bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Paradox Theory and Corporate Governance: A Systems Perspective
Authors: Hargrave Timothy J.
Published: August 2023

Stakeholder-shareholder contradictions experienced by managers are embedded in complex corporate governance systems that are composed of firm-level corporate governance bundles as well as higher-level institutional arrangements. This is known as the paradox perspective. This relationship is also knotted with other contradictions. To effectively manage stakeholder-shareholder contradictions, boards should seek to create and maintain a balance of power between stakeholders’ and shareholders’ interests within the totality of the corporate governance system, and not just within the governance bundle. To do so, they must design firm-level governance bundles to complement existing institutional arrangements. Because stakeholder-shareholder contradictions are highly complex, boards should govern them by establishing “learning spiral” processes in which they experiment and use trial-and-error learning to progressively adjust the governance bundle. While learning spiral processes will tend to involve learning by testing and produce incremental changes in governance bundles, exogenous shocks and changes to the distribution of power within the board can result in learning by discovery and more significant changes in governance arrangements. Firm-level mechanisms that provide managers discretion while also holding them accountable for achieving particular outcomes are more likely to stimulate learning spirals than are policies that prescribe particular structures, processes, or practices. So, too, government policies that combine discretion with accountability will be more effective than more prescriptive policies. Finally, paradox research suggests that boards under pressure to prioritize one pole of the contradiction (either stakeholders’ or shareholders’ interests) over the other rather than maintaining a continuous balance between the two poles can do so—as long as they employ deliberative spaces to engage in learning spiral processes that restore dynamic equilibrium in the long term.
(Multi)Collinearity in Behavioral Sciences Research
Authors: Dalal Dev K.
Published: August 2023

A statistical challenge many researchers face is collinearity (also known as multicollinearity). Collinearity refers to a situation in which predictors - independent variables, covariates, etc. - are linearly related to each other and typically are related strongly enough as to negatively impact one’s statistical analyses, results, and/or substantive interpretations. Collinearity can impact the results of general linear models (e.g., ordinary least squares regression, structural equation modeling) or generalized linear models (e.g., binary logistic regression; Poisson regression). Collinearity can cause (a) estimation/convergence challenges (particularly with iterative estimation methods), (b) inflated standard errors, as well as (c) biased, unstable, and/or uninterpretable parameter estimates. Due to the issues in the results, substantive interpretation of models with collinearity can be inaccurate, sometimes in significant ways (e.g., nonsignificant predictors that are in fact significantly related to the outcome).

In standard linear models, researchers can make use of variance inflation factor (VIF) or tolerance (Tol) indices to detect potential collinearity. Although zero-order correlations may be useful for detecting collinearity in rare instances, most researchers will want to use VIF or Tol to capture the potential for collinearity resulting from linear combinations of predictors. For statistical models that use iterative estimation (e.g., generalized linear models), researchers can turn to condition indices.

Researchers can address collinearity issues in a myriad of ways. This includes basing models on well-developed a priori theoretical propositions to avoid including empirically or conceptually redundant variables in one’s model—this includes the careful and theoretically appropriate consideration of control variables. In addition, researchers can use data reduction techniques to aggregate correlated covariates (e.g., principal components analysis or exploratory factor analysis), and/or use well-constructed and well-validated measurements so as to ensure that measurement of key variables are not related due to construct overlaps.
Reflection on Digital Cities
Authors: Yasuoka Mika , Ishida Toru
Published: August 2023

A global phenomenon of establishing regional information spaces in the 1990s has explored possibilities of information and communication technology for facilitating and empowering city functions such as community activities, local economy, political discourse, and public services. The experimental living lab that connected physical and digital space emerged, and such technologically empowered activities were called digital cities, community networks, virtual cities, and cyber cities. Although characteristics of such digital cities differ from region to region, these early trials of regional information spaces often have something in common: regarded as a chaotic and unstructured engineering utopia, and evaluated and emphasized heavily from a technological excellence point of view.

Looking back on the digital city activities in the early 21st century, the movements are often regarded as helping to formulate a direction of current urban digitalization and to create a solid foundation of smart city technologies that are embraced. From the digital city’s point of view, however, direct connections between the two forms of regional information spaces seem quite limited. Actors, stakeholders, and objectives and charms in the smart city largely differ from those in digital cities. In the era of smart cities, city-based information spaces become more commercialistic and political, and equivalent societal challenges in cities, which partially had emerged in digital cities, have become prominent.

