Environmental Attitudes and Household Electricity Use among Budapest Residents

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 115-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Dúll ◽  
Béla Janky

Abstract: This paper addresses the question of whether the evidence on positive relationship between environmental attitudes and household energy consumption in advanced post-industrial societies can be extended to emerging economies. In this study, we focused on electricity use and utilized multivariate regression to test the above hypothesis on a sample of residents of Óbuda (Budapest) in February 2011. The analysis suggests that the findings on the positive environmental attitude-behaviour relationship in advanced post-industrial societies can be extended to some (relatively affluent) communities in post-socialist societies. Our data also showed that the effects of housing type and demography are much larger compared to the effects of the attitudes. We emphasize that our findings do not provide evidence against the hypothesis on the interaction between the effects of societal culture and individual attitudes on pro-environmental behaviour.

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Áróra Árnadóttir ◽  
Michał Czepkiewicz ◽  
Jukka Heinonen

A lot of emphasis has been put on the densification of urban form to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. However, many recent studies have found that central urban dwellers, even though their carbon footprints of daily transportation may be lower, might be responsible for higher total emissions than those that reside in suburban areas. Similarly, as with the urban form, higher environmental concern is often considered as an indicator of lower emissions, but several studies have found that pro-environmental attitude (PEA) does not always correlate with less energy intensive behavior. This study analyzes how urban zones, PEA, and several sociodemographic variables are associated with annual travel emissions and pro-environmental behaviors (PEB), using a dataset collected with a map-based online survey (softGIS) survey, contributed by 841 participants from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area (HMA), Finland. Although PEA can affect PEBs related to household energy consumption (β = 0.282, p < 0.001), clothing (β = 0.447, p < 0.001) and produce purchases (β = 0.449, p < 0.0001), their relationship with emissions from local (β = −0.067), national (β = −0.019) and international (β = −0.016) travel was not significant. Clusters of low emissions from local travel and high international travel emissions were found in pedestrian-oriented urban zones and residents of car-oriented zones were more likely to conserve household energy (β = 0.102, p < 0.05). These results might help broaden the current perspective of city planners, as well as identify opportunities for more effective mitigation policies.


Author(s):  
Viktor Zinchenko ◽  
Nataliia Krokhmal ◽  
Оlha Horpynych ◽  
Nataliia Fialko

Critical theory of education should be based on a critical theory of society, which is conceptually analyzes the features of actually existing industrial and post-industrial societies and their relations of domination and subordination (oppression), conflict and the prospects for progressive social change and transformative practices that make projects more complete, freer life and democratic society. Criticality theory means a way of seeing and understanding, building categories, making connections, reflection and participation in practice theory, theory of withdrawal of social practice.This term contains an element of emancipation, liberation and self-determination of the oppressed and exploited masses, recognizing that people are socially excluded from the material security, education and decision-making can share vidrefleksuvaty their situation, realize that it is unauthorized again, and realize that they must organize themselves in order to change the structure of society.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 450-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Vandenbroucke ◽  
Koen Vleminckx

Should we explain the disappointing outcomes of the Open Method of Co-ordination on Inclusion by methodological weaknesses or by substantive contradictions in the ‘social investment’ paradigm? To clarify the underlying concepts, we first revisit the original ‘Lisbon inspiration’ and then relate it to the idea of the ‘new welfare state’, as proposed in the literature on new risks in post-industrial societies. We then discuss two explanations for disappointing poverty trends, suggested by critical accounts of the ‘social investment state’: ‘resource competition’ and a ‘re-commodification’. We do not find these explanations convincing per se and conclude that the jury is still out on the ‘social investment state’. However, policy-makers cannot ignore the failure of employment policies to reduce the proportion of children and working-age adults living in jobless households in the EU, and they should not deny the reality of a ‘trilemma of activation’. Finally, we identify policy conditions that may facilitate the complementarity of social investment and social inclusion.


Author(s):  
Roberta Sassatelli

This article investigates the historical formation and specific configuration of a threefold relation crucial to contemporary society, that between the body, the self, and material culture, which, in contemporary, late modern (or post-industrial) societies, has become largely defined through consumer culture. Drawing on historiography, sociology, and anthropology, it explores how, from the early modern period, the consolidation of new consumption patterns and values has given way to particular visions of the human being as a consumer, and how, in turn, the consumer has become a cultural battlefield for the management of body and self. The article also discusses tastes, habitus, and individualization.


Author(s):  
Olga Vladimirovna Semenova ◽  
◽  
Marina Lvovna Butovskaya ◽  

We tested this prediction on data collected in three cultural contexts of modern post-industrial societies. Quantitative data on the frequency of grandparental involvement in childcare were collected via a set of online surveys conducted in 2019 in Russia, the United States, and Brazil (N= 1531) and analyzed in R software. The current research was also focused on the analysis of the impact of the distance between households on the frequency of kinship assistance in childcare. Results. We found significant cross-cultural universalizes: 1) the distance between households negatively affects the frequency of help; 2) the care of the maternal grandparents is significantly higher than the care of the paternal grandparents. Discussion. In this study we found that the distance between households and family kin side have stable significant impact on the grandparental help cross-culturally. At the same time, it was shown that grandparental help in childcare is significantly reduced in Brazil compared to the other two studied countries. The phenomenon of reduced kin help in Brazil is an important finding and requires further research by evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Jerven

AbstractIf we take recent income per capita estimates at face value, they imply that the average medieval European was at least five times ‘better off’ than the average Congolese today. This raises important questions regarding the meaning and applicability of national income estimates throughout time and space, and their use in the analysis of global economic history over the long term. This article asks whether national income estimates have a historical and geographical specificity that renders the ‘data’ increasingly unsuitable and misleading when assessed outside a specific time and place. Taking the concept of ‘reciprocal comparison’ as a starting point, it further questions whether national income estimates make sense in pre-and post-industrial societies, in decentralized societies, and in polities outside the temperate zone. One of the major challenges in global history is Eurocentrism. Resisting the temptation to compare the world according to the most conventional development measure might be a recommended step in overcoming this bias.


Author(s):  
Robin I.M. Dunbar

The brain consumes about 20 per cent of the total energy intake in human adults. Primates, and especially humans, have unusually large brains for body size compared with other vertebrates, and fuelling these is a significant drain on both time and energy. Larger-brained primates generally eat fruit-intense diets, but human brains are so large that a reduction in gut size is needed to free up sufficient resources to allow a larger brain to be evolved, placing further pressure on foraging. The early invention of cooking increased nutrient absorption by around 30 per cent over raw food. Increasing digestibility in this way perhaps inevitably leads to risk of obesity when food is super-abundant, as it is in post-industrial societies. However, obesity has clearly been around for a long time, as suggested by the late Palaeolithic Venus figures of Europe, so it is not a novel problem.


Author(s):  
P.E. Thomas

Unlike the decisive occupations which facilitated the unambiguous naming of the agricultural and industrial societies, the present one which is tagged with an array of groupings—Post-Industrial, Service, Knowledge, Post-modern, Wired/Networked, Artificial, so on and so forth—can hardly ever be viewed from the perspective of a single occupation. With technology in the forefront working as the driver of information and knowledge, it supports and causes the rampant changes in the provinces of economy, occupation, spatial relations, and culture. And, together they signify the arrival of the ‘Information Society'. The obvious shift of a considerable population from the landed labour to industrial labour to knowledge workers marks the transitional phase of the society from agriculture to manufacturing to knowledge society. Hence, this chapter proposes that the dominant phase of a society is not to be visualised as an independent system that is divorced from the other two, but to be understood as an extension of its past.


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