedures. Between‐group differences arise in part from momentary cues that make either individualistic or collectivistic mindset accessible. Within a culture, people experience cultural fluency if situations match their expectations and cultural disfluency if they do not. Cultural disfluency has downstream consequences for choice and behavior. Moving from one culture to another is difficult because people experience many situations in which they either do not know what to expect or their expectations are not met and feedback as to the nature of the mismatch is almost always ambiguous. For these reasons, while cultural processes are universal, acculturation is often fraught, lengthy, and incomplete.
Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict
Authors: Rojas Fabio
Published: May 2015

Schools are both political and academic institutions. This essay explains the different ways that schools generate conflict because people dispute the content of the school curriculum. This essay begins by noting that schools require the approval of political elites and the public. Without such support, schools can't operate. Also, schools lend legitimacy to particular ideas, which means that people will fight over the content of classroom instruction. The essay then discusses how social movements target schools and the factors contribute to successful curricular challenges in schools.

Prior research has focused on uncovering the inherently political nature of school curricula. These researchers produce case studies of conflict over the curriculum. Research also focuses on how political actors target schools and try to enact change. There is also a growing literature on bureaucratic dynamics. Scholars now focus on the administrative response to protest and the demand for educational reform. I conclude by outlining new directions for research. Specifically, researchers should ask about the relationship between academic reform movements and broader social movements. For example, do most mass movements target schools? How much curricular conflict is unique to the educational system? I also suggest that researchers should examine the “spill out” of protest from schools to the larger society.
Digital Methods for Web Research
Authors: Rogers Richard
Published: May 2015

Digital methods are techniques for the study of societal change and cultural condition with online data. They make use of available digital objects such as the hyperlink, tag, timestamp, like, share, retweet, and seek to learn from how the objects are treated by the methods built into the dominant devices online, such as Google Web Search and Facebook's Graph Search. They endeavor to repurpose the online methods and services with a social research outlook. Ultimately the question is the location of the baseline, and whether the findings made may be grounded online. Digital methods as a research practice is part of the computational turn in the humanities and social sciences, and as such may be situated alongside other recent approaches, such as cultural analytics, culturomics, and virtual methods, where distinctions may be made about the types of data employed (natively digital and digitized) as well as method (written for the medium, or migrated to it). The limitations of digital methods are also treated. Digital methods recognize the problems with web data, such as the impermanence of web services, and the instability of data streams, where, for example, APIs (application programming interfaces) are reconfigured or discontinued. They also grapple with the quality of web data, and the challenges of longitudinal study, where, for instance, all of Twitter's tweets may be archived by the Library of Congress, but new types of gaps emerge owing to changes over the years in the company's terms of service.
Dissociating Enhancing and Impairing Effects of Emotion on Cognition
Authors: Dolcos Florin , Denkova Ekaterina
Published: May 2015

Emotion is a “double‐edged sword” that can either enhance or hinder various aspects of our cognition and behavior. The emotional charge of an event can increase attention to and memory for that event, whereas task‐irrelevant emotional information may lead to increased distraction and impaired performance in ongoing cognitive tasks. These opposing effects of emotion can be identified at different levels, both within the same cognitive process and across different processes, and could also be identified at more general levels, such as in the case of the response to stress. The present review discusses emerging evidence regarding factors that influence opposite effects of emotion on cognition in healthy functioning, and how they may be linked to clinical conditions. These issues are important for understanding mechanisms of emotion‐cognition interactions in healthy functioning and in emotional disturbances, where both of these effects are exacerbated and tend to co‐occur. Overall, the present review highlights the need to consider the various factors that can influence enhancing or impairing effects of emotion on cognition, in studies investigating emotion‐cognition interactions.
Diversity in Groups
Authors: Fernandes Catarina R. , Polzer Jeffrey T.
Published: May 2015

