Rethinking Innovation: Context and Gender

10.1068/a3710 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 681-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan K Blake ◽  
Susan Hanson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Advantage ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Contextual Influence ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Many

Geographers have a keen interest in innovation because of its connection to regional economic advantage. We argue that, to date, understandings of innovation are predominantly technological and product driven and defined in universal terms such that the nature of innovation is stripped of its contextual influence and is overly masculinist. Through combined analysis of interview material from two complementary studies on the gendering of entrepreneurship based in the United States, this paper challenges current conceptualisations of innovation within geography. We show how the context, both social and geographical, of an innovation is elementary to its identification as innovative. Moreover, we reveal some of the many instances of innovation that occur in economic sectors and by agents that are typically ignored or undervalued by current research and by policy. Our analysis challenges researchers and policymakers to expand their concepts of regional and urban development beyond those processes associated with technologically defined and growth-oriented originality, such that notions of local development may enhance the social well-being of places and be more gender inclusive.

Social policy: models, directions, and features of the implementation

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-39
Author(s):  
Svetlana Nikolaevna Ispulova
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Support ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Economically Disadvantaged ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Models

The article is devoted to the main models and ways of forming social well-being as an indicator of the social state. The author draws attention to the ongoing measures of social support for economically disadvantaged citizens in Russia and the United States.

Warring for America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Many

The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.

scholarly journals Being a Community Health Worker Means Advocating

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-18
Author(s):  
Ryan I. Logan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Disparities ◽  
Community Health ◽  
Health Worker ◽  
Social Determinants ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Framework

Community health workers (CHWs) participate in advocacy as a crucial means to empower clients in overcoming health disparities and to improve the health and social well-being of their communities. Building on previous studies, this article proposes a new framework for conceptualising CHW advocacy, depending on the intended impact level of CHW advocacy. CHWs participate in three ‘levels’ of advocacy, the micro, the macro, and the professional. This article also details the challenges they face at each level. As steps are taken to institutionalise these workers throughout the United States and abroad, there is a danger that their participation in advocacy will diminish. As advocacy serves as a primary conduit through which to empower clients, enshrining this role in steps to integrate these workers is essential. Finally, this article provides justification for the impacts of CHWs in addressing the social determinants of health and in helping their communities strive towards health equity.

How the West Was One

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Single Number ◽  
Precipitous Decline ◽  
Mitt Romney

When Americans Compare Their Country to others, it is almost invariably to find fault with it. Of course, there are tub-thumpers on the right wing, for whom the United States is the greatest nation and comparisons are drawn merely to underline that preeminence. But they are a predictable lot, and intellectually of no consequence. Comparisons with abroad are of little use when preaching to the choir if the choir does not care. Most conservative Americans are too uninterested in Europe to sit still for comparative explanations of U.S. superiority. Mitt Romney got very little traction from attacking French health care and other things Gallic during his abortive run for the Republican nomination in 2007. The vast majority of Americans’ comparisons are undertaken by social scientists with liberal leanings who hope that the United States will some day approximate Europe when it comes to family allowances, universal health insurance, parental leave, and the like. For them, Europe means northern Europe. They either ignore the south or see it too as aspiring to north European status. Stockholm is the mecca toward which the social science faithful pray. Because of their political reform agenda—fervent but unfulfilled—the tone they strike is wistful. Take as a recent example the American Human Development Report, published by a preeminent institution, the Social Science Research Council, and prefaced by multiple well-wishes from the great and the good. It is modeled on the UN’s attempt to sum up economic and human well-being in a single number, to compare nations and progress over time. Its wealth of information lays bare the sometimes dramatic disparities within the United States and shows where it is lagging in relation to peer comparison countries. That is all well and good, and who could fault it? It is when sight is lost of the larger picture that worries begin. Thus, the report presents a chart (Figure 1.2) showing an apparently precipitous decline in America’s human development ranking. The United States stood in second place, after Switzerland, in 1980. This held steady until 1995, when it plummeted over the next 15 years to land at the 12th spot in 2005. America’s numerical score has increased steadily, we are reassured. But the scores of other countries have risen even faster. As a result, the United States has fallen behind its more efficient competitors.

