Mediating microinsurance: the techniques of translation

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, microinsurance has taken off in South Africa. The strength of this market is fuelled almost exclusively by funeral insurance, unsurprising considering the immense cultural value South Africans place on funerals. Moreover, insurance companies have achieved scale by working through brokers who are embedded within community-based institutions like burial societies and funeral parlours. The incursion of ‘insurance culture’ into this sphere has thus resulted in an ecosystem in which formal and informal institutions are in fluid states of tension and cooperation. Mediators sustain this ecosystem and enable the extension of microinsurance into low-income communities. I employ Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘translation’ in my analysis of three types of mediators: insurance agents, funeral parlour operators, and burial society administrators. The paper, which is based on fieldwork I conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, focuses on these actors’ specific techniques of translation, i.e. the different strategies/practices used to reconcile the disparate rationalities and institutions of the formal insurance system with those of the informal risk management sphere. An analysis attuned to the various social identities and positions embodied by these brokers reveals the dislocations, ambiguities, conflicts, and opportunities generated by the expansion of microinsurance markets into the low-income terrain.     

《建党伟业》：一部气势恢弘的献礼片

影片题材宏大拍摄《建党伟业》这部献礼片,是中国电影集团在2009年《建国大业》剧上映获得观众好评和高上座率后决定的。当时初定的影片名称为《建党大业》,两部影片系姐妹片,后来经有关领导和专家建议,将片名改成了《建党伟业》。     

Movie stars and box office revenues: an empirical analysis

This paper examines the relationship between star power and box office revenues using box office data from nine countries and a continuous measure of star power based on the number of visits to a star’s web page on IMDB, the most popular web site for movie-related information. The degree of star power is computed for the top star, top three stars, and the director for the films in our sample. The results indicate that replacing an average star with a top star would increase revenues by an average of 16,618,570, while replacing three average stars with three top stars would increase revenues by an average of16,618,570, while replacing three average stars with three top stars would increase revenues by an average of 64,410,381.     

Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix: a tale of two institutional logics

Journal of Cultural Economics - Online streaming services are challenging long-standing decision-making processes in the traditional motion picture industry, thus placing Hollywood major studios at...     

Steven J. Ross,Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America

Journal of Cultural Economics -     

Internet Software Piracy in China: A User Analysis of Resistance to Global Software Copyright Enforcement

Abstract

China's entry into the global networked society has raised considerable debate over what is derived from the development and expansion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the hotly debated issues is Internet copyright piracy, which is critical to the credibility and stability of China's membership to the global networked society. This paper examines Chinese users’ online discussion about Internet software piracy as local resistance to global copyright enforcement exercised through globalization processes. The study uses Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework of Polanyi's (1957) counter-hegemony and Gramsci's (1971) counter-movements as a heuristic device to conceptualize the resistance points to globalization located within the dominant discourse on intellectual property rights, specifically Internet software piracy, by Chinese Internet users. Gee's (2002) discourse analysis framework is applied to produce seven recurring themes within online postings: cost, convenience, software companies, foreign developed countries, China's development, Chinese culture, and moral dilemma. The analysis on these dominant themes illustrates the cultural models held by Chinese users towards the issues of Internet software piracy: Internet as a public domain, socialist market economy, patriotism, and Chinese culture. These cultural models represent different types of resistance in Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework. Meanwhile, these resistance positions are integrated under the notion of Chinese nationalism to constitute a complete set of counter-discourses to global software copyright enforcement.     

The Ethics Ecosystem: Personal Ethics,Network Governance and Regulating Actors Governing the Use of Social Media Research Data

Minerva - This paper examines the consequences of a culture of “personal ethics” when using new methodologies, such as the use of social media (SM) sites as a source of data for...     

Movie Stars and the Distribution of Financially Successful Films in the Motion Picture Industry

Audiences choose to see films using information from previous films. A stochastic consumer choice process based on this assumption generates a particular distribution of financially successful films among film types. Movie stars can be used to mark these successful film types. Thus, their star power originates not only from box-office appeal but also from marking power. Evidence of 960 top 20 films released in the United States and Canada between 1940–1955 and 1960–1995 is consistent with this model.     