Diversity has the potential to either disrupt group functioning or, conversely, be the source of collective creativity and insight. These two divergent perspectives pose a paradox that has held the attention of scholars for many years. In response, researchers have marshaled evidence to specify the conditions under which diversity leads to more positive outcomes and explain why it does so under these conditions. After describing these foundational perspectives and more recent work that addresses this paradox, we outline several promising directions for research in this domain. We encourage researchers to develop integrative theoretical explanations, use new technologies to gain insight into group processes, study diversity in the context of virtual interaction, and take advantage of opportunities for cross‐disciplinary research.
DNARevolution and the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Authors: Trzaskowski Maciej , Plomin Robert
Published: May 2015

A century of genetic research on the social and behavioral sciences has addressed the “how much” question, showing that genetic differences are important for nearly all traits. However, during the past few decades, research has moved beyond this rudimentary “how much” question to ask “how” questions about developmental change and continuity, about the relationship between traits, and about the interplay between genes (nature) and environment (nurture). We suggest that some of the most important and transformative findings in the social and behavioral sciences have come from this research. Moreover, the most revolutionary changes in genetic research are on their way with the rapid advances in DNA technology and methodology, which promise to transform the social and behavioral sciences. It is crucial that social and behavioral scientists stay on top of the DNA revolution. The purpose of our essay is to provide an overview of genetic research in the social and behavioral sciences.
Does the 1 Person 1 Vote Principle Apply?
Authors: Turner Ian R. , Schofield Norman , Gallego Maria
Published: May 2015

In this essay we address the puzzle that exists in American politics based on the tension of convergence to the electoral mean because of the MVT (mean voter theorem) and the studies showing divergence in candidate positioning. We provide a model in which voters and states are not treated equally because of vast regional differences. In contrast with the MVT, candidates who campaign in each state may converge to the national electoral mean while adopting diverging positions in different states, as they take differences in voter preferences and valences across states into account. At the state level, we show that while candidates give maximal weight in their policy position to pivotal voters, they give minimal weight to those voting for them with almost certainty; and that in their national position while candidates give maximal weight to swing states they give minimal weight to nonpivotal states. Something that remains hidden when differences across states are ruled out as they are in MVT. Then we adapt the variable choice set logit model of Gallego
et al
. (2013) to study the 2008 Presidential election and find that even though Obama's and McCain's position in swing states differs from the national electoral mean, their national position are close but on opposite sides of the national mean. Given the differential treatment candidates give voters and states in their national position, incorporating the Electoral College vote in the model, the “one person, one vote” principle may fail to obtain in the 2008 US Presidential election when candidates' valences and campaign spending differ across states.
Domestic Political Institutions and Alliance Politics
Authors: Mattes Michaela
Published: May 2015

Military alliances are one of the most important tools states can use to counter international threats, exert influence over other countries, and accomplish broad foreign policy goals, including peace and stability in the international system. Alliance scholarship can provide valuable insights to policy‐makers by answering questions such as which states are likely to ally, when alliances will be upheld, and whether they will be effective. Traditional alliance research focused on international considerations rather than domestic politics as drivers of alliance politics. More recently, however, scholars have shifted their attention to uncovering the ways in which domestic political institutions affect alliance behavior. The main questions underlying this research include: Are states with similar regime types, especially democracies, more likely to ally? Are democracies more reliable alliance partners? Do wartime coalitions involving democracies have a higher chance of victory? Do domestic institutional changes affect alliance maintenance? While the literature has provided conclusive answers to some of these questions, others are characterized by mixed findings. Recently published work has taken on unresolved issues and provided new and original insights. Future research should take these efforts further by unpacking the concepts of “domestic politics” and “alliance politics”.
Economic Models of Voting
Authors: Anson Ian G. , Hellwig Timothy
Published: May 2015

The economic vote provides a widely available tool for gauging electoral accountability. Yet in many cases, this search for electoral accountability appears elusive. A large literature has yielded conflicting and unstable empirical results. While there appears to be an association between the economy and citizens' voting behavior, we are unsure of its foundation. Do citizens reflect on the performance of the economy when choosing between candidates in democratic elections? What determines the existence and size of the economic vote: individual attributes, the wider politico‐economic context, or messages received from trusted elites? Scholars have unearthed some answers by turning outward to consider context, theorizing the cross‐national, individual‐level, and temporal conditions under which economic voting is likely to be strongest. In addition, more recently, researchers have turned inward to reassess the mechanism that drives the link between economic performance and voting behavior. Future scholarship must continue to interrogate core theoretical questions in an effort to better understand how citizens' subjective economic evaluations are reflected in their decisions as voters.
Economics of Early Education
Authors: Steven Barnett W.
Published: May 2015

