scholarly journals The Role of Childhood Participation in Cultural Activities in the Promotion of Pro-Social Behaviours in Later Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 5744
Author(s):  
Brian Garrod ◽  
David Dowell

Cultural organisations often serve as guardians of cultural heritage and, as such, cultural sustainability depends on their ongoing vitality. Many organisations in the cultural sector are, however, presently experiencing intense financial pressures. With their traditional sources of funding being progressively cut off, such organisations are focusing increasingly on monetary donations and the volunteering of time on the part of the general public to help plug the financial gap. Promoting and managing such pro-social behaviours can, however, be costly activities in themselves, so it is critical for cultural organisations to be able to target those segments of the public with the greatest propensity to give. This study sets out to address that need. The findings indicate that individuals who were involved in cultural activities as children are statistically more likely to volunteer their time in later life, not only with cultural organisations but also with good causes in general. In certain circumstances, this is also true of donating money. The cultural organisations benefiting from these pro-social behaviours need not be those with which the individual was involved in their childhood; nor need they be associated with the same form of culture. Importantly, continuous involvement in an activity from childhood into adulthood is not a necessary pre-condition for pro-social behaviour in later life.

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (6) ◽  
pp. 796-815 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Zamponi ◽  
Lorenzo Bosi

Alternative action organizations (AAOs) are collective bodies engaged in carrying out alternatives to dominant socioeconomic and cultural practices through actions that aim to provide people with alternative ways of enduring day-to-day difficulties and challenges in hard economic times. They are often interpreted as merely “philanthropic” actors, although it is not rare to see them go beyond the provision of direct services to people in need and end up pursuing political goals through political means. This article focuses on the process of politicization, that is, the transition of issues from the private to the public sphere and thus the use of public forms of contention (e.g., protest) proposing public solutions at the collective level instead of private solutions at the individual level. We argue for the role of the crisis in the politicization of AAOs. In particular, we show that the appropriation of the context as a context of economic crisis in the discourse of AAOs has a visible effect on their politicization, in terms of both repertoire of actions and goals. Furthermore, we show that social solidarity organizations, those that are not inherently politicized, are the main protagonists of this crisis-triggered transition. The article draws on statistical analysis of the data collected through the coding of AAOs’ websites in Greece, Italy, and Spain.


Author(s):  
Susanne T. Dale Nordbakke

Using nationally representative survey of 4723 people aged 67 or older living in Norway, this paper explores the link between wellbeing, out-of-home activity participation and mobility in old age. A basic assumption of this paper is that out-home activities mediated through mobility can contribute to needs fulfillment, and, hence, wellbeing. This study explores the role of preferences, and individual and contextual constraints, in both the overall level of out-of-home activity participation in old age and the level of participation in three specific out-of-home activities (grocery shopping, visiting family or friends, and attending cultural activities). A person’s degree of home orientation is used as an indicator of preference for indoor activities. The findings suggest that age, living status, income, education, holding a driving license, health, social network, centrality of residence, and the quality of the public transport supply have a significant impact on the overall participation level. In addition, the study suggests that the types of constraints vary between travel purposes and the location of activities. Moreover, there is an independent effect of the degree of home orientation on the overall participation level, on the degree of visits to family and friends and on the degree of attending cultural activities, which suggest that people differ in their need for out-of-home activities. However, degree of home orientation has no impact on the degree of grocery shopping, which might imply that grocery shopping is more independent of preferences. The main conclusion from this study is that the extent to which out-of-home activities fulfill needs vary between individuals, depending on their preferences as well as the interplay between individual abilities and resources and contextual conditions.


2005 ◽  
Vol 360 (1458) ◽  
pp. 1133-1144 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R Krebs

We all take risks, but most of the time we do not notice them. We are generally bad at judging the risks we take, and in the end, for some of us, this will prove fatal. Eating, like everything else in life, is not risk free. Is that next mouthful pure pleasure, or will it give you food poisoning? Will it clog your arteries as well as filling your stomach? This lecture weaves together three strands—the public understanding of science, the perception of risk and the role of science in informing government policy—as it explains how food risks are assessed and managed by government and explores the boundaries between the responsibilities of the individual and the regulator. In doing so, it draws upon the science of risk assessment as well as our attitudes to risk in relation to issues such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, dioxins in salmon and diet and obesity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-59
Author(s):  
Niina Mäntylä ◽  
Laura Perttola ◽  
Kristian Siikavirta

Legal coherence and predictable decision-making are the cornerstones of Finnish administrative law. The aim of this research is to analyze the factors that make administrative decisions unpredictable in Finland today. Why is the challenge so significant for the authorities? The factor analysis revealed six main features affecting predictability in the legal regulation of Finnish public governance: the increasing use of soft law, the devolution of government, deregulation, the changing role of the individual, the blurring of the division between the public and the private sector and the influence of international and EU-law.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice O'Connor