改革开放20年来的中国电影

1980年10月10日,是一个不寻常的日子。这一天,中国一代卓越的电影表演艺术家——赵丹,在京病逝。 逝者如斯。 至今,凡是关心中国电影事业的人们仍然会清晰地记得,就在赵丹临终前,《人民日报》以醒目的标题,发表了他抱病撰写的《管得太具体,文艺没希望》一文。其文字字真切,句句中肯;言之有物,掷地有声。给当时极“左”影响还未彻底清除的中国电影界乃至文艺界,以一记有力的重锤。     

Posthuman Ethics and the Becoming Animal of Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This essay considers Levinas' face-to-face ethical relation together with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of ‘becoming animal’ as a response to the radical dehumanisation involved in biopolitics. Framing his analysis in terms of an archaic law banning wrongdoers as wolves, Giorgio Agamben shows that biopolitics strips humans of subjectivity and exposes them to political power. Levinas' answer to radical dehumanisation is an ethical humanism of the other, but his ethical program is barred from politics. Moreover, he writes that in his own experience of dehumanisation, the only ethical being he encountered was Bobby, the camp dog. It seems biopolitics calls for an ethical politics that we might possess as bare life, outside of the autonomous, individualising conditions of the humanist subject. To this aim, I apply Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming animal as a devise to transport Levinas' ethics of alterity to the political realm.     

Decoupling Policy and Practice: How Life Scientists Respond to Ethics Education

Many graduate programmes in science now require courses in ethics. However, little is known about their reception or use. Using websites and interviews, this essay examines ethics requirements in the field of biosciences in three countries (the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy) between 2000 and 2005. Evidence suggests that current policies may be ineffective, and that scientists who take ethical issues seriously are seen as exceptional.

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宋代儒学伦理与现代东亚社会

宋代儒学伦理不仅为巩固中国封建社会中央集权制作出了重要贡献,至今仍对中国、韩国、日本、越南、新加坡乃至整个东亚社会的国家巩固、民族凝聚力的形成、社会家庭的稳定、个人道德修养的培育等方面产生着积极而深广的影响.当然其间的弊端也不容小觑.     

后现代语境中的儒家本体伦理学发展

本文对“后现代”进行了探讨,指出后现代社会作为对现代性的发展,具有两重性,并包含着对人自身发展的危害,因此而提出人在后现代社会中仍需进行自我精神修养的问题,以便借此认识自我并获得真正的精神自由,而这也就是需要发展儒学尤其是儒家本体伦理学的理由。为应对一些西方学者以后现代的方式消解儒学的原始经典,文中提出以本体诠释学的方法解读文本意图,以克服偏见与盲目性。为探究儒家精神的真谛,本文勾勒了儒学发展的五个阶段,以为后现代社会的出现既是一种挑战,也是一种机遇,由此而提出了在当今后现代语境中发展新新儒学的可能。最后质问了儒学本体论和道德论能否被解构的问题,并提出在解构中建构的方法与原则。     

明清徽州生存伦理下的多元文化

在徽州生存伦理的影响下 ,明清时期的徽州社会文化中有着奢侈和节俭的双重体现 ,有着多样化的婚姻形态 ,有着对赋役的抗争和主流职业价值观的重新诠释。徽州社会文化的表层呈现出了多元性的生存意识强烈的一面。     

Ethics of University Research,Biotechnology and Potential Military Spin-off

The paper provides a briefintroduction to the biotechnology revolutionand its impact upon biological researchrelevant to military uses. It describes thestatus of biological weapons today, and currentefforts to strengthen the Biological WeaponsConvention with a legally binding complianceprotocol. Specific modifications ofmicro-organisms that may be of military use arediscussed. Three examples of dual-use researchactivities are then used to highlight issuesand dilemmas in ethical decision making.     

Cultural Similarities and Differences in Seeking Social Support as a Means of Coping: A Comparison of European Americans and Chinese and an Evaluation of the Mediating Effects of Self-Construal

Abstract

Two studies examined similarities and differences in how European Americans and Chinese view seeking social support as a strategy for coping with an upset. Participants (407 European Americans and 595 Chinese) completed instruments assessing the appropriateness of seeking social support and several self-reliant coping strategies (problem-solving, emotion management, avoidance) when confronting upsets. Both studies detected cultural and sex differences in support seeking. However, there were also substantial similarities in coping responses. Americans viewed seeking support as a more appropriate coping strategy than did Chinese. However, both Americans and Chinese viewed seeking support as more appropriate than the solitary coping strategies of avoidance and emotion management. Culture moderated sex differences in support seeking; American women viewed seeking social and emotional support as more appropriate than American men, whereas few sex differences were evident among the Chinese samples. Individual differences in interdependent and independent self-construals partially mediated cultural and sex differences in support seeking in Study 2; in addition, culture moderated the mediating effects of self-construal, with self-construal mediating sex differences among Americans but not among Chinese. The cultural and sex differences in self-construals, however, did not conform to theoretical expectations. Moreover, cultural and sex differences in self-construals were quite small in magnitude.