Economic research has established that public investments in early childhood programs providing education can yield high rates of return. A substantial portion of these returns are spillover effects that benefit society generally but not the child and family creating a classic instance of market failure. Benefits include improvements in school progress and achievement, health and health behaviors, social behavior, and employment and earnings for children and improvements in maternal employment and career paths. The weight of the evidence indicates that disadvantaged children benefit more than others. While programs can produce benefits from increased maternal employment (child care function) as well as from improved child development (education function), child development benefits look to be the larger part of the potential gain. Studies of large‐scale public policies and programs find much smaller benefits indicating that there may be substantial government failure in putting this knowledge into practice. One point that is immediately obvious is that public programs often fail to replicate the successful programs from research because government funds them inadequately. However, this is not the only problem as the costs and benefits of programs depend on the details of policy and program design and implementation. These details are not all well understood. Recent research has provided some insights, but has by no means answered all the key questions definitively. Key issues for further research include the advantages and disadvantages of means‐tested v. universal programs, and the nature and size of investments that are most productive at each age.
Education in an Open Informational World
Authors: Scardamalia Marlene , Bereiter Carl
Published: May 2015

Education now functions in an open informational world in which there are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be brought to bear on any topic, question, or activity. Changes in the form and connectedness of information are giving rise to new issues concerning coherence, sustained work with ideas, and complexity. In place of the extended text of a well‐crafted book, with its carefully developed line of thought, information on the web is frequently presented as
hypertext
—relatively small packets of information complexly interlinked. It is now up to the reader to construct a connecting line of thought. The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of such fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy. Transliteracy requires not only skill in using new information media but ability to carry on sustained integrative work with ideas—an ability traditionally the mark of a skilled teacher but now increasingly the shared capacity of a knowledge‐building community. Whereas traditionally the skilled teacher has smoothed the way to learning by simplifying complex content and problems, functioning in the open informational world requires that learners be able and willing to work with complexity and with problems that have not been structured for them. A current trend is to bring these requirements together in a focus on the “big ideas” of the disciplines. A number of “constructivist” educational approaches engage students in creative knowledge work and problem solving but neglect the
sine qua non
of contemporary knowledge building: students taking collective responsibility for idea development and improvement.
Elites
Authors: Chu Johan S. G. , Mizruchi Mark S.
Published: May 2015

By definition, individual elite actors have a disproportionately high level of resources at their disposal with which to influence society. The question is whether such elites are able to act in a unified and effective manner. During the twentieth century, scholars discovered mechanisms that led to elite cohesion and unified political action. In the early twenty‐first century, these mechanisms have ceased to function. Elite researchers are thus faced with the challenge of identifying alternative mechanisms capable of fostering elite influence. In addition to cohesion, mechanisms of elite institutional influence and durable dominance are promising areas for study. Against the current backdrop of popular interest in elites and the many theoretical avenues opened up by researchers doing related work in fields such as economics, organizational theory, business, and psychology, the twenty‐first century promises to be an important period for elite scholarship.
Embodied Knowledge
Authors: Pecher Diane , Zeelenberg René
Published: May 2015

In theories of grounded cognition, mental representations (concepts) share processing mechanisms with systems for perception and action. In this view, mental representations are simulations of embodied experiences. This view is supported by empirical data showing that concepts, linguistic processing, and emotion processing interact with perception and action. Key issues for further research are the question how abstract concepts are grounded in sensory‐motor processing, how language and concepts are related, and the development of formal models.
Motivation Science
Authors: Kruglanski Arie W. , Chernikova Marina , Kopetz Catalina
Published: May 2015

