Evaluation of Life Quality and its Spatial Mismatch with Local Economic Development in Large Chinese Cities

Quality of life (QoL) is an important factor which influences local economic development (LED). The study aims to evaluate the quality of life in large Chinese cities and explore the relationship between life quality and local economic development. By constructing the index system of QoL of large cities, this study analyses the spatial pattern of QoL in 39 largest cities across China and then introduces the spatial mismatch method to analyse the relationship between QoL and LED. The results point to the significant differences in QoL among large Chinese cities and unlock the spatial mismatch between QoL and LED in these cities. The quality of life is generally better than local economic development in large cities across Western China and different cities display various spatial mismatch features. This study also shows that local economic development can promote quality of life, though they do not merely stand in a quantitative relation. Quality of life is related more to the economic structure. It is suggested that future urban development focus on high value-added and environmental-friendly industries, which can improve both local economic development and quality of life.

     

Subjective well‐being and human welfare around the world as reflected in the Gallup World Poll

We present data on well‐being and quality of life in the world, including material quality of life such as not going hungry, physical health quality of life such as longevity, social quality of life such as social support, environmental health such as clean water, equality in income and life satisfaction, and levels of subjective well‐being (SWB). There are large differences between nations in SWB, and these are predicted not only by economic development, but also by environmental health, equality and freedom in nations. Improving trends in SWB are seen in many countries, but declining SWB is evident in a few. Besides average differences in SWB between nations, there are also large disparities within many countries. We discuss the policy opportunities provided by national accounts of SWB, which are increasingly being adopted by many societies. They provide the opportunity to inform policy deliberations with well‐being information that reflects not only economic development, but also other facets of quality of life as well. National accounts of SWB reflect the quality of life in areas such as health, social relationships and the natural environment, and therefore capture a broader view of societal well‐being than afforded by measures of economic progress alone.     

Religiosity and life satisfaction across nations

This paper investigates the relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction in 79 nations using World Values Survey data. Extant literature analyzes religiosity and life satisfaction at person level. But religiosity is an attribute of both, persons and societies. To solve methodological problems evident in previous work a random coefficient multilevel model is employed to account for the fact that individuals are nested within countries. This study shows that the relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction is bimodal. Religious people tend to be either very satisfied or dissatisfied with life. The relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction is also two-dimensional. Forms of religiosity that promote social capital predict high life satisfaction. People have so called “need to belong” and religion helps to satisfy it. On the other hand, forms of religiosity that do not promote social capital do not predict high life satisfaction. Religiosity is also context-dependent. Religious people are happier in religious nations. In other words, it is not only religiosity per se that makes people happy, but rather a social setting it offers.     

Less Happiness in Cities,but Why and so What? One More Reason to Stop Overpopulation

Average happiness in big cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants is, in the USA, lower than average happiness in towns and in the country. Adam Kozaryn offers several explanations. One explanation is that core characteristics of cities, such as size, density and heterogeneity lead to a deterioration of social relations. This explanation is insufficient because average happiness in cities can also be relatively high, as is the case in poor nations, compared to happiness in towns and in the country. Important factors like relative safety and the availability of services have to be considered additionally. A second explanation is that capitalism plays a more dominant role in cities, with similar negative effects. This explanation is also insufficient because the negative effects of capitalism are not limited to cities. A more plausible explanation is that average happiness in American cities is relatively low, because of the interaction of their core characteristics and capitalism. More people should live in smaller places, but this is impossible. There are too many people and big cities are needed to minimize their ecological footprint. Overpopulation is the root of the problem. A discussion about the maximum size of the population is needed. There is no reason to fear for a negative impact on individual freedom, but people can pay attention to this discussion if they make up their mind about having children.     

Diversity and Community Can Coexist

We examine the (in)compatibility of diversity and sense of community by means of agent‐based models based on the well‐known Schelling model of residential segregation and Axelrod model of cultural dissemination. We find that diversity and highly clustered social networks, on the assumptions of social tie formation based on spatial proximity and homophily, are incompatible when agent features are immutable, and this holds even for multiple independent features. We include both mutable and immutable features into a model that integrates Schelling and Axelrod models, and we find that even for multiple independent features, diversity and highly clustered social networks can be incompatible on the assumptions of social tie formation based on spatial proximity and homophily. However, this incompatibility breaks down when cultural diversity can be sufficiently large, at which point diversity and clustering need not be negatively correlated. This implies that segregation based on immutable characteristics such as race can possibly be overcome by sufficient similarity on mutable characteristics based on culture, which are subject to a process of social influence, provided a sufficiently large “scope of cultural possibilities” exists.     