By reflecting on the trajectory of advancement of digital cities, and by revisiting digital cities from the smart city era, clear differences between digital cities and smart cities become evident. Among these differences, a diversity of approaches from technological, political, and socioeconomic agendas exists with varied balance. At the same time, the ongoing social, political, and industrial challenges are comparative, have rooted, or at least have been inherited largely from those of digital cities.
Media and Ethnolinguistic Minorities: Framing the Tonga and Nambya in Selected Zimbabwean Mainstream Newspapers
Authors: Chibuwe Albert , Mpofu Phillip
Published: August 2023

Studies that focus on the framing of ethnolinguistic minorities in Zimbabwe’s mainstream media are scarce. These ethnic groups—among them the Tonga and Nambya—are generally marginalized in everything. Not only are they geographically located on the margins of Zimbabwe but they are also located on the fringes of political, economic, sociocultural, and economic development. The Tonga are located in Kariba, Binga, and parts of Gokwe, while the Nambya are located around the Hwange area and areas around Victoria Falls. Prior to the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) Act of 2013, Tonga, Nambya, and other indigenous languages were classified as “minority languages,” while Ndebele and Shona were the two national languages, and English was the official language. In the new constitution, the formerly marginalized languages are now accorded the same status as the officially recognized languages of English, Shona, and Ndebele. Hence, the status of Nambya and Tonga shifted from “minority” to “previously marginalized” languages. Though the terms officially recognized languages and previously marginalized languages are somewhat vague and indecisive, the enactment of the new constitution increased interest in the so-called previously marginalized ethnolinguistic minorities. For instance, Tonga was elevated to an examinable subject in public examinations at Grade 7, Ordinary level and Advanced level. Similarly, Nambya, Kalanga, Venda, and Tonga were introduced at the degree level at some Zimbabwean universities, while in the mainstream media, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation introduced news in some previously marginalized languages. However, this did not alter the framing of Tonga and Nambya ethnolinguistic minorities in mainstream media. Whereas the Tonga received more coverage in The Chronicle and The Herald than Nambya, the quality of coverage was the same for both ethnic groups in both newspapers. Four broad frames were utilized and these are: the education frame, the culture frame, the not-so-subtle marginalization frame, and the development frame. These frames perpetuate long-held stereotypes about the Tonga and Nambya. Furthermore, the stories about the two ethnic groups were mainly categorized as opinion, local, and entertainment. This creates the illusion that no Tonga story is worthy to be categorized under national news, business news, or political news. It builds into and reinforces the marginalization of the Tonga and Nambya as backward and stuck in the past. Implied is that the Tonga and Nambya are insignificant to the national developmental agenda in Zimbabwe.
Race and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Zimbabwean and Zambian Cinema
Authors: Ureke Oswelled , Hamusokwe Basil
Published: August 2023

The article develops a postcolonial history of the cinemas of Zambia and Zimbabwe by examining the political economy of the countries’ screen media industries, as well as how issues of race and ethnicity are portrayed in their cinematic corpora. It employs race and ethnicity lenses to examine Zimbabwe’s and Zambia’s cinema economies. The chapter maps the racial and ethnic composition of the two countries’ cinema economies post–Central African Film Unit (CAFU) when indigenization, Africanization, and decolonization impetuses began taking root in economic enterprises. Informed by political economy and national cinema theories, this study utilizes a review of literature and archival material on post-independence film in Zambia and Zimbabwe, focusing on both structural issues and content.

Neighbors Zimbabwe and Zambia are former British colonies that share cross-cultural commonalities, with some of the ethnic groups populating them, for instance the BaTonga, only being separated by the Zambezi River. The film histories of the two countries also have common foundations. During the colonial era, the CAFU operating in the two countries as well as Nyasaland (Malawi), produced films that were shown to “natives.” The films were produced by White officers and shown to Black Africans with the intent of making them subservient to the colonial project. Post-independence, the film industries in the two countries have taken different development trajectories in response to their respective postcolonial social, economic, and cultural specificities. Beyond 1964, the Zambian Information Services carried over the work of the CAFU in Zambia, while in post-1980 Zimbabwe, the Production Services had a similar mandate. However, the international growth of video-based production characterized by affordable technology has democratized the countries’ cinema economies and ushered in numerous experimental and sometimes community-based production initiatives. Those previously marginalized on economic, racial, or ethnic grounds from participating in cinematic production can now produce and disseminate their own art. Yet, the appeal of this demotic turn masks the racial and ethnic diversity (and sometimes inequality) in the countries’ screen media industries, which, in turn, have a direct influence on representational agency. The article also shows that film production endeavors have grown parallel to urban development, such as was the case in Zambia’s Copperbelt region and Harare in Zimbabwe, or sometimes along regional and ethnic lines, although such productions are often unproblematically grouped as national cinemas. The article further explains how racial and ethnic dynamics of the Zambian and Zimbabwean screen media industries influence the focus of their cinemas.
Rhetorical Field Methods/Rhetorical Ethnography
Authors: Chevrette Roberta , Hanchey Jenna , Lechuga Michael , Hess Aaron , Middleton Michael K.
Published: August 2023