Traditionally,research on the psychology of motivation has addressed two separate questions: theWhatof motivation and theHowof motivation. The former concerns thenatureof the various motives that propel human behavior, and the latter the generalprocesswhereby any motive exerts its effects. This essay reviews historical and contemporary research in each of the foregoing categories. We highlight cutting edge concepts and findings in motivation science and identify emerging trends and future challenges.
Culture and Movements
Authors: Polletta Francesca , Gardner Beth Gharrity
Published: May 2015

Scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of culture in social movements' emergence, trajectories, and impacts. Culture is no longer conceptualized as a subjective lens through which people perceive objective structures, but rather as a key dimension of those structures. This has allowed researchers to shed new light on why certain areas of social life come to be contested when they do, as well as to understand the limitations on activists' ability to act strategically, and the sometimes surprising ways in which movements have influence. We focus on one vein of research: the role ofinstitutional schemasin spurring mobilization and accounting for its effects. Schemas are accepted ways of doing things—doing business, obstetrics, race relations, or Internet protest. Research has investigated both the conditions in which institutionalized schemas become vulnerable to challenge and whether winning the acceptance of a new institutional schema counts as movement success.
The Material Turn
Authors: Mukerji Chandra
Published: May 2015

There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power. It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under‐examined forms of social life—particularly the lives of nonliterate or suppressed groups. It is an emerging trend with multiple sources and faces, but it has roots in Foucault's analysis of political embodiment, work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on object agency, and the growing interest (in part because of climate change) in how the natural world is entangled with social practices.
Enduring Effects of Education
Authors: Curry Matthew , Brand Jennie E.
Published: May 2015

Social scientists have found strong and persistent causal effects of education on various outcomes over the life course, even after using various methods to control for preexisting selection into educational treatments. Research suggests that educational attainment is an important causal factor in determining labor market outcomes, social status, physical and mental health, marriage and fertility, civic participation, and social attitudes. As education plays a central role in the causal processes of so many outcomes of interest, understanding the effects of education is a primary concern to social scientists. The effects of education are complex and vary across demographic groups, appearing greatest for marginal students. Furthermore, after controlling for individual educational attainment, aggregate levels of education can affect economic and noneconomic outcomes at both the aggregate and individual levels. Building on the literature on the effects of education, we suggest promising areas for future research, including assessing effect heterogeneity across individual and contextual characteristics; rigorously identifying and testing causal pathways and mechanisms that link education to associated outcomes; and attending to equilibrium effects, where aggregate levels of education may influence the relationship between individual education and a variety of individual outcomes.
Epistemological Linguistics
Authors: Greene Rebecca D. , Hakuta Kenji
Published: May 2015

Numerous researchers are coming to appreciate the linguistic and interactional nature of content learning. At the same time, language‐centered educational standards are being implemented nationwide, and the federally protected but educationally struggling English Learner population is rapidly expanding (Migration Policy Institute, 2013). In response to these evolving circumstances, a new subdiscipline known asEpistemological Linguisticsis emerging in which researchers are exploring the role of language in content learning. This field will also offer practitioners and policy makers recommendations based on up‐to‐date theory and ample, sound empirical evidence surrounding disciplinary learning. Epistemological linguistics is also taking advantage of the rapidly growing capacity of computers to facilitate and enhance, as well as collect and analyze data on, students' learning of language and content.

A great deal of resources will be required to help teachers and administrators understand that content and language learning are both best supported by helping students engage with each other in rich discourse about subject matter, not by attempting to impart knowledge to them. Research is critically needed to develop widely useful pre‐service and professional development models (including for administrators) that address the needs of English Learners. Epistemological linguists will help provide policy makers, schools, and teachers with models for how best to support English Learners' content learning. Findings in this subdiscipline will influence instructional outcomes in ways that improve life chances for English learners, and indeed all students.
Ethnography in the Digital Age
Authors: Howard Alan , Mawyer Alexander
Published: May 2015

