Intergenerational practice in the community: A focused ethnographic evaluation

An intergenerational community intervention based on contact theory and using ‘photovoice’ methods was designed to change negative age‐group stereotypes and promote sense of community. A focused ethnographic approach was adopted. Participants were 18 young people and 13 older adults. Data from focus groups, carried out with each generation separately, and observational field notes were analysed using thematic analysis; credibility checks were carried out by auditing and respondent validation. Before the intergenerational intervention, both generations presented age‐group stereotypes and both experienced only a weak sense of community. After the intervention, both generations felt that intergenerational contact had reduced age‐group stereotypes and enhanced recognition of intergenerational similarity; many also articulated a positive sense of community. The intervention has promise for helping young people and older adults to feel more socially included. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

(De)colonizing Culture in Community Psychology: Reflections from Critical Social Science

Since its inception, community psychology has been interested in cultural matters relating to issues of diversity and marginalization. However, the field has tended to understand culture as static social markers or as the background for understanding group differences. In this article the authors contend that culture is inseparable from who we are and what we do as social beings. Moreover, culture is continually shaped by socio-historical and political processes intertwined within the globalized history of power. The authors propose a decolonizing standpoint grounded in critical social science to disrupt understandings of cultural matters that marginalize others. This standpoint would move the field toward deeper critical thinking, reflexivity and emancipatory action. The authors present their work to illustrate how they integrate a decolonizing standpoint to community psychology research and teaching. They conclude that community psychology must aim towards intercultural work engaging its political nature from a place of ontological/epistemological/methodological parity.     

Exemplarist Environmental Ethics

This article argues that environmental ethics can deemphasize environmental problem‐solving in preference for a more exemplarist mode. This mode will renarrate what we admire in those we have long admired, in order to make them resonate with contemporary ethical needs. First, I outline a method problem that arose for me in ethnographic fieldwork, a problem that I call, far too reductively, “solution thinking.” Second, I relate that method problem to movements against “quandary ethics” in ethical theory more broadly. Third, I discuss some interpretive work I am engaged in about Henry David Thoreau and how it bears on the methodological issues my fieldwork raised. I argue that some of the most important icons of right relation to environment, especially Francis of Assisi and Thoreau, should be envisioned as far more politically invested than they usually are. They demonstrate to scholars of religious ethics that an exemplarist ethic focused on character need not neglect politics.     

Ethnography and Subjectivity in Comparative Religious Ethics

The ethnographic turn in religious studies has responded to important developments, such as the rejection of value neutrality and the need to better address the lived experience of individuals and communities. In this essay, I affirm the value of ethnography as a method in comparative religious ethics, but distinguish between two ways of framing ethnography in relation to ethics. The first way insists on the hard limits of translating values across cultures, and tends to marginalize or dismiss normative inquiry. The second way allows for the interpretation of practices of ethical justification in diverse cultural contexts. I argue that this second category of ethnography is more congenial to the work of comparative religious ethicists, since an integral part of ethical inquiry involves reflecting on, and making arguments about, social norms and practices.     

Employees’ perceived institutional importance,organizational norms,and organizational citizenship behavior: Insights from a multilevel assessment of the institutional anomie theory

ABSTRACT

This study contributes to the understanding of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and extending the application of institutional anomie theory (IAT). Employing a multilevel moderation framework, this paper explored the influence of employees’ perceived institutional importance to their demonstration of OCB and the moderating impacts of organizational norms on this relationship. Utilizing data of 243 employees from 34 banks in the Philippines, results of the hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis revealed the positive influence of the importance of the economy, family, polity, and religion on employees’ citizenship acts. Furthermore, goal emphasis and socio-emotional support have significant interacting effects on the association between perceived institutional importance and OCB.     

MORAL COMMODITIES AND THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM

This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call “journeys to the margins”: trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler’s ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with one case study, “Come and See Tours” to Israel/Palestine, I interrogate how the commodified form of these trips shape possibilities for ethical subjectivation. First, I demonstrate ways in which journeys to the margins market ethical transformation to American Christian consumers in the form of packaged moral narratives. Second, I focus on the paradoxical nature of journeys to the margins as simultaneously packaged commodities and ethical encounters. Finally, I use reformulations of freedom emerging from the anthropology of ethics to argue that possibilities for ethical subjectivation occur in moments when tour ideals come into tension with lived realities.     

On Comparative Religious Ethics as a Field of Study

This essay is a critical engagement with recent assessments of comparative religious ethics by John Kelsay and Jung Lee. Contra Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo‐Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, the authors argue that comparative religious ethics is and should be practiced as a field of study in active conversation with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods that have their roots in multiple disciplines. Cross‐pollination from a variety of disciplines is a strength of comparative ethics, which has enlivened recent and ongoing research on ethics, not a problem to be resolved by convergence on a single, distinctively comparative project. The authors also argue in response to Lee and Kelsay that while individual comparative studies of virtue and personal formation can be flawed in various ways, this line of research has been productive and at times very compelling. Moreover, attention to comparative virtue ethics shows how scholarship on some ethical topics necessitates drawing on a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, a conclusion relevant to all work in religious ethics today.     

Institutional rearing is associated with lower general life satisfaction in adulthood

We analyzed whether individuals reared in institutions differ in their general life satisfaction from people raised in their families. The data comprised of 19,210 German adults (51.5% female) aged from 17 to 101 years and were provided by the SOEP, an ongoing, nationally representative longitudinal study in Germany. Compared to people raised in families, individuals reared in institutions reported lower general life satisfaction in the manner of a dose response relationship controlling their parents’ education and occupational prestige. The association was moderated by participants’ age such that with increasing age the association between institutional rearing and lower general life satisfaction decreased. Further, the relationship was partly mediated by the individuals own education/socio-economic attainment in adulthood, physical health, and relationship status.     

Introduction: Ethnography,Moral Theory,and Comparative Religious Ethics

Representing a spectrum of intellectual concerns and methodological commitments in religious ethics, the contributors to this focus issue consider and assess the advantages and disadvantages of the shift in recent comparative religious ethics away from a rootedness in moral theory toward a model that privileges the ethnography of moral worlds. In their own way, all of the contributors think through and emphasize the meaning, importance, and place of normativity in recent comparative religious ethics.     

Revising the Communication Mediation Model for a New Political Communication Ecology

A long tradition of research focuses on conversation as a key catalyst for community integration and a focal mediator of media influence on participation. Changes in media systems, political environments, and electoral campaigning demand that these influences, and the communication mediation model, be revised to account for the growing convergence of media and conversation, heightened partisan polarization, and deepening social contentiousness in media politics. We propose a revised communication mediation model that continues to emphasize the centrality of face‐to‐face and online talk in democratic life, while considering how mediational and self‐reflective processes that encourage civic engagement and campaign participation might also erode institutional legitimacy, foster distrust and partisan divergence, disrupting democratic functioning as a consequence of a new communication ecology.