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Material Interests (material + interest)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	40%

Selected Abstracts

Disclosures and Asset Returns

ECONOMETRICA, Issue 1 2003
Hyun Song Shin
Public information in financial markets often arrives through the disclosures of interested parties who have a material interest in the reactions of the market to the new information. When the strategic interaction between the sender and the receiver is formalized as a disclosure game with verifiable reports, equilibrium prices can be given a simple characterization in terms of the concatenation of binomial pricing trees. There are a number of empirical implications. The theory predicts that the return variance following a poor disclosed outcome is higher than it would have been if the disclosed outcome were good. Also, when investors are risk averse, this leads to negative serial correlation of asset returns. Other points of contact with the empirical literature are discussed. [source]

A Curriculum of Aloha?

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2000
Colonialism, Tourism in Hawai, i's Elementary Textbooks
In this article I question the efficacy of (post)colonial Hawai,i's seemingly progressive Hawaiian studies curriculum by proceeding through a detailed textual analysis of the curriculum's core textbooks and instructional guides. Building upon Foucault's work in discourse genealogy and new historicism's technique of reading a text alongside an unlikely partner from another genre, I demonstrate how the images of Hawai,i and Hawaiians represented in the Hawaiian studies curriculum are strikingly similar to the images that were first projected upon Hawaiians by early colonial voyagers and have since been perpetuated through Hawai,i's visitor industry. By juxtaposing the school texts with documents used for the training of tourist industry workers, I explore how the material interests of the visitor industry are expressed in a curriculum that attempts to interpellate young Hawaiian students as low-paid tourist industry labor. In giving an example of how a well-intended curricular inclusion effort has had unintended, paradoxical effects, I raise difficult questions about the inclusion of underrepresented minority groups in the school curricula of (post)colonial societies in which colonialist economic- and psychodynamics continue to exist. Turning the logic of visibility politics on its head, I send a warning to all indigenous and disadvantaged groups engaged in parallel struggles across the globe, cautioning them to think closely before lobbying for inclusion in area studies curricula that may ultimately do more damage than good. [source]

Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá-Atlantic Religion

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2003
J. Lorand Matory
Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of selectively narrating Yorùbá-Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re-casting of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists abroad but also led Brazilian nationalist power-brokers to marginalise the male, and often reputedly homosexual, priests who give the lie to Landes's interpretation. In the service of a longdistance Yorùbá nationalist agenda, sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has declared traditional Yorùbá society ,genderless', and found, among both North American feminist scholars and Yorùbá male scholars, allies in concealing the copious evidence of gender and gender inequality in Yorùbá cultural history. What these historical constructions lack in truth value they make up for in their power to mobilise new communities and alliances around the defence of a shared secret. The article addresses how politically tendentious scholarship on gender has inspired new social hierarchies and boundaries through the truths that some high-profile scholars have chosen to silence. [source]

Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: Jubilee 2000, Debt Relief, and Moral Action in International Politics

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2007
JOSHUA WILLIAM BUSBY
Do states and decision-makers ever act for moral reasons? And if they do, is it only when it is convenient or relatively costless for them to do so? A number of advocacy movements,on developing country debt relief, climate change, landmines, and other issues,emerged in the 1990s to ask decision-makers to make foreign policy decisions on that basis. The primary advocates were motivated not by their own material interests but broader notions of right and wrong. What contributes to the domestic acceptance of these moral commitments? Why do some advocacy efforts succeed where others fail? Through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for developing country debt relief, this article offers an account of persuasion based on strategic framing by advocates to get the attention of decision-makers. Such strategic but not narrowly self-interested activity allows weak actors to leverage existing value and/or ideational traditions to build broader political coalitions. This article, through case studies of debt relief in the United States and Japan, also links the emerging literature on strategic framing to the domestic institutional context and the ways veto players or "policy gatekeepers" evaluate trade-offs between costs and values. [source]

Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2008
Theodore P. Gerber
"Predatory policing" occurs where police officers mainly use their authority to advance their own material interests rather than to fight crime or protect the interests of elites. These practices have the potential to seriously compromise the public's trust in the police and other legal institutions, such as courts. Using data from six surveys and nine focus groups conducted in Russia, we address four empirical questions: (1) How widespread are public encounters with police violence and police corruption in Russia? (2) To what extent does exposure to these two forms of police misconduct vary by social and economic characteristics? (3) How do Russians perceive the police, the courts, and the use of violent methods by the police? (4) How, if at all, do experiences of police misconduct affect these perceptions? Our results suggest that Russia conforms to a model of predatory policing. Despite substantial differences in its law enforcement institutions and cultural norms regarding the law, Russia resembles the United States in that direct experiences of police abuse reduce confidence in the police and in the legal system more generally. The prevalence of predatory policing in Russia has undermined Russia's democratic transition, which should call attention to the indispensable role of the police and other public institutions in the success of democratic reforms. [source]