Search results

Purpose: This paper examines for the first time inequality of opportunity for income in Africa, by analyzing large-sample surveys, all providing information on individuals’ parental background, in five comparable Sub-Saharan countries: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, and Uganda.

Methodology/approach: We compute inequality of opportunity indexes in keeping with the main proposals in the literature, and propose a decomposition of between-country differences that distinguishes the respective impacts of intergenerational mobility between social origins and positions, of the distribution of education and occupations, and of the earnings structure.

Findings: Among our five countries, Ghana in 1988 has by far the lowest income inequality between individuals of different social origins, while Madagascar in 1993 displays the highest. Ghana in 1998, Ivory Coast in 1985–1988, Guinea in 1994, and Uganda in 1992 stand in-between. Decompositions reveal that the two former British colonies (Ghana and Uganda) share a much higher intergenerational educational and occupational mobility than the three former French colonies. Further, Ghana distinguishes itself from the four other countries, because of the combination of widespread secondary schooling, low returns to education, and low income dualism against agriculture. Nevertheless, it displays marked regional inequality insofar as being born in the Northern part of this country produces a significant restriction of income opportunities.

Originality/value of paper: By providing the first figures for five countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, this paper allows enlarging the sample of international comparisons in the study of inequality of opportunity. It also reveals some suggestive evidence regarding the long-term origin of intergenerational mobility differences, and in particular the colonial legacy of school extension and of dualism against agriculture.

This paper aims to examine the effects of narrowing social distance with celebrity endorsers (i.e. via close relationship social categories) and their origin (i.e. local or international) on consumer attitudes about advertisements. It is proposed that using such a relational approach to celebrity endorsement, where celebrities are framed as socially close social categories, leads to more favorable attitudes toward the advertisement.

A pilot test on actual advertisements and three laboratory experiments tested the proposed hypotheses on the effects of varying celebrity social distance levels, with self-referencing as mediator, on attitudes toward the advertisements.

Celebrity endorsements are more effective when the advertisement features celebrities as socially close social category; furthermore, these effects are more pronounced when the celebrity is local as opposed to foreign. The study also proposes that consumer self-referencing vis-a-vis celebrities’ social distance through framed social categories mediates these effects.

Anchored in the identity and social identity theories, implications on relational approaches to celebrity endorsements and international marketing communications are discussed together with the fact that Asian culture inherently subscribes to relational celebrity endorsements.

Social mobility research starts conventionally from the children's generation and looks at group-specific individual life chances. However, an immediate interpretation of these results as measures of social reproduction is often misleading. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of a related but alternative approach which looks at intergenerational links from the perspective of the parents’ generation. It asks about the consequences of social inequality in this generation for the following generation(s). This includes questions of how the parental origin context is formed, whether there are any children at all and when they were born as well as the aspect of these children's relative chances of attaining particular social positions. As an empirical example, the paper describes patterns of educational reproduction in (West) Germany during the mid- and late 20th century. Simulations allow assessing the relative importance of various partial processes of social reproduction. A large proportion of the observed levels of educational reproduction can be attributed to family-related processes such as union formation. Drawing together analyses from various areas, the paper combines questions of social mobility research with a demographic perspective and broadens the analytical basis of inequality research for systematic comparative research.

This paper aims to refine conceptual treatment of the social facet in business relationships and reinforce its significance in the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) research tradition by integrating the concept of social capital in its original interpretation into the actor-resource-activity (ARA) model.

The paper begins by indicating some typical conceptual challenges associated with application of social capital in IMP. This is followed by a conceptual clarification that explores the origin and the essence of social capital in economic sociology. Finally, the paper proposes integrating social capital in its original interpretation into IMP’s ARA model and presents four propositions on how social capital is created in interaction between business actors.

The paper shows how bridging Bourdieu’s theory of social capital with the IMP approach may solve the identified conceptual challenges. This paper’s main contribution is a cyclical model depicting how social capital is created in business networks. It is integrated into the ARA model and designed specifically for studying the social facet of business relationships.

The paper is expected to aid IMP researchers in empirical contexts where the social component in business relationships is particularly prominent. As such, the novel approach presented could be used to further understand how social exchange processes are related to relationship governance, relationship initiation and development.

The proposed model shows how social capital is generated through the dynamic interplay in the social facets of actor, activity and resource dimensions, emphasising its creation dynamics. The model integrates insights from the classic works in economic sociology to strengthen the social side of IMP’s socioeconomic interface and is intended to be used as a tool for empirical application.

Purpose – This chapter examines individual and collective quests for authenticity, as experienced through consumption activities within an urban neighborhood. It investigates the interplay between consumption experiences as authenticating acts and authoritative performances (Arnould & Price, 2000), and considers the implications with regard to Zukin's (2010) theories on urban authenticity, and how it may be experienced as new beginnings and origins.