This essay explores the ways in which ethnography, both as a methodology and a product of research, has adapted to the rapid growth of digital technology and the new venues for research that it has spawned. On the one hand, digital technology affords social scientists new means of recording, storing, and analyzing data. On the other hand, digital media have been responsible for the creation of new venues for research, mostly on the Internet in the form of websites, blogs, social networks, and multiplayer online games. As a methodology, ethnography, with its beginnings in the anthropological study of non‐Western societies, has proved to be highly adaptable to the task of making sense of, and giving meaning to, computer‐mediated communications in its various forms. This has led to its adoption in the study of online sites by researchers from a number of different disciplines attempting to come to grips with the cultural nuances of digitally formed communities. Ethical problems posed by more powerful forms of surveillance and access to personal information are discussed. The boundaries between public and private domains have become increasingly blurred, resulting in complex issues relating to informed consent. As a product, digital ethnographies allow for nonlineal, hyperlinked presentations that permit new forms of engagement between authors and readers not afforded by traditional published monographs.
Evaluating and Rewarding Teachers
Authors: Hart Cassandra
Published: May 2015

Policymakers and researchers alike debate the optimal structure of teacher evaluation and compensation systems. This article reviews research in both fields, with a concentration on one increasingly policy‐relevant topic in each domain. Within the evaluation domain, particular attention is given to value‐added measures, which are increasingly being used to incorporate information about student test performance into teacher evaluations. While these measures allow evaluators to make quantitative estimates of teachers' contributions to student learning, critics argue that the measures suffer from a number of problems, including lack of stability, bias, and misattribution of teacher contributions. Within the realm of compensation, I devote particular attention to recent efforts to implement merit pay schemes, which aim to reward teachers, or teams of teachers, that are especially successful at boosting student achievement. Given that states and districts are increasingly requiring the use of value‐added measures in evaluations and experimenting with merit pay plans, both areas are ripe for future research into the benefits and costs of these policies. Suggestions for future directions for research in both fields are offered.
Event Processing as an Executive Enterprise
Authors: Ross Robbie A. , Baldwin Dare A.
Published: May 2015

Actual experience as life unfolds tends to be an ebb and flow of dynamic, multimodal sensations, many of which are fleeting. Yet what is encoded, recalled, and talked about tends to be events—units of experience that are conceptualized as having both a beginning and an end. In this essay, we consider processing mechanisms that enable the extraction of event structure from the dynamically unfolding stream of experience. Two proposals emerge from our own and others' recent research on event processing: First, fluent detection of structure within activity streams appears to hinge on knowledge of the predictability relations within those streams. Second, skill at event processing seems to involve harnessing such knowledge of predictability relations to selectively direct attention to information‐rich portions of the activity stream. If this account is correct, individual differences in knowledge and executive skill should influence event‐processing fluency. As well, children's developmental progress in event processing should reveal the telltale impact of increasing knowledge and executive skill. Our hope is that research pursuing these ideas will ultimately make it possible to enhance event‐processing fluency for all, which in turn has the potential to facilitate memory, learning, and social interaction.
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children's Academic Achievement
Authors: Geary David C. , Berch Daniel B.
Published: May 2015

There are evolved cognitive biases that influence what people pay attention to (e.g., faces, not rocks) and how they interpret this information (e.g., underlying intentions). These cognitive biases are organized to help us understand ourselves and other people (folk psychology), other species (folk biology), and the physical world (folk physics). Human cultural advances have resulted in the development of evolutionarily novel concepts (e.g., natural selection) and skills (e.g., reading) that are built from this evolved core. The basic architecture of folk cognitive biases is universal and adapted to nuances in local conditions as children play, interact with other people, and explore the environment. The learning of evolutionarily novel competencies is necessary for success in today's economy but children do not learn these as easily as they adapt folk knowledge nor are they as motivated to engage in the associated activities. This is because learning academic competencies requires adapting folk systems for tasks for which they did not evolve. The associated activities (e.g., direct instruction) are very different from the activities (e.g., play) that foster the adaptation of folk abilities to local conditions. Schooling thus involves the society‐wide organization of children's activities so they learn competencies that would not otherwise emerge. This perspective allows us to better understand the importance of working memory, a motivational focus on effort, and the need for explicit, organized instruction for children's learning in school.
Expertise
Authors: Eyal Gil
Published: May 2015

