scholarly journals Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-319
Author(s):  
Sean Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Social Power ◽  
General Characteristic ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Informal Social Networks ◽  
Industry Associations

Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidified by industry associations can buffer this precariousness by opening new employment opportunities and allowing them to maintain their connection to elite industry circles through periods of unemployment and uncertainty. For many working in the industry, precariousness defines the US hydrocarbon sector as much as the wealth that it is known to generate. Precariousness, I argue, is not just experienced by specific groups of people but rather is a general characteristic of capitalism that touches all but a select few.

scholarly journals The Social Aspects of Sexual Health: A Twitter-Based Analysis of Valentine’s Day Perception

Sexes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-59
Author(s):  
Andrea Sansone ◽  
Angelo Cignarelli ◽  
Daniele Mollaioli ◽  
Giacomo Ciocca ◽  
Erika Limoncin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Sexual Behavior ◽  
Sexual Health ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Healthcare Research ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Valentine's Day ◽  
The Uk

Sentiment analysis (SA) is a technique aimed at extracting opinions and sentiments through the analysis of text, often used in healthcare research to understand patients’ needs and interests. Data from social networks, such as Twitter, can provide useful insights on sexual behavior. We aimed to assess the perception of Valentine’s Day by performing SA on tweets we collected between 28 January and 13 February 2019. Analysis was done using ad hoc software. A total of 883,615 unique tweets containing the word “valentine” in their text were collected. Geo-localization was available for 48,918 tweets; most the tweets came from the US (36,889, 75.41%), the UK (2605, 5.33%) and Canada (1661, 3.4%). The number of tweets increased approaching February 14. “Love” was the most recurring word, appearing in 111,981 tweets, followed by “gift” (55,136), “special” (34,518) and “happy” (33,913). Overall, 7318 tweets mentioned “sex”: among these tweets, the most recurring words were “sexy” (2317 tweets), “love” (1394) and “gift” (679); words pertaining to intimacy and sexual activity, such as “lingerie”, “porn”, and “date” were less common. In conclusion, tweets about Valentine’s Day mostly focus on the emotions, or on the material aspect of the celebration, and the sexual aspect of Valentine’s Day is rarely mentioned.

SafeOCS Industry Safety Data Program: An Industrywide Safety Data Management Framework

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (12) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Demetra V. Collia ◽  
Roland L. Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Oil And Gas ◽  
High Reliability ◽  
Safety Data ◽  
Oil And Gas Industry ◽  
Near Miss ◽  
Outer Continental Shelf ◽  
Gas Industry ◽  
The Us ◽  
Recommended Practices ◽  
Industry Associations

Introduction In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the oil and gas industry, regulators, and other stakeholders recognized the need for increased collaboration and data sharing to augment their ability to better identify safety risks and address them before an accident occurs. The SafeOCS program is one such collaboration between industry and government. It is a voluntary confidential reporting program that collects and analyzes data to advance safety in oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) established the program with input from industry and then entered into an agreement with the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) to develop, implement, and operate the program. As a principal statistical agency, BTS has considerable data-collection-and-analysis expertise with near-miss reporting systems for other industries and the statutory authority to protect the confidentiality of the reported information and the reporter’s identify. Source data submitted to BTS are not subject to subpoena, legal discovery, or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Solving for the Gap Across industries, companies have long realized the benefits of collecting and analyzing data around safety and environmental events to identify risks and take actions to prevent reoccurrence. These activities are aided by industry associations that collect and share event information and develop recommended practices to improve performance. In high-reliability industries such as aviation and nuclear, it is common practice to report and share events among companies and for the regulators to identify hidden trends and create or update existing recommended practices, regulations, or other controls. The challenge for the offshore oil and gas industry is that industry associations and the regulator are typically limited to collecting data on agency-reportable incidents. With this limitation, other high-learning-value events or observed conditions could go unnoticed as a trend until a major event occurs. This lack of timely data represented an opportunity for the industry and the offshore regulator (BSEE) to collaborate on a means of gathering safety-event data that would allow for analysis and identification of trends, thereby enabling appropriate interventions to prevent major incidents and foster continuous improvement. The SafeOCS Industry Safety Data (ISD) program provides an effective process for capturing these trends by looking across a wider spectrum of events, including those with no consequences.