Methodology – The chapter is based on autoethnographic research that explores how interaction and identity definition within servicescapes can work to construct place-based community.

Findings – It describes how a servicescape of new beginnings offered opportunities for individual authentication that also enabled personal identification with a specific cultural group. This authentication drew on the cultural capital embedded in such locations, including their association with gentrification. This is contrast with the collective identification offered by a servicescape operating as a place of exposure. This site of origins displayed the social practices of a different demographic, which worked to highlight a relational link between the authentication practices of the broader neighborhood. These sites also worked cumulatively, to highlight the inauthenticities within my identification practices and offer opportunities for redress. Through this interplay it was possible to establish an authentic sense of neighborhood that drew on its new beginnings and its origins, and was both individual and collective.

Originality – Through the combination of urban and consumption-based perspectives of authenticity, and an autoethnographic methodology, this chapter offers a different insight into the ways identification with, and attachment to, a neighborhood can develop through consumption experiences.

The merits of acculturation and marginality theses are considered for the particular Management Bibliography case of upwardly mobile individuals who have followed educational and non‐educational routes. Two indicators — values and social integration — have been chosen as basic to the assumptions of the accultural and marginality theses, and the relation of upward occupational mobility to each is examined independently.

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether, how and why ethical investment practices of charities differ between two countries with quite different ideological and institutional frameworks – Norway and the UK.

The paper uses mixed methods and a cross-sectional field study design to explore the ethical investment practices of 300 of the largest charities by investments in the UK and Norway. Practices are theorized using the dual lens of institutional theory and social origins theory.

The paper provides evidence on why charities established the practice of ethical investment. The results show that large charities were more likely to have an ethical policy; that charities with moderate public sector funding were more likely to have an ethical policy. In line with institutional theory some Norwegian charities with public sector funding mimic the policy of the Government Pension Fund, and the ethical investment policy of Norwegian charities was more influenced by donors. Institutional entrepreneurs (charity founders) had a more prominent influence in UK charities.

The paper highlights that more research is needed on sovereign wealth funds, their investment practices and how they affect charities.

The findings of this paper highlight the potential role that the ethical investment practices of sovereign can play a soft regulatory function in changing the behaviour of other investors.

To the extent that ethical investment practices are construed as having a positive social impact, then this study shows how a government sovereign wealth fund can influence the spread of ethical investment practices.

This paper, which sits at the nexus of the charity and corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures, contributes by responding to calls for more research on charity practices in different countries and CSR practices in different countries. This comparison also contributes to the development of institutional theory by shedding light on the institutional influence of a sovereign wealth fund and its impact on others. The paper will be of value to academics, policy setters and regulators.

Until recently, motivation has been considered to be an individual phenomenon. Motivational theorists have accordingly conceptualised key constructs in individualistic terms and emphasised the individual origins and nature of motivation, although they have also long recognised that contextual or social factors have a significant influence on these individual processes. Recently this conceptualisation has been questioned as theorists have suggested, after Vygotsky, that motivation, like learning and thinking, might be social in nature. This idea was first suggested by Sivan (1986) more than twenty years ago but it received a major impetus with the publication of an article by Hickey (1997) eleven years later. Since that time interest in the social nature of motivation has grown as a small number of book chapters and journal articles have been published and conference papers have been presented on the topic. Although some motivational theorists remain sceptical (e.g. Winne, 2004) of this theoretical development, the inclusion of a section on sociocultural approaches to motivation in Perry, Turner, and Meyer's (2006) chapter on classrooms as contexts for motivating learning in the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Educational Psychology suggests that this perspective is being seriously considered by motivational researchers. Similarly, the inclusion of a chapter (Walker, in press-b) on the sociocultural approach to motivation in the 3rd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education indicates that this approach has achieved some recognition.

This work addresses what Michael E. Brown calls the immanence of sociality to individuality. It does so by focusing on the essentially social nature of human consciousness. I explore Durkheim’s analysis of human consciousness, beginning with totemism and concluding with his analysis of German consciousness at the time of World War I. I do so in order to provide some insight into the rise and nature of political movements, with a focus on extreme right wing political groups and leaders today as well as the spirit of the French Revolution in European and American history. With reference to Marx’s early writings on consciousness, spiritual nourishment, and the fettering of forces of production and his later writings on the critical significance of fetishism, and the role of “fictitious” capital, I conclude by claiming that bringing together the insights of Durkheim, Marx, and Spinoza can provide a way to analyze and address the interlocking social, political, economic, and cultural crises of today.