The main claim of the essay is that expertise is better understood neither as a set of skills that experts possess nor as a social attribution, but as a historically specific way in which we currently talk about the intersection, articulation, and friction between professions, science and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics on the other. It is shown that talk in terms of expertise is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it is claimed that it reflects not the rise of the “expert society,” but its crisis, namely, as long as it was fairly clear who the experts were, and how to recognize them there was little discussion of expertise, but once the number of contenders for expert status has increased and the bases for their claims have become more heterogeneous; once the struggles between these would‐be experts intensified; expertise became problematized because the question was how to determine whose claim is legitimate. After surveying some of the current debates about the nature and character of expertise, the essay concludes by suggesting that the more fruitful approach is to treat expertise in an open‐ended nominalist manner as everything that is necessary to take into account when one seeks to give a description of the capacity to accomplish a relevant task, that is, of everything that is necessary in order for a particular expert statement or performance to be produced, repeated, and disseminated.
Feminists in Power
Authors: Orloff Ann , Schiff Talia
Published: May 2015

In contrast to the scholarship allied with first and second waves of feminism, feminist analysts today survey a changed landscape of gender across the United States and much of the world: formal exclusions and discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined, and women are appearing among economic, political, and other elites to an unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities stubbornly persist across multiple arenas. A focal point of debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture is the meaning and implications of pursuing gender equality in a world that no longer neatly divides into subordinated women and powerful men, and in which the increasing number of women among the socially advantaged problematizes traditional notions of female victimization and male domination. In this essay, we first offer an overview of earlier approaches to gender equality, then turn to critiques of these approaches which insist on the need for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women's emancipation.
Food Sharing
Authors: Gurven Michael , Jaeggi Adrian V.
Published: May 2015

Food sharing is a human universal trait that forms the centerpiece of economic and social life in hunter‐gatherer societies. Human livelihoods require sharing at all life stages: to support infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and to help reduce risk of daily food shortfalls in adulthood. Attempts to understand the evolved human life history require an examination of the conditions that led to the evolution of food sharing. We summarize key findings and recent directions, and raise unexplored questions. Past emphases included testing predictions from several evolutionary models, and the role that sharing may have played in shaping human family formation. The functions of sharing fall into two categories: reducing food shortages that come with relying on a difficult foraging niche, and advertising attractive qualities of the donor. New directions include multivariate analyses of larger samples from a variety of diverse small‐scale subsistence populations, greater consideration of the interdependency between producing food and sharing it, incorporation of bargaining theory into exchange models, and greater attention to proximate psychological mechanisms. Future studies need to explain cross‐cultural variation in sharing norms and behavior and use a variety of methods to better bridge observed sharing patterns with the study of underlying social preferences and beliefs.
Gender and the Transition to Adulthood: A Diverse Pathways View
Authors: Schoon Ingrid
Published: May 2015

The transition to adulthood can be considered as a status passage in the institutionalized life course, involving the assumption of new social roles, such as the completion of education, entry into the labor market, and family formation (Shanahan, 2000). It is guided by age‐related legal norms as well as population‐based norms and informal expectations regarding appropriate ages for the completion of education, marriage, or becoming a parent, and the sequencing and combination of these roles (Buchmann & Kriesi, 2011). These norms and expectations, or “scripts of life” (Buchmann, 1989), can vary by gender, ethnicity, and social class—and are also highly responsive to social change. In this essay, I introduce a diverse pathways view examining variations and changes in transition experiences among men and women, as well as similarities in pathways to independent adulthood between the 1960s and today. The essay also addresses the intersection of multiple inequalities (focusing on class and gender) that shape individual transition experiences, and introduces the notion of “bounded diversity” taking into account the institutional framing of transitions. It is argued that existing templates for the transition to adulthood are dominated by the assumption of a linear career path moving from full‐time education to full‐time continuous employment, which is more typical for males than females, ignores the dynamics of human lives, and the need to combine work and family roles. To address the complexities and variations in transitions of men and women and in different subgroups of the population, it is necessary to revise existing templates and increase awareness of persisting inequalities. Moving toward more flexible and dynamic conceptions that represent the changing everyday arrangements between men and women, it can be possible to undercut traditional views of status differences and open up new potential for life projects. I first review key findings regarding gender differences in transition experiences, followed by a brief consideration of recent research, and a discussion of issues for future research.
Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment
Authors: McDaniel Anne , Buchmann Claudia
Published: May 2015