Reexamining Social Class Differences in the Availability and the Educational Utility of Parental Social Capital

2008 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Ream ◽  
Gregory J. Palardy
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Collective Efficacy ◽  
Social Exchange ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Status

Emergent ethnographic research disentangles “social capital” from other components of social class (e.g., material and human capital) to show how class-stratified parental social networks exacerbate educational inequality among schoolchildren. The authors build upon this research by using survey data to reexamine whether certain forms of parental social capital create educational advantages for socioeconomically privileged students vis-à-vis their less economically fortunate peers. By drawing a distinction between the availability of social capital and its convertibility, the authors find that whereas larger stocks of parental social capital accompany higher rungs on the social class ladder, its educational utility is less clearly associated with class status. A possible exception to this pattern pertains to the educational utility of middle-class parents’ ideas about the collective efficacy of influencing school policies and practices. At issue is whether a more inclusive understanding of the material and sociological reasons for educational inequality can spur educationally useful social exchange among parents across social class boundaries.

scholarly journals The power of suggestion

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mara Buchbinder
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Aid In Dying ◽  
Ethical Controversy ◽  
Physician Relationship

This article examines an ethical controversy that has received relatively little attention in public debates about the legalization of medical aid-in-dying (AID): should physicians inform patients that they have the option of hastening death? Drawing on ethnographic research about the implementation of AID in Vermont, I argue that how we understand the moral stakes of this debate depends on divergent views regarding language use in social interactions. Some stakeholders in this debate view a physician’s words as powerful enough to damage the patient-physician relationship or to influence a patient to hasten her death, while others believe that merely informing patients about AID cannot move them to act against their own values and preferences. I illustrate how these divergent perspectives are tied to competing language ideologies regarding clinical disclosure, which I call ‘disclosure ideologies’. My analysis of these two disclosure ideologies surrounding AID highlights disclosure practices in medicine as a rich site for medical anthropological theorizing on linguistic performativity and the social power of clinical language.

scholarly journals From Enslavement to Emancipation: Naming Practices in the Danish West Indies

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Abel ◽  
George F. Tyson ◽  
Gisli Palsson
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
The Social ◽  
Danish West Indies ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Naming Practices

AbstractIn most contexts, personal names function as identifiers and as a locus for identity. Therefore, names can be used to trace patterns of kinship, ancestry, and belonging. The social power of naming, however, and its capacity to shape the life course of the person named, becomes most evident when it has the opposite intent: to sever connections and injure. Naming in slave society was primarily practical, an essential first step in commodifying human beings so they could be removed from their roots and social networks, bought, sold, mortgaged, and adjudicated. Such practices have long been integral to processes of colonization and enslavement. This paper discusses the implications of naming practices in the context of slavery, focusing on the names given to enslaved Africans and their descendants through baptism in the Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Danish West Indies. Drawing on historiographical accounts and a detailed analysis of plantation and parish records from the island of St. Croix, we outline and contextualize these patterns and practices of naming. We examine the extent to which the adoption of European and Christian names can be read as an effort toward resistance and self-determination on the part of the enslaved. Our account is illuminated by details from the lives of three former slaves from the Danish West Indies.

scholarly journals Why We Love It Here: Exploration of Affection and Attachment in a Brazilian Urban Periphery

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Sue-Yeon Ryu
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Place Attachment ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Tripartite Model ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Emotional Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
The City

This research interprets the marginalized neighborhood of Serrinha as a place in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by examining the relations between the physical neighborhood and internal social networks. I use concepts from the anthropology of materiality and an interdisciplinary understanding of place attachment to examine how the social and physical dimensions of place coalesce within Serrinha. I employ data from eight weeks of ethnographic research and Scannell and Gifford’s tripartite model of place attachment to frame the everyday experiences and affects of Serrinha residents, especially to illustrate Serrinha outside of the typical stereotypes of favelas. In doing so, the study analyzes the symbolic significance of brick as the material of choice for Serrinha’s self-built houses and asserts that the brick is a metaphor for local and global relationships. Ultimately, this research argues that autoconstruction of the house with brick constitutes a significant social and emotional process of attachment in Serrinha.

scholarly journals Critical Discourse and Event Semantics Analyses of D. Trump’s Statement on the Armenian Genocide

