Gendered Outcomes

This chapter reviews the quantitative, cross-nationally comparative literature investigating the effects of welfare states on gendered social landscapes in high-income OECD countries. It begins by reviewing the data, measures, and methodological approaches used in the literature. It then reviews research on the ‘effects’ of welfare states on gendered (a) labour market outcomes; (b) divisions of household labour and childcare; and (c) well-being. The authors conclude that welfare states play a key role in shaping gender inequality within the labour market and the home, with important consequences for well-being. Finally, the authors conclude with an assessment of limitations and prospects for future research.

The Business of Journalism and Studying the Journalism Business

This chapter challenges the conventional assumption that journalism can be saved through a singular business model. We argue, using examples from the United States, that scholars and journalists need to be more holistically engaged with the economics of media more generally, and different types of journalism beyond newspaper and digital-first outlets. Second, scholars and journalists need to be more intellectually honest about their aims in conducting this research: Is research on news business models aimed at propping up corporate-funded journalism? What is the purpose of critiquing current business models, and are the solutions proposed really tenable or equitable within current political and social landscapes? Third, universities should consider their strengths and limitations in serving as potential “bubbles” for innovation, experimentation, and insulation from commercial pressures.

Do Neighborhoods with Highly Diverse Built Environment Exhibit Different Socio-Economic Profiles as Well? Evidence from Shanghai

The link between the built environment and residential segregation has long been of interest to the discussion for sustainable and socially resilient cities. However, direct assessments on how extensively diverse built environments affect the social landscapes of cities at the neighborhood level are rare. Here, we investigate whether neighborhoods with a diverse built environment also exhibit different socio-economic profiles. Through a geodemographic approach, we scrutinize the socio-economic composition of Shanghai’s neighborhoods. We statistically compare the top 10% (very high values) to the bottom 10% (very low values) of the following built environment variables: density, land use mix, land use balance, and greenness. We show that high-density areas have three times the percentage of divorced residents than low-density areas. Neighborhoods with a high level of greenness have median values of 30% more residents aged between 25–44 years old and five times the percentage of houses between 60 to 119 m2 than low-greenness areas. In high land-use mix areas, the share of people that live on a pension is 30% more than the low land-use mix areas. The findings of this study can be used to improve the designs of modern, sustainable cities at the neighborhood level, significantly improving quality of life.

Brighton Fair: The Life, Death, and Legacy of an Animal Suburb

This paper explores the development and legacy of nineteenth-century “animal suburbs,” focusing on Boston and Brighton, Massachusetts. As domesticated animals were pushed from downtowns—and as large-scale animal industries emerged in the 1800s—urban areas grappled with what to do with livestock populations for urban consumers and markets. Animal suburbs like Brighton marked important developmental forms—marking key changes in human-animal relationships, and also in urban development, law, politics, and environmental change. These animal suburbs had distinctive built environments, ecologies, economies, and social landscapes that shaped development in the nineteenth century and in the many decades that followed. This paper explores the life and death of one animal suburb—Brighton—and shows the centrality of these marginal spaces in explaining why parts of American cities look the way they do today, while also providing insight into developments of nineteenth-century law, political development, and capitalism.

The Bible and Missionary Novels In Chinese

While foreign missionaries to China spared no effort in translating and disseminating the Bible, they recognized the fact that the Holy Scripture, with all its cultural and theological peculiarities, was too alien and difficult for most Chinese readers to comprehend during the early Qing and Republican periods. Some missionaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, were committed to the production of a sizable corpus of Christian novels in Chinese by making creative use of traditional Chinese literary forms to rewrite biblical stories. Fictional representations of the biblical narratives might provide greater leeway to indigenize the Christian thoughts by offering their intended Chinese audiences culture-specific commentaries and nuanced interpretations. The literary fruits of the missionaries not only had facilitated the reception of the Bible and the spread of the associated religious message but also had reshaped the literary and social landscapes of late imperial and early Republican China.

“Post-viral tourism’s antagonistic tourist imaginaries”

Purpose This paper aims to examine the antagonistic coexistence of different tourism imaginaries in global post-viral social landscapes. Such antagonisms may be resolved at the expense of the ethics of tourism mobility, if not adjudicated by post-human reflexivity. Currently, unreflexive behaviours involve the refusal to conform to lifesaving “stay-at-home” policies, the tendency to book holidays and the public inspection of death zones. Design/methodology/approach Each of the consumption styles explored in this paper to discuss post-COVID-19 tourism recovery corresponds to at least one tourist imaginary, antagonistically placed against social imaginaries of moral betterment, solidarity, scientific advancement, national security and labour equality. A multi-modal collection of audio-visual and textual data, gathered through social media and the digital press, is categorised and analysed via critical discourse analysis. Findings Data in the public domain suggest a split between pessimistic and optimistic attitudes that forge different tourism futures. These attitudes inform different imaginaries with different temporal orientations and consumption styles. Social implications COVID-has exposed the limits of the capacity to efficiently address threats to both human and environmental ecosystems. As once popular tourist locales/destinations are turned by COVID-2019s spread into risk zones with morbid biographical records their identities alter and their imaginaries of suffering become anthropocentric. Originality/value Using Castoriadis’ differentiation between social and radical imaginaries, Foucault’s biopolitical analysis, Sorokin’s work on mentalities and Sorel’s reflections on violence, the author argue that this paper has entered a new phase in the governance and experience of tourism, which subsumes the idealistic basis of tourist imaginaries as cosmopolitan representational frameworks under the techno-cultural imperatives of risk, individualistic growth through the adventure (“edgework”) and heritage preservation. This paper also needs to reconsider the contribution of technology (not technocracy) to sustainable post-COVID-19 scenarios of tourism recovery.

Building our social landscape in cyberspace

Developing a community of learners and leaders in school librarianship is fundamental to effective practice in professional preparation programs. As more and more school librarian preparation programs go online, staying focused on community building and collaboration becomes the key challenge to the best practices ideal. The Internet provides excellent tools and resources for developing online professional communities, as well as opportunities for academic programs to create social landscapes that students will engage in after they finish their academic program.

Commercial Potentials of NBIoT and Its Impact on the Economy

The internet of things (IoT) has emerged as a potential game changer in the modern ICT landscape. Like several other technologies, it is going to disrupt the global markets to a large extent. The main potentials of IoT are its pervasive presence and multiple applications. For the large-scale deployment of the IoTs, a huge amount of resources are needed. In that case, a lighter or energy efficient version of the IoT is preferred for the large scale projects such as the smart cities and healthcare applications. In this regard, narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is preferred which is a resource efficient version of the modern IoTs. The pervasive uses of the IoTs are going to change the economy and the social landscapes to a large extent. IoT will be pervasive, and it will touch every aspect of the human lives. Due to its pervasiveness, the economy associated with it is going to be equally pervasive. In this chapter, the aim is to provide the commercial potentials of NBIoT and to analyze the changes it can bring to the economy. In the commercial potentials the author include the common applications where NBIoT is the main choice and can play a crucial role in the long term. Normally, these sectors are widely accessible to the general public such as the healthcare, traffic monitoring systems, smart cities, utilities management, retail management, industrial automation, and the emergency services.