Just a few decades ago in most nations in the world, women completed far less schooling than men. Today, throughout much of the world, the reverse is true, and on average, women complete more years of schooling than men. This essay identifies important cross‐national trends in gender inequalities in educational attainment, outlines foundational and cutting‐edge research on the topic and suggests directions for future research. We examine US‐based explanations for the female‐favorable gender gap in educational attainment, and argue that the gender gap must be studied from a comparative and international perspective. While little is known about why women outpace men in education throughout the world, we recommend three potential avenues for future research: (i) the sources of girls' better average academic performance in school, (ii) boys' apparent greater vulnerability to resource deficits within families, and (iii) changing incentives for women and men to complete higher education. We conclude by discussing the potential consequences of the female advantage in educational attainment and the challenges of conducting cross‐national educational research.
Genetics and the Life Course
Authors: Charney Evan
Published: May 2015

A life‐course perspective is committed to the proposition that from conception to death, all human outcomes are the result of a continual interaction between the individual and all of the environments that he or she inhabits at any given point in time. Early development is a critical period, a window of time during the life course when a given exposure can have a critical or permanent influence on later outcomes. But the impact of exposures upon outcomes does not end at any specific point in time, inasmuch as life is a continuing interactive and adaptive process. We now know that what applies to human beings also applies to their genomes. The “outcome” of any gene at any given point in time (whether or not it is used to transcribe a particular protein, what form of that protein, and how much) is a product of the interaction between the gene and the multiple environments of which it is a part, which include the epigenome, the cell, the biological human, and the assorted environments he or she occupies (e.g., geographical, socioeconomic, ethnic, etc.). Early life experiences can permanently “reprogram” the epigenome and gene transcription with life‐long behavioral consequences. At the same time, the epigenome as well as the genome continue to be environmentally responsive throughout the life course.
Global Economic Networks
Authors: Bandelj Nina , Shorette Kristen , Sowers Elizabeth
Published: May 2015

Globalization can be most concretely captured in an investigation of global economic networks. In this essay, we review foundational and cutting‐edge research on global economic networks, including economic ties that result from trade, investment, finance, and remittance relations between corporations and/or citizens from different nations; through flows of people due to migration and global tourism; and via international institutions that govern global economic exchange. We focus on research that examines the determinants and consequences of global economic ties from different theoretical perspectives, such as neoclassical economics, the world‐systems research, global commodity chains, regionalization, and world society perspective. We also review research that maps the structure of the global economy. We end by identifying promising venues for future research.
Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced Capitalist Societies
Authors: Elger Tony
Published: May 2015

This essay considers the consequences of globalization for work and employment in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines the classic arguments of hyperglobalists, sceptics, and transformationalists. It first discusses the roles of multinational companies (MNCs) in both disseminating and differentiating distinctive models of work organization and employment relations across their international operations, emphasizing the micropolitical mediation of such processes and the interplay of “system,” “societal,” and “dominance” effects in the selection and hybridization of such models. It next considers the roles of corporate and state actors in recasting national institutional configurations, highlighting the contradictory and contested features of such configurations, and the scope for substantive remaking despite apparent institutional continuity. It then considers agendas for future research which build on these arguments but give fuller consideration to service MNCs and MNC operations beyond advanced capitalist societies. Finally, it notes the possible impact of other vectors of globalization on overall trends and variations in work and employment across societies.
Government Formation and Cabinets
Authors: Golder Sona N.
Published: May 2015