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2 (18)) ◽  
pp. 137-146
Author(s):  
Sona Hakobyan
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Armenian Genocide ◽  
Event Semantics ◽  
Structure Approach ◽  
Causative Constructions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us

The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the US President D. Trump’s statement on the Armenian Genocide. Our research is based on some principles of the discourse analytical theories covering the fields of semantics, pragmatics and political discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis is applied for analyzing political discourse and mostly studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. As for the event semantics analysis we employ the socalled Event Structure Approach focusing on causative constructions which refer to predicates formed by a combination of a causative event and an underlying predicate. Hence, two types of linguistic theories are applied for enclosing the hidden subtexts of the president’s intentions along with maneuvering strategies.

scholarly journals Impact of social capital on access to formal credits of shrimp households in the coastal districts of Ben Tre

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-39
Author(s):  
Trinh Quoc Trung ◽  
Duong The Duy
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Multivariate Regression ◽  
Education Level ◽  
Descriptive Statistics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Informal Social Networks

The study was conducted in Ben Tre’s three coastal districts, namely Binh Dai, Ba Tri and Thanh Phu, with the aim to identify the structure and quality of social capital as well as its impact on the access to formal credits of 172 shrimp households. Using descriptive statistics, Logistic regression and multivariate regression, the results show that official social networks (i.e. associations and organizations), informal social networks (farming management, credit officers, family - . friends – colleagues), age, experience, number of years living in the locality and education level are determinants of the access to formal credits and credit amounts. In addition, the study also proposed a number of measures to expand the social capital and enhance the accessibility to formal credits of shrimp households.

The role of social networks and intense friendships in study abroad students’ L2 use and speaking development

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristof Baten
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Network Development ◽  
Speaking Proficiency ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This article examines the connections among self-reported social network development, L2 use, and self-perceived speaking proficiency development in a group of Belgian ERASMUS students (n = 59) who studied abroad in different European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK). The results suggest a number of differences between the participants in this study and the US cohorts who have been traditionally the focus of previous SA research. For example, the Belgian students report high levels of proficiency in the target language before going abroad and high levels of target language use while abroad. Furthermore, a number of social network variables point to differences between the ERASMUS students in the present study and the US students featuring in previous research. Nevertheless, the results also reveal some similarities, especially with regard to the social network variables ‘size’ and ‘intensity of friendship’ which were predictors of language gains for the group of students under analysis in this study and, consequently, corroborated findings of previous studies conducted with US cohorts.

Leveraging social networks for offline crowdfunding in rural communities

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-122
Author(s):  
Nathan A. Woolard ◽  
Tanja Steigner
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Social Capital Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
Start Ups ◽  
Jobs Act

Purpose<br/> As a result of the US JOBS Act, Regulation Crowdfnding went into effect in June of 2017, allowing non-accredited investors in the US for the first time to purchase securities in local start-ups. Ahead of the JOBS Act, Kansas established its own intrastate initiative in 2011, known as the Invest Kansas Exemption (IKE, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to explore how IKE participants describe the social and communal impact on their community crowdfunding success.<br/> Design/methodology/approach<br/> For this qualitative case study, we interviewed start-up businesses, economic champions, and SEC representatives in Kansas to determine the importance of social networks for entrepreneurs in offline community public offerings, what projects are fundable, and who to tap for capital and how to tap them.<br/> Findings<br/> Leaning heavily on social capital theory (Davidsson & Honig, 2003; Lin, Ensel, & Vaughn, 1981), we find that a successful community crowdfunding campaign requires community connections, economic champions, destination businesses, forward-thinkers, return to the community, and transparency.<br/> Limitations<br/> While the federal JOBS Act will present future opportunities for research, this study aimed to find social motivations behind participating in a regulation crowdfunding campaign, and is limited to participants in one US state.<br/> Implications<br/> The study provides insight into the social and communal aspect of crowdfunding investors, helping to expand further academic understanding of social capital as it pertains to business start-ups.<br/> Contribution<br/> This original study should be of broad interest to the social business academic community interested in understanding the social motivations of investing in a microlending campaign, as well as of practical relevance to entrepreneurs, and to community leaders who may seek those investors.

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