The Mixed Blessings of Material Progress: Diminishing Returns in the Pursuit of Happiness

The progress of nations is widely believed to enhance the happiness of their people. However, whether progress, as currently defined and derived, is increasing happiness and well-being in rich nations is problematic. The paper explores the relationship between economic growth and human development and the use of subjective measures of both life satisfaction and social quality of life as indicators of progress, noting the complex nature of well-being and the differences between personal and social perspectives. It questions whether widely used, simple measures are adequate, and whether greater happiness should, in any case, be regarded as the ultimate goal of progress.     

The Antecedent Impact of Culture and Economic Growth on Nations` Creativity and Innovation Capability

Even though the literature has widely examined culture’s effect on nations’ creativity and innovation level, it has done little to address the system theory’s perspective. However, as proponents of the system theory have argued, nations’ creativity and innovation is the cumulative effort of the various stakeholders who operate as a system, so any assessment of a nation’s creativity and innovation must consider these stakeholders’ role. This study examines the overlooked effect of culture on the broader system aspect of eighty nations’ creativity and innovationto ensure representation by both developed and developing countries. Structural equation modeling using partial least squares software is applied to analyze the data. The study found out that nations with individualist and low power distance cultural values have the highest creativity and innovation, and that a nation’s economic growth level moderates the impact of the individualist cultural value. Policymakers who seek to develop a strategy that promotes creativity and innovation at the national level benefit from these findings. Future research directions are suggested.     

Civic religion in England: Traditions and transformations

As the religious diversity of English towns and cities has grown over the past thirty years due to the establishment in some places of sizeable communities of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, as well as other faiths, there have been important changes to local public religion. Traditional civic ceremonies, such as Remembrance Sunday, as well as new forms of civic celebration and commemoration, are now increasingly taking account of the diversity of faiths represented in Britain. This paper examines the consequences of religious diversity for English civic religion by looking at some of the traditions of civic ceremonies in England and at the way in which they have been transformed by the changing religious landscape of towns and cities. The paper also explores some of the dilemmas and questions that have emerged both for the Church of England as well as for the other faith communities when it comes to the design and delivery of civic ceremonies.     

Zombie multiculturalism meets liberative difference: searching for a new discourse of diversity

This paper grapples with an unresolved tension – twenty-first century Britain is indelibly multicultural and yet diversity is increasingly depicted as a threat to social cohesion. A society characterised by superdiverse cities where some suggest that ‘multiculturalism has failed’. On the basis of an analysis of three dominant theoretical and ideological discourses – community cohesion, multiculturalism and interculturalism – it will be argued that there is an urgent need to forge a new understanding of diversity that can counter the zombie discourse that characterises current debates about diversity in Britain. Difference will be framed as a potential source of mutual liberation, not a problem seeking a solution. It will be argued that a critical engagement with political theology can help us to fashion a new discourse of diversity that is characterised by a hermeneutics of liberative difference, which can help to defeat the zombies sucking the life out of diverse Britain.     

Suicidal Behavior in the Western Pacific Region: Characteristics and Trends

Current knowledge of suicidal behavior in the Western Pacific region is relatively limited when compared to other areas of the world. This area is characterized by a wide diversity of social, economic, and cultural aspects that do not permit any homogenous reading of suicide phenomena. Data from countries of the region included in this article suggest the existence of important differences among nations in terms of gender, age, and methods of suicide, as well role of mental illness. In addition, the Western Pacific region appears to be affected by higher rates of suicide than other areas in the world, with signs of progressive worsening in recent years and worrying predictions for the next two decades. The Suicide Trends in At‐Risk Territories (START) Study, initiated by the World Health Organization Regional Office in Manila, seeks to research the incidence of both fatal and nonfatal suicidal behavior in countries of the region and to implement interventions for suicide attempters. This ambitious project is expected to standardize data collection procedures and improve the knowledge cultural factors in suicide.     