The government in aparliamentary(orsemi‐presidential)democracyrefers to the prime minister and the other cabinet ministers, whereas the government in apresidential democracyrefers to the president's cabinet. The members of the government cabinet determine national policy and arguably hold the most important political positions in their country. Most governments comprise two or more parties, which means that the government formation process requires coalition‐building. During this process, party elites bargain over who gets which ministerial position and over policy; they can reach an agreement quickly and take office, or the bargaining can break down and take months to resolve. This essay discusses the different types of governments that can form as well as how they form in parliamentary, semi‐presidential, and presidential regimes. Recent research on government formation and cabinets has introduced new theoretical arguments, and the implications of these arguments are being tested with new data and new statistical methods. For example, analyses of European democracies now include the post‐communist Eastern countries (not only the Western ones), and more scholars are studying coalition governments in Latin America. Future research might include more work on cabinets in developing democracies in regions such as Africa and Asia, as well as analyses of the political and economic consequences of bargaining delays and the partisan composition of the government.
Herd Behavior
Authors: Kameda Tatsuya , Hastie Reid
Published: May 2015

There are many manifestations of herding in the human species—one of the most socially interdependent species on the earth.
Herding
here refers to an alignment of thoughts or behaviors of individuals in a group through local interactions among individuals rather through than some purposeful coordination by a central authority in the group. Herding underlies many collective phenomena in the Internet era, ranging from everyday social behavior, consumer choices, economic bubbles, and political movements. Accumulating evidence in various behavioral science disciplines suggests that we humans are equipped with neural, psychological, and behavioral mechanisms that constitute our highly socially sensitive minds. These built‐in mechanisms are evolutionary products that have promoted our survival. Yet, these adaptive tools can cause serious errors in modern environments, in which interconnectivities of individuals are much denser and externalities accruing from individual behaviors are much greater and more far‐reaching, compared to primordial environments in which the human mind evolved. Growing evidence in the behavioral sciences also suggests that the two contrasting collective phenomena in humans, maladaptive herding and the wisdom of crowds, are based on similar underlying mechanisms. In this sense, the two apparently opposite macro phenomena may be seen as twins produced and governed by the social receptivity of our minds. Given this commonality, understanding the neural, psychological, and behavioral mechanisms that could distinguish these twins will be one of the most important challenges for behavioral sciences in the next decade.
History and Materiality
Authors: Joyce Rosemary A.
Published: May 2015

Studies of the newly emerging field of materiality examine the various ways in which physical objects that populate the environments we inhabit affect us socially, psychologically, and culturally. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences are actively engaged in such studies of what they termthe new materialism. It examines how “things” shape tour worlds in decisive ways. This essay reviews the development of this exciting new area of investigation and outlines promising directions for study going forward.
Homuncular Flexibility: The Human Ability to Inhabit Nonhuman Avatars
Authors: Won Andrea Stevenson , Bailenson Jeremy N. , Lanier Jaron
Published: May 2015

This essay seeks to explicate an unorthodox idea that spans psychology, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and computer science called
homuncular flexibility
(
HF
). HF posits that the homunculus—the part of the cortex that maps movement and sensing of body parts—is capable of adapting to novel bodies, in particular bodies that have extra appendages or appendages capable of atypical movements. Evidence demonstrates neural plasticity in nature; for example, amputees experience cortical shifting such that their face receives extra attention in the brain after a limb is amputated. However, experiments such as the rubber hand illusion, in which people respond to rubber hands placed near their arms as if they were their actual hands, demonstrated that a person's sense of their body can be adjusted to include external objects. The recent advent of virtual reality technology, which can track physical human motions and display them on avatars, allows for the wholly new human experience of inhabiting distinctly nonhuman bodies. HF is a paradigm in which physical motions are transformed by remapping degrees of freedom from tracked movements onto an avatar. For example, if a human being were to inhabit an avatar of a lobster, controlling two of the eight lobster arms would be simply be a function of tracking the two physical arms and directly mapping those movements onto the avatar's first two arms. However, in order to control the remaining six arms, degrees of freedom that are orthogonal to the movements of the first two arms need to be measured and remapped. In this essay, we discuss advancements in neuroscience, psychology, and computer science that relate to HF. We review some preliminary studies that demonstrate how humans accommodate novel bodies. Finally, we discuss theoretical implications and practical applications relating to HF.