Rhetorical scholars have recently taken up rhetorical field methods, rhetorical ethnography, and other participatory methods to augment textual approaches. Following critical rhetoric, field researchers engage emplaced and embodied perspectives, thereby gaining an immediate understanding of rhetoric and its effects on audiences. Rhetorical field methods/ethnography challenge key assumptions and ethics about rhetorical research, including conceptions of text, context, the critic, the rhetor, and audiences. Although antecedent work at this intersection exists, only recently have rhetorical scholars given full attention to how fieldwork orientations and participatory approaches challenge the project of rhetoric. Rhetorical field methods/ethnography have been applied in a wide array of topic areas, including social movement research, public memory, environmental/ecological rhetoric, digital rhetoric, international contexts, and audience studies. Tensions that have arisen as a consequence of taking up participatory perspectives include whether such research engages in critical/cultural appropriation or can effectively be conducted within groups that researchers ideologically oppose. Moreover, incorporating participant perspectives, non-textual elements, and affective considerations opens rhetoric to forms of expression that span well beyond traditional, logos-centered criticism. Such a move may dilute rhetorical research by flattening expression, making nearly all elements of human life open for critical consideration. Finally, rhetorical field methods/ethnography have emerged in a larger context of disciplinary reflexivity, with many questioning rhetoric’s racist and colonial histories and legacies. To this end, we offer anti-colonial landmarks, orienting toward multidimensionality, liquidity, queering, and community, while disorienting from citizenship. These landmarks trouble rhetoric’s legacies, and invite scholars to engage more deeply with de/colonial possibilities of rhetorical fieldwork.
Stepchild-Stepparent Relationships and Resilience
Authors: Oliver-Blackburn Bailey M.
Published: August 2023

Stepfamilies have existed throughout time and refer to families that form after re-partnering when at least one partner brings a child from a previous relationship into the new union. Stepfamilies can be complex, spanning across multiple residences, and may include full biological, half-biological, and step siblings. Although stepfamilies can be found within nearly every culture in the world, they are most prevalent in Westernized cultures such as the United States. Stepparents at one time were most likely the result of the death of a spouse or partner. However, since the 1970s, stepparents have served as an additional kin or family relationship, as remarriage is more likely to follow a divorce than bereavement. As the demographics of stepfamilies have changed over time, so has the stepparent role. Stepfamilies were originally studied for how they fall short of first-marriage, intact family outcomes, and research has well-documented the inherent challenges to stepparent-stepchild relationship development, noting the ambiguous roles, expectations, and boundaries for stepfamily interaction. Stepfamilies lack cultural models to derive these roles and expectations from and thus rely on communication to make sense of the relationships within their family unit, and to externally validate their family to outsiders. Instead of exclusively focusing on their deficits, current research looks to how stepfamilies are developmentally unique yet functional, and how communication can contribute to positive and resilient stepparent-stepchild relationships. Affinity-seeking strategies, remaining flexible in roles, and negotiating boundary and ritual changes can aid in developing positive and resilient stepparent-stepchild relationships over time.
Support Seeking
Authors: Wang Ningxin , Ning Wanming , Mao Anran
Published: August 2023

Support seeking refers to the communication process through which individuals elicit supportive actions from their social networks. Although the bulk of research on supportive communication has focused on support provision, theories and emerging evidence suggest that the support seeker may play a critical role in influencing the process of supportive exchange and the quality of support provided. Research on support seeking has addressed several key questions. First, what factors are inhibiting or driving individuals’ support-seeking behaviors? Individuals are more likely to seek support when they feel capable of doing so, and when they anticipate the benefits of seeking support to outweigh the costs of it. Gender and culture are among the most widely studied factors that affect the likelihood of support seeking. Second, what communication strategies do people employ to seek support, and how do they decide what strategies to use? The sensitive interactions systems theory serves as an important guiding framework for the conceptualizations of support-seeking behaviors. Most existing research has examined support-seeking strategies along the dimensions of direct-indirect, verbal-nonverbal, and approach-avoidant. The choice of support-seeking strategy is determined by the support seeker’s communication ability and subjective evaluation of the costs and benefits of using certain strategies. In particular, the literature has highlighted several factors that could increase perceived costs of direct support seeking and thus drive the use of indirect or avoidant support-seeking strategies, including perceived stigma of the stressor, dispositional qualities (e.g., insecure attachment style, low self-esteem), and collectivistic cultures. Last, how do different support-seeking strategies impact the outcomes of supportive interactions? There is some empirical evidence that direct support seeking, compared to indirect, avoidant means of seeking, is more effective in terms of eliciting helpful support and facilitating personal coping. Findings revealed a phenomenon called “the paradox of indirect support seeking” that describes an irony where individuals may strategically choose to seek support indirectly due to face needs or fear of rejection, yet the indirect strategies backfire, leading to the rejection and the unhelpful responses that they dread. Overall, support seeking maintains an area that attracts growing scholarly attention. There are opportunities for new insights on the message features and interactive process of support seeking.
Language Development
Authors: Quam Carolyn , Roberts Teresa
Published: August 2023