A Feminist Critique of the Alleged Southern Debt

Neoliberal globalization has deepened the impoverishment and marginalization of many women. This system is maintained by the debt supposedly owed by many poor nations in the global South to a few rich nations in the global North, because the obligation to service the debt traps the people of the South within an economic order that severely disadvantages them. I offer several reasons for thinking that many of these alleged debt obligations are not morally binding, especially on Southern women.     

The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken Problem

Nanotechnologies that have been linked to the possibility of enhancing cognitive capabilities of human beings might also be deployed to reduce or eliminate such capabilities in non-human vertebrate animals. A surprisingly large literature on the ethics of such disenhancement has been developed in response to the suggestion that it would be an ethically defensible response to animal suffering both in medical experimentation and in industrial livestock production. However, review of this literature illustrates the difficulty of formulating a coherent ethical debate. Well structured arguments for disenhancement can be made on the basis of mainstream views on the basis of ethical obligations to animals, but these arguments have not been persuasive against the moral intuition that disenhancements are unethical. At the same time, attempts to ground these intuitions in a coherent philosophical doctrine have been plagued by logical fallacies and question begging assertions. As such, the debate over animal disenhancement forecasts an enduring conundrum with respect to the core question of transforming the nature of sentient beings, and this conundrum is logically independent of claims that relate either to the distinctive of human beings or to issues deriving from the emphasis on enhancement.     

The ideological manipulation of Hebrew literature in English translation in the 1970s and 1980s

In the past two decades, the field of translation studies has increasingly focused on the role of ideology in literary translation and cross-cultural transfer. This paper presents findings from the close textual comparison of original works of Hebrew literature and their English translations published in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. I specify translation strategies that have had ideological effects on the source texts, and demonstrate how historically or ethically charged subject matter was manipulated so as to subdue “problematic” aspects of the text for the (largely Jewish) target audience. The two major categories of manipulations had to do with the moral dimension of the portrayal of Israel and Israeli society, particularly in subject matter related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; and with the relationship between Israel and other nations, and between Israel and Diaspora Jews. As stressed by recent sociological studies of translation, the translations can be seen both as reflective of contemporary socio-political trends of thought, and as practices playing an unseen role in strengthening these trends.     

'Mid-Life crisis' and its implications in counselling

The term 'mid-life crisis' is increasingly used both in everyday speech and in the professional literature as an explanation of certain disturbing psychological symptoms and uncharacteristic behaviour in middle age. This paper outlines the symptoms and the causes presumed by a wide range o f literature (mainly American) to underlie them. It then examines empirical research for evidence of the existence and nature of the phenomenon labelled 'mid-life crisis' and, finding little, proposes alternative explanations for its symptoms and for the emergence and use of the concept in recent years. It concludes with an examination of implications for guidance and counselling.     

Dystopian Fiction for Young People: Instructive Tales of Resilience

ABSTRACT

The rise and popularity of dystopian fiction in recent years is quite marked, and critics often attribute such high sales of books and box office as being linked to the impact September 11 has had on the world, especially in the United States. Although the events of September 11, 2001 saw a heightened anxiety by nations and their citizens about the fear and threat of terrorism—an anxiety that is paradoxically lowered and raised by increased surveillance practices, security checks, and warnings—other changes since the last stages of the twentieth century have also raised concerns and anxieties. The processes of globalization, immigration, and advances in technology have brought about many social and economic changes, and advances in nanobiology are redefining the very essence of life. The extrapolation of the world people currently know into the very worst of future scenarios is the subject of dystopian fiction. Dystopian narratives are diverse in their treatment of future scenarios, with some presenting a pessimistic outlook and others offering “a horizon of hope” (Moylan, 2000, p. 147).     

Through a Glass Darkly What Do People Learn in Videoconferences?

Interactive video communication, both in conference rooms and on desktop computers, is becoming an increasingly attractive technology, in large measure for economic reasons. In a longitudinal field study, the authors demonstrate, as have others, positive first-order efficiency effects of this technology. That is, people can achieve the same levels of performance in video interaction as they do in face-to-face interaction. However, the authors also demonstrate some second-order differences between face-to-face and video interaction. They show that the impressions people form of remote others are different from and less positive than the impressions they form of face-to-face others, starting from an equal baseline. The authors also show that people make use of different kinds of information informing their impressions. They frame their results within the context of growing use of interactive video to suggest implications for research and organizational practice.     

