Search results

This chapter reports estimates of consumers’ preferences for plans to improve food safety.

The plans are distinguished based on whether they address the ex ante risk of food borne illness or the ex post effects of the illness. They are also distinguished based on whether they focus on a public good – reducing risk of illness for all consumers or allowing individual households to reduce their private risks of contracting a food borne pathogen.

Based on a National Survey conducted in 2007 using the Knowledge Network internet panel, our findings indicate consumers favor ex ante risk reductions and are willing to pay approximately $250 annually to reduce the risk of food borne illness. Moreover, they prefer private to public approaches and would not support efforts to reduce the severity of cases of illness over risk reductions.

This study is the first research that allows a comparison of survey respondents’ choices between public and private mechanisms for ex ante risk reductions.

The woman has appeared in many films as an unknown dangerous monster for men. Barbara Creed, in The Monstrous-Feminine. Film, Feminist, Psychoanalysis (1993), recognized the fear of women as a vampire and as witch. Masters of Horror (Showtime, 2005–2007) is a TV series that focuses their attention on distinct monsters, including female monster.

The aim of this chapter is to analyze some episodes of these two acclaimed TV series: ‘Deer Woman’ (Season 1 Episode 7) and ‘Jenifer’ (Season 1 Episode 4), in Masters of Horror. Both episodes show the struggle between the female threatening monster and the defensive male normalcy, where liberated women (they break the established rules) resist the males’ domination through cultural transgressions.

This chapter is based on different methodologies: cultural studies, history, discourse analysis and TV studies. That way, it will be essential to delve into the different readings about woman as a monster (dangerous creature for the established order) and as the otherness, where the flesh temptations (cannibalism, sex) and supernatural narrations place her outside society.

Many African Americans cheered the election of President Obama in 2008 with the hope he would cause an easing of the pain of economic and political barriers to collective black progress in America. This chapter assesses the role of President Obama in addressing these issues.

The Presidential Bully Pulpit is presented as a framework for addressing racial inequities. Properly used it can bring keen attention to issues a president deems important for consideration by the American public. Socio-historical texts and secondary data are used.

Data are presented to show how racial discrimination continues to affect African Americans during the age of Obama. These include housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and racial profiling. This chapter shows Mr. Obama has not used the office of the presidency as a bully pulpit for addressing these racial inequities. Rather he has tended to use the bully pulpit to chastise blacks, especially black males.

Also discussed are some promising developments challenging racism that have emerged from his administration, primarily from the Department of Justice, and how President Obama could use the bully pulpit more productively.

This chapter presents a contradiction in the actions of President Obama. While he seldom uses the bully pulpit to push his own legislative agendas or to push toward solutions to relieve racial inequities in society, he does use the bully pulpit to criticize black males.

The author takes a comprehensive look at the accessibility of e-resources for all people, including those with disabilities, in the context of collection development (CD).

Employing a combination of research methodologies — policy analysis, content analysis, and phone survey—the author explores the extent to which the needs of people with disabilities are considered.

Several professional library organizations recommend accessibility-sensitive selection and procurement procedures. However, not all students enrolled in library school programs might learn about the issue. Few books on the subject cover the issue adequately. Nationwide, CD policies requiring conformance to accessibility standards are the exception; and when librarians meet to make decisions about the selection of specific e-resources, the needs of people with disabilities are rarely on their radar screens.

Researchers conducting similar surveys in the future might want to not only select a statistically more representative sample of academic libraries but also widen their focus and include both accessibility and usability in their investigations.

Textbook authors and course instructors in the area of CD need to address accessibility and usability. Librarians need to raise the issue with database and e-book vendors during license negotiations.

The acquisition of e-resources designed to be accessible and usable for all will enable people with disabilities to participate more fully in our information-driven society.

The data collected provide for a broad discussion of the extent to which the needs of people with disabilities are considered in connection with CD.

Using the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, I argue that the catastrophe was less an example of a low probability-high catastrophe event than an instance of socially produced risks and insecurities associated with deepwater oil and gas production during the neoliberal period after 1980. The disaster exposes the deadly intersection of the aggressive enclosure of a new technologically risky resource frontier (the deepwater continental shelf) with what I call a frontier of neoliberalized risk, a lethal product of cut-throat corporate cost-cutting, the collapse of government oversight and regulatory authority and the deepening financialization and securitization of the oil market. These two local pockets of socially produced risk and wrecklessness have come to exceed the capabilities of what passes as risk management and energy security. In this sense, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was produced by a set of structural conditions, a sort of rogue capitalism, not unlike those which precipitated the financial meltdown of 2008. The forms of accumulation unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico over three decades rendered a high-risk enterprise yet more risky, all the while accumulating insecurities and radical uncertainties which made the likelihood of a Deepwater Horizon type disaster highly overdetermined.

The issues raised by bioethics have been discussed broadly within medical sociology. Scholars such as Bosk (2002), Rothman (1986), DeVries (2004), DeVries and Subedi (1998), and others have discussed the social origins, organization, and consequences of various aspects of bioethics, while many authors have discussed the ways in which bioethics may be blind to social context. Fox and DeVries note that all contributors to the DeVries and Subedi (1998) text fault bioethicists for their failure to recognize the multiple social, cultural, and historical influences on their ethical thinking and the failure to recognize the broader implications of their work for society. The collection of essays in DeVries and Subedi is an exceptionally rich source of sociological reflection about bioethics, its origin, social organization, and implications. This text stands in contrast to previous work by sociologists who served within bioethics as consultants or advisors to bioethics committees. Since its publication, relatively fewer works have sought to understand the world of bioethics through a sociological lens, although the number of books and journals on bioethics has proliferated.

In the era of financial capitalism, how to manage and hold global corporations accountable has become too multifarious a topic for a solitary focus of one theme, to sufficiently outline the whole gamut and implications of their activities. Capitalism is characterized by several well-organized antinomies and contrasts, with reflections of critical dualities that bear a resemblance to the primeval paradoxes of Hellenic philosophy. The challenge of governance of capitalism to be effectual entails breaking out of the entrenched precincts of habitual academic silos. Various standpoints while reasonably informative falls short to explain fully the complex interlinkages between the concept of global governance and the state’s capacity to put into effect its will on corporate power.

Spotlighting on assessing the praxis of political economy at global and national level and the corporate reality, this chapter aims to provide a renewed thrust for the focused recalibration of global regulatory regime. In this chapter, the inquiries take the regulation as the main explanandum for elucidation of the shifting governance framework.