Land-Use Strategies

This chapter describes the land-use and land-arrangement strategies that Chinese migrant and left-behind rice farmers use to manage their farmland and off-farm migration. These include both social and technical strategies – only some of which accord with state expectations – such as leaving behind family members, building houses on farmland, using labour-saving technologies, switching from rice to cash crops, or even abandoning fields. Using specific household cases, the chapter demonstrates how peasants draw on a wide repertoire of available resources to handle their situation. Shedding light on the logics behind these decisions, it argues that, in taking seemingly technical agricultural decisions, farmers are in fact pursuing various long-term and short-term projects that best match their fluctuating current and anticipated future household situation.

Why are the institutional injustice and the lack of fairness omnipresent in Serbia? A pragmatic assessment of plural orders of worth

Recent results from Round 9 of the European Social Survey (ESS) indicate that Serbia differs from other European countries in terms of justice and fairness. Whereas the Serbian people?s dissatisfaction relating to unjust income distribution, unfair employment chances and political institutions may not be surprising, these findings still raise a dozen questions. Situated within contemporary discussions on normativity in sociology and survey methodology, this paper aims to reassess the moral grammar of these judgments. By endorsing tenets of pragmatic sociology and its principal aim to recognize the plural modes of valuation and criticism and reflective capacities of social actors to judge and evaluate, this paper develops around few major points. First, we underline how most major approaches to axiology remain stuck in a co-determinist framework, thereby renewing a number of dualisms. Instead, we opt for a relational approach and further present how the theoretical model of Boltanski and Thev?not enables the locating of different assessments of worth. After setting our methodological framework against the ?externalist? epistemology, we explore our key assumption that the above-mentioned high rates come as a problem of a feasible ?truce? between the domestic regime and the civic polity, ruled by proclaimed legality, representativeness and impersonal character. We trace the problem of incorporating multiple arrangements as a problem of generality, by relating these to two layers of information acquired through the ESS. One involves the analysis of the domestic polity covering the household situation in terms of organization and unveiling the specific worth given to care and protection. Another layer is derived from regression analysis which affirms that the absence of fairness in civic polity correlates with a higher degree of worth given to the domestic one, but also that the latter situation depicts a deeper ontological puzzle about making a mild transition to the assumed ?horizontality? of civic matters.

Exploring the “Energy-Saving Personality Traits” in the Office and Household Situation: An Empirical Study

Behavior-driven energy conservation has been a promising strategy for reducing building energy consumption as well as carbon emissions. With the intention of revealing the impacts of an individual’s personality basis on energy conservation behavioral attitudes and intentions in households and offices, the present study proposes and conducts an experiment in Xi’an, China with two groups for the investigation of such attitudes towards household energy-saving behavior (HESB) and office energy-saving behavior (OESB), respectively. The research adopts structural equation modeling for experiment data analysis. The analysis results suggest that the two personality traits, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, are significantly related to both HESB and OESB attitudes. Especially, agreeable people tend to present stronger energy-saving attitudes, while individuals with higher Neuroticism are less likely to do so. The results indicate that the impacts of these two traits on energy-saving attitude are found to be less influenced by different environment settings. Further, the results find that Extraversion positively influences energy-saving attitude in the office environment, while Openness only significantly works in the household environment. It is hoped that the findings of the present study can provide informative references to energy-saving intervention design as well as further studies on the spillover of pro-environmental behaviors.

The Divine Comedy at Corinth: Paul, Menander and the Rhetoric of Resurrection

This article asks how the New Comedy of Menander might have influenced Paul's theological rhetoric in 1 Cor 5–15. An intertextual reading of Paul's letter against the backdrop of Menander'sSamiareveals a number of shared topics, ethical concerns and dramatic characteristics. Paul's citation of Menander'sThaisin 1 Cor 15.33 is part of this larger strategy to frame the struggles in Corinth within the ambit of Greek household ‘situation comedy’. Like Menander, Paul hybridises tragic and comic motifs throughout his epistle, inflecting the comedy of the Christ narrative with tragic examples of human misapprehension in this plea for ecclesial reconciliation.

The Effects of Situational and Dispositional Factors on the Change in Financial Risk Tolerance

Utilizing the lens of Heider's (1958) attribution theory and Grable and Joo's (2004) conceptual framework, this chapter studies the effect of situational and dispositional attributions on changes in financial risk tolerance. Situational factors are assessed through changes in household situation and changes in macroeconomic factors. For dispositional factors, changes upon sensation seeking attitudes are explored. The data employed in this research come from the 1993, 1994, and 2006 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 5,449). Results from structural equation modeling indicate that changes in internal attributions have a significant and positive effect (coefficient = 0.12, p <0.01) on the change in risk tolerance, as is true for changes in external attributions where a significant effect is seen (coefficient = 0.30, p <0.01). Thus, the findings from this study support the conceptual framework premised on Heider's attribution theory and Grable and Joo's (2004) conceptual model.

An Analysis of Personal Financial Literacy among Expatriates in the United Arab Emirates

This study investigates 389 expatriates in the UAE to examine their financial literacy level, relationship between the financial literacy and demographic characteristics. A questionnaire was used to study the financial literacy of expatriates from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. The findings reveal that the financial literacy of expatriates is low, with an average answering only 52 per cent of the questions correctly. The low level of knowledge would limit their ability to make informed decisions. The study finds age, marital status, gender, country of origin, income, experience, education, employment status, work place activity, and household situation influence financial literacy and hence calls for initiatives to improve financial literacy among expatriates and for further research in this direction.

The Effects of Situational and Dispositional Factors on the Change in Financial Risk Tolerance

Utilizing the lens of Heider's (1958) attribution theory and Grable and Joo's (2004) conceptual framework, this chapter studies the effect of situational and dispositional attributions on changes in financial risk tolerance. Situational factors are assessed through changes in household situation and changes in macroeconomic factors. For dispositional factors, changes upon sensation seeking attitudes are explored. The data employed in this research come from the 1993, 1994, and 2006 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 5,449). Results from structural equation modeling indicate that changes in internal attributions have a significant and positive effect (coefficient = 0.12, p <0.01) on the change in risk tolerance, as is true for changes in external attributions where a significant effect is seen (coefficient = 0.30, p <0.01). Thus, the findings from this study support the conceptual framework premised on Heider's attribution theory and Grable and Joo's (2004) conceptual model.