Language is a complex human capacity. The speed with which young children learn it is a remarkable feat. Across diverse cultures and family structures, children learn thousands of languages. Despite tremendous variation across languages, commonalities hold in structure and learning mechanisms. Children undergo perceptual and expressive development. They learn to organize and process language structure at the levels of semantics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. Rates of learning of linguistic patterns are shaped by frequency, complexity, concreteness of form-to-meaning mappings, and the number of exceptions to a rule. In languages with written forms, children apply language knowledge to reading and writing.
Thirty Years of American Psychosomatic Medicine, 1917–1947
Authors: Brown Theodore M.
Published: August 2023

Psychosomatic medicine is an interdisciplinary medical field that focuses on the influence of psychological and behavioral factors on bodily processes, particularly by studying nonphysical factors that adversely affect somatic functioning. Dysfunction in processes or structural damage in bodily organs or systems is thought to emerge as the consequence or concomitant of emotional states. Some psychosomatic theorists focus on specific personality traits of the patients in whom symptoms appear, and others on situational vulnerabilities or emotional stress.

The American branch of the field began to take shape in the United States in the early 20th century and rose to prominence and popularity in the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1940s, there were several competing varieties of psychosomatic medicine, and the field generated popular interest as well as both professional enthusiasm and resistance. American medical experience in World War I and World War II provided incentives for interest in the field and clinical encounters that led to the clarification of certain of the field’s ideas and approaches. But many other developments in American medicine besides wartime experience contributed to the field’s popularity, especially in the 30 years between the United States’ entry into World War I in 1917 and 2 years after the conclusion of hostilities in World War II.
Policing Violent Extremism in Canada and the United States
Authors: Thompson Sara K.
Published: August 2023

The changing and increasingly complex nature of violent extremism has prompted important changes to the ways police in Canada and the United States understand and respond to this violence. A burgeoning research literature examines the reasons underpinning these changes, documents the corresponding expansion of national security apparatuses in both countries and the policy and operational innovations that drove this expansion, and raises important questions about the way forward: Can an operational combination of enforcement and prevention-based programming complement and supplement one another in ways that improve the police response to extremist violence? How have public health frameworks been deployed in the context of police co-led extremism prevention programming? What are the most salient operational challenges for police and partner agencies? Is it possible to ensure that the police response is equitable and effective in responding to the current threat landscape? What role can research and evidence-based practice play to inform and assess the efficacy of current approaches? Such questions mirror the ways traditional, reactive, and enforcement-based approaches to policing violent extremism have been morally interrogated as the primary response to this violence. Lessons learned from an overemphasis on such approaches are imperative to the development of effective, legally and socially responsible approaches for responding to extremist violence in North America.
Life Events Calendar Method
Authors: Roberts Jennifer
Published: August 2023

The calendar methodology facilitates data collection across multiple life domains, events, and time to assess how dynamic changes influence criminal offending, victimization, and criminal justice contacts. Building upon knowledge of the structure of autobiographical memory, calendar methodologists use a variety of cues to aid recall of transitions into and out of a variety of life events during a specified time frame. Past studies have created highly specialized calendars for data collection, altering the life domains and events studied, type of calendar used (paper or calendar), time unit and reference period, and mode of administration. Overall, the calendar method performs similar to or better than a standard interviewing or survey procedure. However, more studies using criminological samples and topics are needed.
Leverage in Private Equity Real Estate
Authors: Sagi Jacob S. , Zhu Zipei
Published: August 2023

Private equity real estate (PERE) refers to professionally managed pooled investments in the real estate market available only to institutions (e.g., pension funds), private accredited investors, and high-net-worth individuals. In the ownership structure of PERE funds, general partners (GPs) serve as the active fund managers who raise an extensive amount of external capital from limited partners (LPs) to acquire and operate commercial real estate properties. Debt financing, namely the use of leverage, is prevalent in real estate investments and even more so in the setting of PERE funds. Though much empirical research is devoted to PERE fund performance, few studies directly investigate the role of financial leverage in PERE funds.