White Domestic Goddess on a Postmodern Plantation: Charity and Commodity Racism in The Blind Side

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Montez de Oca
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
National Football League ◽  
The United States ◽  
Blind Side ◽  
White Family ◽  
Private Charity ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Commodity

This article looks at the Hollywood “blockbuster” movie The Blind Side (2009) to explore intersections of race, class, and gender in a significant neoliberal, cultural commodity. Animating the production and, apparently, the consumption of the film is the “inspiring” story of Michael Oher, an impoverished young African American man who was adopted by a wealthy white family and rose to success in the National Football League in the United States. The film mobilizes postracial and postfeminist discourses to tell a story of redemption and how private charity can overcome social problems that the state cannot. Ultimately, charity operates as a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not only make charity possible but also creates an urban underclass in need of charity.

scholarly journals LITTORAL TRANSPORT IN THE GREAT LAKES

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (7) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
L. Bajorunas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Lakes ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Littoral Drift ◽  
North American Continent ◽  
The North ◽  
Waves And Currents ◽  
Maintenance Dredging ◽  
The Many

The Great Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario extend almost to the middle of the North American Continent. With their 95,000 square miles of water surface and their three navigable connections with the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, they affect the well-being of about 4.0 million people living within their vicinity in Canada and the United States. Possessing a shoreline of 6,600 miles, these waters have been called the fourth coast of the continent along with the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts. This paper analyzes one of the many problems of the Great Lakes, the littoral transport problem. Littoral transport has been defined as the movement of material along the shore in the littoral zone by waves and currents. The material thus transported is referred to as the littoral drift. The littoral drift originates from the beach material, being picked up by the water and transported along the shore and deposited in another location. Shore erosion, littoral transport, and deposition of drift are all factors in the littoral process. A knowledge of the littoral process is important for many engineering projects including the construction and maintenance of shoreline harbors. The harbor breakwater extending from the shore into deep water forms a littoral barrier, and by stopping the transport action causes the depositio of drift on the updrift side. If the breakwater does not entirely stop the transport, or when the storage area on the updrift side is filled, the drift will bypass the breakwater and fill the dredged navigation channel causing frequent and expensive maintenance dredging. This problem is especially important in the small harbors on the Great Lakes planned every 25 to 30 miles as refuge for fishing and pleasure boats. These harbors have a rather small capacity for littoral drift, and the costs of maintenan dredging of so many entrance channels would be almost prohibitive. In order to provide data required for the design and economic evaluation of the small refuge harbors on the Great .Lakes, the United States Lake Survey, Corps of Engineers, conducted a study of the best method of estimating the rate of littoral transport along the shores of the Great Lakes. Although much of the data used in this paper was taken from the above study, the views and

scholarly journals An Overview of the Current State of Human Issues in Horticulture in the United States

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia I. Lohr ◽  
Paula Diane Relf
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Gardens ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Plant Sciences

Throughout history, plants have been used to benefit people. In the United States, formal research to document the impacts of plants on people was not published until the 1970s, when papers from social and medical scientists began to appear. In the 1990s, symposia, including the first on “The Role of Horticulture in Human Well-being and Social Development,” brought people together from around the world to share and expand their knowledge in this emerging field. Symposium participants have included researchers in the social sciences and plant sciences, practitioners in horticultural therapy, teachers in colleges and public gardens, industry representatives applying the knowledge, and more. This has formed the basis for current activities in research, teaching, and practice throughout the United States. Examples from research that now documents a variety of beneficial impacts of plants on people are discussed.

Talking Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor N. Carlson ◽  
Marisa Abrajano ◽  
Lisa García Bedolla
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge Policy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

Individuals arrive at meaning through conversation. Scholars have long explored political conversations in the United States, and the vast majority of this research suggests that political discussion has important effects on political attitudes and engagement. However, much of this research relies on samples of White respondents, making it potentially difficult to generalize these findings to our increasingly diverse electorate. In this book, we seek to understand how political discussion networks vary across groups who have vastly different social positions in the United States, specifically along the lines of ethnorace, nativity, and gender. We build upon seminal work in the field as we argue that individuals with different social positions likely discuss politics with different groups of people and, as a consequence, their discussion networks have different effects on their political behavior. We use a novel discussion network data set with an ethnoracially diverse sample, paired with qualitative interviews, to test this argument. We assert that this book makes three central contributions: (1) expanding the scope of the political discussion network literature by providing a comparative analysis across ethnorace, nativity, and gender; (2) demonstrating how historical differences in partisanship, policy attitudes, and engagement are reflected within groups’ social networks; and (3) revealing how the social position of our respondents affects the impact that networks can have on their trust and efficacy in government, political knowledge, policy attitudes, and political and civic engagement patterns.

Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and U.S. Party Coalitions. By Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 342p. $55.00.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 478-480
Author(s):  
Carole Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Social Cleavages ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Bases ◽  
And Gender

This work is touted as the only book-length examination of the sociological model of vote choice in American politics since David Knoke's The Social Bases of Political Parties (1976), and it is, indeed, a well-researched examination of the role that race, class, religion, and gender play in our under- standing of voter alignments in the United States. At the same time, I have concerns about some of the methodological decisions made by the authors and the effect of these choices on their conclusions.

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