Family in contemporary society

Family as a concept is flexible, thus prone to changes concerning the needs of the modern industrial society. Roles within the family are structured following the contemporary conditions, following the emancipation of women, reduction in the male workforce due to mechanization, and increased presence of grandparents as caregivers, due to increased life expectancy. The main objective of this scientific work is to analyse relevant standpoints regarding the function and sustainability of family, while taking into account external influences such as economic status, political situation, as well as societal norms and values. The identification of these challenges helps us determine the extent to which family structure and function is able to adopt to rapid globalisation that is taking place. Globalization is opening many doors, giving us freedom of choice in terms of family structure and roles, while simultaneously forcing us to find our identity through labeling ourselves as “this”, “that”, or “the next best alternative”. Higher living standards constrain our possibility of choice, as fewer children mean less economic burden, but more attention is spent on them. The boomerang effect of childhood is what emphasizes the importance of a stable home.

The Attitude of Generation Z Towards YouTube Skippable Ads: An Empirical Study on Lokalate Ads

As businesses’ marketing activities have migrated to various social media platforms, competition between advertisers to attain market’s attention is getting more intense. As a result, marketers began to involve manipulative and provocative strategies to steal market’s attention. This, however, lead to a boomerang effect where consumers develop negative attitude towards advertisement—especially among Generation Z as one of the biggest demographic groups. Aimed to fill in the knowledge gap regarding this issue, specifically in Medan, this research investigates how attitude towards advertisement is affected by several antecedents, namely informativeness, entertainment, and irritation. Multiple linear regression analysis is employed to assess the relationship between variables. The result shows that informativeness along with entertainment have positive effect on attitude towards advertisement, whereas irritation has negative effect. This indicates that marketers should consider these factors to create an effective advertisement that can evoke positive attitude among audiences.

Systemic Reconfiguration of Capitalism: Applying Ruggie’s Critique of Waltz in Economics

This paper identifies changes in the center-periphery structure due to transformations in capitalism since 1970. In its new configuration, capitalism not only altered center-periphery relations but also exerted impact upon peripheral units that affect the system structure itself. This paper aims to apply Ruggie’s famous critique of Waltz in International Relations to analyse global capitalism and show how the changes in the center-periphery cleavage is affecting its systemic reconfiguration in the 21st century. This research identifies the boomerang effect as a new systemic element, that is, as a byproduct of the interaction of units of the global capitalist system in the 21st century.

The impact of super-spreader cities, highways, and intensive care availability in the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil

Although international airports served as main entry points for SARS-CoV-2, the factors driving the uneven geographic spread of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Brazil remain mostly unknown. Here we show that three major factors influenced the early macro-geographical dynamics of COVID-19 in Brazil. Mathematical modeling revealed that the “super-spreading city” of São Paulo initially accounted for more than 85% of the case spread in the entire country. By adding only 16 other spreading cities, we accounted for 98–99% of the cases reported during the first 3 months of the pandemic in Brazil. Moreover, 26 federal highways accounted for about 30% of SARS-CoV-2’s case spread. As cases increased in the Brazilian interior, the distribution of COVID-19 deaths began to correlate with the allocation of the country’s intensive care units (ICUs), which is heavily weighted towards state capitals. Thus, severely ill patients living in the countryside had to be transported to state capitals to access ICU beds, creating a “boomerang effect” that contributed to skew the distribution of COVID-19 deaths. Therefore, if (i) a lockdown had been imposed earlier on in spreader-capitals, (ii) mandatory road traffic restrictions had been enforced, and (iii) a more equitable geographic distribution of ICU beds existed, the impact of COVID-19 in Brazil would be significantly lower.

Tropicality and the Choc en Retour of Covid-19 and Climate Change

This article reads ‘pandemic, plague, pestilence and the tropics’ through Covid-19, climate change and the discourse of tropicality. It asks: What happens, as seems to be the case today, when the temperate/tropical oppositions around which tropicality revolves start to unravel because the aberrations and excesses (here of epidemic disease and extreme weather) hitherto deemed to belong to tropical areas, and as constitutive of their otherness, are found in temperate ones? This question is broached with a focus on the United Kingdom as one such ‘temperate’ place that currently finds itself in this situation (although the argument has broader resonance), and with Aimé Césaire’s ideas about the choc en retour (boomerang effect) of Western colonisation and la quotidienneté des barbaries (the daily barbarisms) by which this effect works. Evidence and feelers from science, theory, politics, and the media are used to consider how sensibilities of tropicality, and especially (as Césaire enquired) distinctions between the ‘normal’ and ‘pathological,’ and ‘immunity’ and ‘susceptibility,’ permeate the way Covid-19 and climate change are perceived and felt in the temperate world.

Benefits First: Consumer Trust Repair in Mobile Commerce

The purpose of this study is to explore trust repair strategies and the outcomes in mobile (m-)commerce. Consumer trust in m-commerce is a calculus-based form of trust; service failures, “inaction” and “excessive actions” are the typical trust decline situations. Three strategies of the fulfillment of consumers’ psychological contract for compensation, arousal, and regulation are proposed as trust-repaired solutions regarding the abovementioned three situations. The experimental results demonstrate that trust cannot be repaired by a single relational psychological contract strategy and that it can be repaired by both a single transactional and interactive strategy; the interactive strategy is more effective in competence-based decline. Second, in integrity-based decline, both the single and interactive strategy negatively influence trust repair; the relational strategy has the strongest effect. The “boomerang effect” shows that the more m-vendors repair, the more the trust decreases. Third, trust can be repaired, respectively by arousal and regulation strategy regarding corresponding situations of inaction and excessive actions. Finally, the trust repair paradox (TRP) has not been verified in m-commerce.