In an ideal friction-free setting, leverage creates no value and is essentially part of a zero-sum game of rights and privileges between various asset stakeholders. In practice, however, leverage seems far from irrelevant due to the existence of market frictions that could lead to value creation (or destruction) by its use. Financial economic theories indicate that leverage can amplify skill (or the lack thereof), reallocate cash flow rights, and shift incentives in the presence of market frictions. With PERE, existing work provides mixed or little evidence that leverage is employed to amplify skill and consistently hints that its use shifts the balance of benefits toward fund sponsors over their limited partners.

Based on data from Preqin and StepStone, a typical closed-end PERE fund targets roughly 65% debt to the value of total assets under management. Funds managing more risky real estate tend to use more leverage, and there is little evidence that fund terms are adjusted to reflect potential conflicts of interest posed by more intensive use of leverage. Rather, stylized facts raise concerns that the scope for conflict of interest may have increased over the past 10 years. Among these concerns is an increase in strategic longer-term use of subscription facilities. The bulk of evidence in the literature points to robust underperformance of high-leverage funds on a net-of-fee risk-adjusted basis. In other words, there is little evidence supporting the notion that leverage is employed to enhance skilled management and to benefit LPs. This suggests that a significant portion of PERE investors are not optimizing risk-return tradeoffs in allocating investments to high-leverage PERE funds. More work is needed to refine these findings and, more importantly, understand the source of market frictions behind them.
Estimation Error in Optimal Portfolio Allocation Problems
Authors: Olmo Jose
Published: August 2023

Markowitz showed that an investor who cares only about the mean and variance of portfolio returns should hold a portfolio on the efficient frontier. The application of this investment strategy proceeds in two steps. First, the statistical moments of asset returns are estimated from historical time series, and second, the mean-variance portfolio selection problem is solved separately, as if the estimates were the true parameters. The literature on portfolio decision acknowledges the difficulty in estimating means and covariances in many instances. This is particularly the case in high-dimensional settings. Merton notes that it is more difficult to estimate means than covariances and that errors in estimates of means have a larger impact on portfolio weights than errors in covariance estimates. Recent developments in high-dimensional settings have stressed the importance of correcting the estimation error of traditional sample covariance estimators for portfolio allocation. The literature has proposed shrinkage estimators of the sample covariance matrix and regularization methods founded on the principle of sparsity. Both methodologies are nested in a more general framework that constructs optimal portfolios under constraints on different norms of the portfolio weights including short-sale restrictions. On the one hand, shrinkage methods use a target covariance matrix and trade off bias and variance between the standard sample covariance matrix and the target. More prominence has been given to low-dimensional factor models that incorporate theoretical insights from asset pricing models. In these cases, one has to trade off estimation risk for model risk. Alternatively, the literature on regularization of the sample covariance matrix uses different penalty functions for reducing the number of parameters to be estimated. Recent methods extend the idea of regularization to a conditional setting based on factor models, which increase with the number of assets, and apply regularization methods to the residual covariance matrix.
The Role of Incentives for Improving Students’ Motivation and Performance
Authors: Fidjeland Andreas
Published: August 2023

Although the returns to education can be substantial, many students underperform in school, for example, by not putting in sufficient effort. To mitigate this underinvestment problem, policymakers are often eager to try to motivate students using extrinsic incentives, such as cash payments and merit scholarships, stricter grading standards, and more competitive admission processes. The design, scope, and implementation of such incentive policies with the goal of affecting student motivation and study habits have been a fruitful area of economic research over the last 30 years. However, the evidence on their potency for improving student performance is mixed. In particular, the use of extrinsic incentives often elicit strategic responses from students, resulting in behavior that might improve performance metrics, but are not productive in terms of learning and skill development. Many incentive policies have therefore ended up producing unintended consequences that goes contrary to the policy objective. As incentives are everywhere in any school system, economists should pursue a better understanding of how they affect which outcomes students focus on, the choices they make, and how these effects differ across groups of students. Broadening the scope of outcomes considered when assessing the effects of incentives, in particular a greater focus on what student’s choose not to do, could provide a fruitful foundation for future research.
An Analysis of COVID-19 Student Learning Loss
Authors: Patrinos Harry , Vegas Emiliana , Carter-Rau Rohan
Published: August 2023

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to school closures around the world, affecting almost 1.6 billion students. This caused significant disruption to the global education system. Even short interruptions in a child’s schooling have significant negative effects on their learning and can be long lasting. The capacities of education systems to respond to the crisis by delivering remote learning and support to children and families have been diverse and uneven.