This paper discusses the role of social scientific expertise in the emergence of poverty as a problem and a priority for public intervention in the United States during the 1960s. That the social scientific experts defined “the poverty problem” narrowly, as a problem of individuals lacking income or otherwise caught in a “cycle of poverty,” can be understood in terms of a series of historical transformations that played out in overlapping processes of disembedding: of social science from social reform; of economic from social and political knowledge; and of poverty from the study of structured patterns and experiences of stratification and inequality. The structurally disembedded, individualized concept of poverty that emerged from these transformations presented Great Society liberal reformers with a legible problem that they could fix without recourse to major reforms. It would eventually be recast by neoliberal reformers to justify a more ideological form of disembedding that shifted the boundaries of responsibility for dealing with poverty from the social and the public to the individual and personal.


Author(s):  
Frank Den Hartog ◽  
Jan De Nijs

Given the ever increasing number of Wi-Fi devices in use by the public, the progressing urbanisation, and the current attempts by the industry to improve Wi-Fi system performance, we here analyse the case of apartment blocks with residents increasingly suffering from Wi-Fi over-congestion. Here, individuals use private Wi-Fi networks in an ''in house'' environment to achieve cordless connectivity to the Internet. We show that Wi-Fi in apartment blocks is a true commons and, therefore, over-congestion can only be avoided by having the individual access point (AP) operators collaborating with each other. We found that such collaboration is not inhibited by current regulation, but neither can it be enforced. However, as AP operators will most likely enter collaboration voluntarily, further regulation is not deemed necessary.


Author(s):  
Haykaz Mangardich ◽  
Stanka A. Fitneva

Language is deeply involved in the management of human reputations. In this chapter, we review some of the linguistic features that relate to reputation, drawing extensively on ethnographic and experimental research. At the individual level, what the speaker says, and the physical form of speech contribute to establishing the public face of the speaker. At the interaction level, linguistic devices such as hedges and silences regulate the relations among speakers, expressing politeness, deference, acceptance, or rejection. Finally, linguistic speech acts such as apologies explicitly manipulate the speaker’s and others’ reputations. We also highlight some of the structural features of gossip, which is a genre of conversation that paradigmatically illustrates the role of language in reputation management.


Author(s):  
Adetunji Ogunyemi

This article examines the essential issues in the economic development of Nigeria in the 1960s as shown in all the budget speeches presented to the parliament by her first indigenous Finance Minister, Festus Okotie-Eboh. The study highlights the Minister’s efforts to obtain parliamentary approval for the Appropriation Bills laid by his government before the Nigerian House of Representatives in Lagos. The purpose being to underscore the role of the individual in shaping the course of the development of any nation. Hence, the study identifies the fiscal policy orientation upon which the key programmes and projects reflected in such speeches were built. It also establishes the extent to which the projects were achieved. The study concludes that Chief Okotie-Eboh’s parliamentary speeches on Nigeria’s federal budget, though loaded with oversized literary niceties, were still, rather than depictive of a mere display of endless parliamentary filibustering, indeed, a veritable part of the sources of Nigeria’s public history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Alanna Beroiza

This article examines the visual dynamics underlying wrong-body narratives of gender through Lacanian psychoanalytic readings of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair (2015) and Pedro Almodóvar’s film La piel que habito (Spain/France, 2011). Leibovitz’s photographs, seen as the public culmination of Jenner’s gender transition, and Almodóvar’s fictional film, centered on the forced surgical sex reassignment of one of its characters, both comment on the role of technically produced images in constructing visually articulated bodily materiality as central to gender. Staged in Jenner’s domestic space, often before mirrors that reflect the camera alongside its subject, Lei-bovitz’s photos portray Jenner at the center of complex scenarios of mastery over her image. These images demonstrate an awareness of their constructed nature at the same time as they offer themselves as the optical proof of Jenner’s transition; they reveal and, ostensibly, dominate what Lacan refers to as the fundamental misrecognition at the heart of all scopic scenarios of recognition. Almodóvar’s film imagines the reverse scenario in which the body-as-image exerts violent control over the individual, not only erasing the apparent sex of one of its characters, Vicente, but also, and less tolerably, attempting to erase the absence, or misrecognition, of his body in its status as what Lacan calls “objet a,” or object of desire. The distinct ways in which Leibovitz’s images and Almodóvar’s film theorize the relationship between bodies and images with regard to misrecognition and absence point to the continued necessity of considering the influence of scopic relations in formations of gender identity.


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