Search results

Timebanking is a generalized, voluntary service exchange that promotes use of otherwise idle resources in a community and facilitates community building. Participants offer and request services through the mediation of the timebank software. In timebanking, giving help and accepting help are both contributions; contributions are recognized and quantified through exchange of time-based currency. The purpose of this paper is to explore how users perceive timebank offers and requests differently and how they influence actual use.

This survey study, conducted in over 120 timebanks across the USA, examines users’ timebanking participation, adapting dimensions of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).

The authors found that perceived ease of use in timebanking platforms was positively associated with positive attitudes toward both requests and offers, whereas perceived usefulness was negatively associated with positive attitudes toward requests and offers. The authors also found that having positive attitudes toward requests was important to elicit behavioral intention to make a request, but that positive attitudes toward offers did not affect behavioral intentions to make offers.

The authors discussed these results and proposed design suggestions for future service exchange tools to address the issues the authors raised.

The study is among the first few studies that examine timebanking participation using large-scale survey data. The authors evaluate sociotechnical factors of timebanking participation through adapting dimensions of TAM.

At a time when governmental corruption seems rife and administrations grow ever more secretive, the whistleblower is a crucial resource in journalism’s attempts to make accountable those who wield power. Yet despite legislation that is meant to protect employees and officials who expose wrongdoing, a governmental “war on whistleblowers” has made the hazards faced by many whistleblowers increasingly grim. This chapter explores the role of the journalist/whistleblower collaboration in disclosing important, but sensitive, information involving national security. In discussing case studies of those who have braved the government’s anger, we examine not only the circumstances of these breaches, but also their political and legal repercussions.

The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which self-tracking data have meaning and value in and after the life of the creator, including how such data could become part of the larger historical record, curated in an institutional archive. In doing so, the article expands upon existing shared interests among researchers working in the areas of self-tracking, human–computer interaction and archival science.

A total of 18 people who had self-tracked for six months or more were recruited for the study. Participants completed a survey which gathered demographic data and characteristics vis-à-vis their self-tracking behavior. In-person semi-structured interviews were then conducted to ascertain the beliefs of the participants regarding the long-term use and value of personal quantified-self data.

The findings reveal the value that people place on self-tracking data, their thoughts on proper modes for accessing their archive once it moves from the private to the public space, and how to provide fidelity within the system such that their experiences are represented while also enabling meaning making on the part of subsequent users of the archive.

Today’s quantified-self data are generally embedded in systems that create a pipeline from the individual source to that of the corporate warehouse, bent on absorbing and extracting insight from a totality of big data. This article posits that new opportunities for knowing and for design can be revealed when a public interest rationale is appended to rich personalized collections of small data.

In August 2007, over 6,000 sociologists gathered in New York to attend the 102nd meeting of the American Sociological Association and discuss the possibility of radical social transformation in post-modern capitalist society.¹ The adoption of the conference theme ‘Is another world possible?’ was theoretically significant, for it seemed to call into question one of the most fundamental assumptions upon which critical sociology depends: that despite the rarity of radical social change, it is possible, desirable and even imperative to imagine and struggle for better alternatives to existing ways of being. From phenomenological insights into the contingency of our subjective interpretations of reality to the imperative of reconciling ‘appearance’ with ‘reality’; from the long history of collective movements to defend human dignity to the ‘politics of small things’ (Goldfarb, 2006), critical theories of society presume that human fates are not determined and futures are not reified, and that the possibility of possibility is a pre-condition for ‘normal’ human existence. This is not to say that progressive alternatives to the status quo are not often and everywhere repressed to some degree and in some form, or that they are equally distributed or attainable. But as Gustavo Gutierrez once remarked, a ‘commitment to the creation of a just society and, ultimately, to a new human being, presupposes confidence in the future’ (2003, p. 197).

The purpose of this paper is to identify the potential relationship between farm income variability and off-farm employment decisions in the short and medium term for the case of Irish farm operators.

Panel probit models of off-farm labour supply are estimated using Teagasc National Farm Survey data for Irish farms. The framework is based largely on standard expected utility but includes a constraint for recent employment history.

The analyses identifies some evidence of a positive association between farm income variability and off-farm employment in the medium term but no significant relationship in the short term. This suggests that off-farm employment is part of a wider portfolio decision but is not a strong solution to short-term farm income shocks.

European farmers increasingly face high income variability but financial risk management tools are not sufficiently developed or widely accessible to assist farmers in managing the associated risk. This deficiency can have negative implications for household economic welfare and future farm investments and hence the future farm income. Off-farm employment can form part of a wider medium-term portfolio strategy but more effective tools are also required for risk management particularly in dealing with short-term volatility and where off-farm employment is not a realistic endeavour given time constraints and/or demographics.

The estimation of farm income variability includes a detrending method thus reducing the likelihood of overestimating farm income variability for farms in deliberate expansion or decline. While previous research has typically focused on the short-term response of farmers to historical farm income variability, this research has distinguished between the short and medium term.

By examining the role of farming attitudes and motivations, the aim of this paper is to provide a framework for better understanding farmers' behaviour in relation to the decision to obtain credit.

Using a nationally representative survey of farm operators in Ireland, this paper derives explanatory variables (based on a factor analysis of respondents mean ratings of 13 attitudinal statements) representing three different farming motivations. An ordered logit model is then formulated to examine the effect of farming attitudes as well as personal characteristics and farm structural variables on the degree of indebtedness.

Personal characteristics of the farmer such as age and education as well as farm structural variables such as farm size and farm system were all found to strongly affect decisions in relation to credit use. The study identified how farmers are not just driven by business related goals such as maximising profits but are also strongly motivated by productivist tendencies and perceived lifestyle benefits associated with farm work. These underlying farming motivations were, in turn, found to have a differential impact on credit use. Specifically, business orientated attitudes were found to provide a prime incentive for farmers to borrow funds. On the other hand, farmers who strongly value the benefits associated with the farming lifestyle were less likely to look for credit.

Past research has focused on the effect of socio‐demographic characteristics and farm structural variables in examining differences in farm indebtedness. This study extends this literature by specifically examining the role of farming attitudes. Obtaining a deeper understanding of the factors that affect the level of farming debt will be important as the degree of indebtedness has been found to affect farmers' management decisions. Outside of explaining farm credit use, farming attitudes and motivations may have an important impact on farmers' behaviour in relation to a variety of farm activities.