In response to this disruption, education researchers are beginning to analyze the impact of these school closures on student learning loss. The term learning loss is commonly used in the literature to describe declines in student knowledge and skills. Early reviews of the first wave of lockdowns and school closures suggested significant learning loss in a few countries. A more recent and thorough analysis of recorded learning loss evidence documented since the beginning of the school closures between March 2020 and March 2022 found even more evidence of learning loss. In 36 identified robust studies, the majority identified learning losses that amount to, on average, 0.17 of a standard deviation (SD), equivalent to roughly a one-half school year’s worth of learning. This confirms that learning loss is real and significant and has continued to grow after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most studies observed increases in inequality where certain demographics of students experienced more significant learning losses than others. The longer the schools remained closed, the greater were the learning losses. For the 19 countries for which there are robust learning loss data, average school closures were 15 weeks, leading to average learning losses of 0.18 SD. Put another way, for every week that schools were closed, learning declined by an average of 0.01 SD.

However, there are also outliers—countries that managed to limit the amount of loss. In Nara City, Japan, for example, the initial closures had brought down test scores, but responsive policies largely overcame this decline. In addition, a decreased summer vacation helped. In Denmark, children received good home support and their reading behavior improved significantly. In Sweden, where primary schools did not close during the pandemic, there were no reported learning losses. Further work is needed to increase the quantity of studies produced, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and to ascertain the reasons for learning loss. Finally, the few cases where learning loss was mitigated should be further investigated to inform continued and future pandemic responses.
Priming Healthcare for Health Equity Management
Authors: Dotson Ebbin D. , Johnson Kimson E. , Irving Jada
Published: August 2023

Health equity management (HEM) is defined as an actionable framework that supports the development of an industry-defining position for healthcare organizations and senior leaders to guide their business practices for investments in and financial gains from health equity. As healthcare leaders confront the disparate racial and ethnic burdens caused by the nation’s racialized societal history, making investments that increase health equity can help eliminate health disparities. To achieve health equity, leaders must cultivate a sense of interdependence among stakeholders and community members to effectively communicate the importance of collaboration, which is a shared understanding of the necessary actions that engage stakeholders around a central purpose. Achieving health equity forces healthcare systems to consider the notion that creating an equitable environment, where the costs of health inequity and barriers to achieving community and population health are shared with stakeholders and community members, might be addressed by the modification of certain management practices.

HEM encompasses an applied management model to help healthcare organizations maximize their efforts to increase health equity for vulnerable populations. It provides a stepwise approach to help frame the social, economic, and educational changes necessary for leaders to invest in health equity initiatives. The HEM involves the following actions: (a) redefining health equity, (b) identifying upstream inequalities, (c) realigning fiscal investments, and (d) leveraging community partnerships. Establishing and sustaining health equity initiatives through HEM ensures that both economic and social criteria are systematically considered, and financial investments are prioritized for sustained impact. Without addressing all four, the efforts of healthcare organizations will fall short of what it will take to effect lasting change.

Redefining health equity requires incorporating upstream and downstream inequities to offer a lens to align mission, assess capacity, and leverage profitable partnerships. The systematic approach to HEM goals and principles can be integrated at various organizational levels as a tool to successfully address health inequalities and social determinants of health.
Materiality and the Study of Indigenous Religions
Authors: Whitehead Amy R.
Published: August 2023

Academic attention to Indigenous religions has grown steadily since the 1990s in parallel with increasing attention to the lived, material dimensions of religions. The global emergence of the subfield of material religion in the late 1990s began to highlight the often taken-for-granted and marginalized material aspects of religions by placing religious “things” front and center within cutting-edge debates. Paying scholarly attention to geographical sites, temples, ritual tools, texts, clothing, language, the body, and the things that people use to live their religions with and through began to unmask a scholarly heritage that privileges mind over matter, subjects over objects, culture over nature, the sacred over the profane, and metaphysics over the tangible. Simultaneously, the 1990s saw the re-emergence of Indigenous religions as an area of interest for the study of religions. These two trajectories, while at first seemingly unrelated, are both responding to a transformative and decolonizing shift in the study of religions, where researcher positionality, institutional structures, power relations, and processes are being critically and practically reassessed. Features of this shift include a series of moves in scholarship that problematize the discipline’s modern, Enlightenment, colonial legacy; emphasis on metaphysics, texts, and beliefs in the academic study of religions; and the world religions paradigm. Combining the fields of lived and material religion with the study of Indigenous religions, beginning with their related historical trajectories, offers rich and complex possibilities for the future innovative development of theories and methods. These theories and methods extend beyond established, anthropomorphic positions about material cultures, offering relational theories (such as the new animism and the new materialism) that allow Indigenous religious materialities to reveal new understandings about the ontological and other potentialities of so-called “things.”
Potatoes
Authors: Earle Rebecca
Published: August 2023