Gender,Marriage, and Suicide Acceptability: A Comparative Analysis

The previous work on suicide acceptability hasneglected gender specific analysis of the marriagesuicide acceptability linkage as well as cross-nationalanalysis. The present study fills these gaps in the literature through an analysis of 15nations. Controlling for alternative predictors ofsuicide acceptability, marriage lowers suicideacceptability for both males and females. Further,marriage lowers suicide acceptability more for men than forwomen. This gendered relationship has the same strengthin nations both high and low in economic genderequality. The results provide the first comparativeevidence on the subject. The findings support the notionthat men derive relatively more benefits from marriagethan women. However, the strongest correlates of suicideacceptability (e.g., religiosity, liberalism, French residence) affect men and womenequally.     

ROLE OF INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS IN SUPPORTING SOCIAL VALUES TO SUSTAIN ECONOMIC SUCCESS IN NEWLY-INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS

Organizations are evolving into a flatter structure with fewer intermediate organizational levels. Especially, fewer middle managers are needed to relay communications up and down the hierarchy. As information technology is deployed for competitive advantage, fulfilling internal communication becomes as crucial as fulfilling external communications with suppliers and customers. Fulfilling internal communications is especially crucial because incorporation of social (organizational) values and corporate culture requires communication. As the role of communication expands, the role of information technology in promoting communication is fostering experimentation in organizing work and in management practices. For example, electronic mail promotes equality and consensus in a manner that enables participatory rather than authoritarian management. An infrastructure network is a telecommunications network that provides basic communication services on which public, e.g. government, or private organizations depend for their survival. An infrastructure network is distinguished from any ordinary communications facility because it is both pervasive and comprehensive to promote group participation. An infrastructure network is further distinguished by its robustness that allows sufficient bandwidth for substantial resource sharing. Infrastructure networks represent a vital opportunity for newly-industrialized nations in Asia. In these nations, through effective communication, social values related to the ‘group’ will produce a better payoff. This payoff would result from the momentum and partnership experience generated by recent economic success. Also, the relatively smaller size of these nations would enable easier networking. Finally, as demonstrated by their success and as a result of their smaller scale, the ability of these nations to focus on what needs to be done will ensure the wise investment of funds earned from economic success in projects that will guarantee future success. This paper recommends the development of infrastructure networks including national and local networks as well as gateways (to other national networks) and other network, e.g. data bases, resources. The involvement of all constituencies, government and education as well as the private sector, will encourage experiments with information technology in organizing work and in management practices that incorporate social values.     

Fading Majority Cultures: The Implications of Transnationalism and Demographic Changes for Immigrant Acculturation

Processes of globalisation, migration, and increasing cultural diversity within nations have resulted in a growing need to understand intercultural relations in plural societies. Accordingly, this paper highlights the relations between immigrants and members of host societies and considers how social and demographic changes may affect acculturation and intercultural relations and shape future psychological theory and research in these areas. Based on a combination of empirical data and informed speculation, we discuss three significant changes. First is the growing importance of transnational relations due to a large degree of faster and cheaper forms of communication and traveling. A second important factor is changing demographics characterised by the growth of mega‐cities and the increasing proportion of first and second generation of immigrants in contemporary immigration nations and – consequently – the diminishing size of native majority groups. Third is the greater acceptance of a global culture, which is shaped by globalisation and coloured by local multi‐ethnic characteristics and creolisation processes in each country of settlement. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How living in economically unequal societies shapes our minds and our social lives

In recent decades, the economies of many countries have produced increasingly unequal outcomes for the rich and poor. This economic trend has attracted interest from members of the media, public and political classes as well as researchers who are interested in its societal implications. While this research has traditionally been the purview of economists and sociologists, there has been a burgeoning growth in research that has sought to understand the psychology of economic inequality. In this review, we summarize this work, focusing on two major themes: (1) how people perceive the scale of economic inequality and appraise its significance, and (2) how living in an economically unequal environment shapes people's social lives. Together, this work affirms claims that economic inequality is ‘the defining issue of our time’ (Obama, 2013) with a great deal of destructive potential. We identify important questions that await further research attention.