Potatoes originated in the mountainous Andes but are now a ubiquitous global food, eaten in every continent, every day, by millions of people. Their spread from South America to the entire world demonstrates the concrete connections between European colonization of the Americas in the 16th century and how people everywhere eat today. At the same time, while the potato was traveling the world, it remained an essential resource for Andean people caught in the maelstrom of colonialism. Potatoes had long been eaten in the Andes, and Spanish American colonial society connected eaters and their characteristic foodstuffs: for settlers, potatoes were often dismissed as “a certain food eaten by Indians,” even if the tubers sometimes also graced their own tables. After the ending of colonial rule in the early 19th century, the potato’s fortunes have oscillated between nationalistic celebration and continued disdain. The potato’s complex and surprising history reveals the protean nature of this modest root, able to encapsulate profound changes in social and political organization, whether in 18th-century Europe or post-Soviet Russia. It reminds us of the centrality of eating to human history and highlights the important role played by ordinary people—smallholders, peasant farmers, imaginative cooks—in making history.
The Semantics of Chinese Wh-Phrases
Authors: Ren Qianqian , Pan Haihua
Published: August 2023

In formal semantics, a wh-phrase is traditionally assigned the semantics of an existential quantifier phrase, an abstraction operator, or a set of alternatives. Such semantics per se, however, is not sufficient to account for the behaviors of Chinese wh-phrases.

A wh-phrase in Chinese may be used in a variety of contexts and express a variety of meanings. Apart from interrogative meaning, it may also give rise to existential or universal meaning. More specifically, it can be licensed in typical contexts that license negative polarity items like the c-command domain of negation, the antecedent clause of a conditional, and a yes–no question. It can also be licensed in modal contexts, including epistemic modality and deontic modality. Finally, it can produce a universal reading by being quantified by the adverb dōu ‘all’ or forming the so-called bare conditionals/wh-conditionals, which are composed by two clauses containing matched wh-forms without overt connectives. In order to achieve explanatory adequacy, it is necessary to consider whether and how the different functions of wh-phrases can be unified and whether they can be derived from more general principles or mechanisms. To maintain descriptive adequacy, variations in licensing and interpretation possibilities across wh-items and contexts must also be taken into consideration.

Another feature of Chinese wh-phrases is that sometimes they seem to extend their scope beyond domains within which they otherwise take scope (e.g., a Chinese wh-phrase may take existential scope within the antecedent of a conditional, though it may also co-vary with another wh-phrase in the consequent of that conditional). In this respect, they behave like indefinites. As some evidence suggests that some cases where they display this feature may in fact involve the interrogative use, it remains to be seen whether the locus of explanation lies in the wh-phrase itself or in the question meaning.

There are other big questions to consider: For instance, how do prosody, syntax and semantics interact with one another in licensing and interpreting a Chinese wh-phrase? Do the theoretical devices and mechanisms postulated have psychological reality? There is also much space for empirical research, which hopefully will help settle debates over the grammaticality of certain structures or the availability of certain readings.
Language Crossing and the Global Southern Gaze
Authors: Severo Cristine , Makoni Sinfree , Abdelhay Ashraf
Published: August 2023

The notion of language crossing is discussed from the perspective of Southern language practices and epistemologies. The notion of language is expanded to include the voices and metalanguages of subjects who were historically invisibilized and silenced, with a focus on Southern contexts that underwent processes of colonization and liberation, specifically Africa. This also includes speaking across the human/nonhuman dimension. Language crossing not only is a contemporary and Northern practice but also includes a complex set of arrangements, alliances, and negotiations inscribed in the meaning-making process that cannot be reduced to the modern ideas of linguistic, national, or ethnic borders. By drawing on the decolonial sociolinguistic critique of language and linguistics, the concept of crossing is revised and elaborated in light of the insights from certain African sociolinguistic situations. Southern perspectives of language crossing should be able to include the role of objects, animals, nature, and humans in language practices. The following questions are addressed: (a) What does language crossing look like when viewed from the global South/s? (b) What can those who study language crossing learn from the perspective of a global Southern gaze? (c) What can African multilingualisms teach us about the situated dimensions of the notion of language crossing? The conclusion argues that language crossing in Southern contexts is connected to issues of legitimacy, authenticity, and belonging that characterize a sense of community, which is a complex and context-based notion. This means that different peoples, individuals, or groups may have different understandings of what counts as communication and language use. By crossing the disciplinary Northern boundaries toward an approach that dialogues with Southern voices and experiences, the political nature of the notion of boundary is problematized.
Gender Systems in Germanic
Authors: Audring Jenny
Published: August 2023

Grammatical gender is a pervasive property of the Germanic languages. The typical Germanic gender system distinguishes three values: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The gender value of a noun is not expressed on the noun itself, but shows on agreeing words such as articles, adjectives, and a variety of pronouns. In all Germanic languages except for the two most conservative, Icelandic and Faroese, gender is distinguished only in the singular. Some of the languages have reduced the traditional three gender values to two. In most varieties, this involves the conflation of the historical masculine and feminine. In these languages, nouns denoting male or female persons appear with the same form of the article and other agreeing words. However, the personal pronouns often retain the masculine-feminine split. Some agreement targets have lost their ability to mark gender altogether. In the most extreme cases, gender agreement is limited to the personal and the possessive pronouns, such as in English and in Afrikaans.

What gender a noun belongs to is regulated by assignment principles. Germanic shows semantic, morphological, and phonological assignment principles. In the more traditional languages, especially Icelandic, Faroese, and German, the inflectional class of a noun is an important predictor for its gender. The pronominal gender languages Afrikaans and English have purely semantic systems. This appears to be a typical correlation, observable in other languages.

This article describes the gender systems of Germanic comparatively and points out interesting complexities that inform our understanding of this puzzling grammatical feature.
Infiltration of Water Into Soil
Authors: Nimmo John , Shillito Rose
Published: August 2023

The infiltration of water into soil has profound importance as a central component of the hydrologic cycle and as the means of replenishing soil water that sustains terrestrial life. Systematic quantitative study of infiltration began in the 19th century and has continued through to the present as a central topic of soils, soil physics, and hydrology. Two forces drive infiltration: gravity, and capillarity, which results from the interaction of air-water surface tension with the solid components of soil. There are also two primary ways water moves into and within the soil. One is diffuse flow, through the pores between individual soil grains, moving from one to the next and so on. The other is preferential flow, through elongated channels such as those left by worms and roots. Diffuse flow is slow and continues as long as there is a net driving force. Preferential flow is fast and occurs only when water is supplied at high intensity, as during irrigation, major rainstorms, or floods. Both types are important in infiltration. Especially considering that preferential flow does not yet have a fully accepted theory, this means that infiltration entails multiple processes, some of them poorly understood. The soil at a given location has a limit to how much water it can absorb—the infiltration capacity. The interplay between the mode and rate of water supply, infiltration capacity, and characteristics of the soil and surrounding terrain determines infiltration into the soil. Much effort has gone into developing means of measuring and predicting both infiltration capacity and the actual infiltration rate. Various methods are available, and research is needed to improve their accuracy and ease of use.
Taxonomic and functional structure of understorey bird assemblages on Amazonian seasonally flooded river islands
Authors: De Jesus Diniz Priscilla , Baccaro Fabrício beggiato , Borges Sérgio henrique
Published: August 2023

The seasonal inundation of the floodplains of the Amazonian rivers is a natural and strong environmental filter for biota. Its effects on the taxonomic and functional attributes of assemblages, however, remain poorly understood. We investigated the taxonomic and trait diversity of understorey bird assemblages on fluvial islands subject to dramatic seasonal flooding in the Amazon. Birds were captured using mist-nets on ten fluvial islands and at 17 sites in unflooded terra firme forests. We captured 1552 individuals of 116 bird species in 4144 net-hours. Average capture rates were similar between the forest types, but species diversity was higher in terra firme forests. The bird assemblages of the islands showed higher species dominance, with only three species accounting for 47% of the individuals captured. Functional space was occupied similarly in both bird assemblages, as indicated by functional dispersion indices (Fdis). In contrast, functional evenness (Feve) was lower in the river island assemblages indicating that the dominant species share similar traits. Functional divergence indices (Fdiv) showed substantial niche differentiation between the bird assemblages of the two forest types. Low inter-annual variability in avian taxonomic and trait diversity was observed in river islands, probably associated with the predictability of the flooding regime.