Initial Communication with and Attitudes toward International Students: Testing the Mediating Effects of Friendship Formation Variables

From the theoretical perspectives of intergroup contact, predicted outcome value (POV), and similarity-attraction, this study examined U.S. host nationals’ (N = 342) communicative behaviours in a recent initial encounter with an international student and attitudes toward the student’s cultural group as a whole. Testing of two models indicated the significant sequential mediator effects of perceived similarity-social attraction and POV-social attraction between communication variables (e.g. amount of communication exchange in both models, self-disclosure in model 1, and information seeking in model 2), and intergroup attitudes (e.g. behavioural attitudes). Findings in general demonstrated that contact effects in the intercultural context varied according to specific measures of communication, the mediating mechanisms, and intergroup attitudes.     

Relationship Understanding Between Emotional Stability,Self-Disclosure and Social Adjustment

This paper discusses a survey, carried out by the authors, of 211 employees’ employed in public and private manufacturing organizations in North India to determine if emotional stability acts as a mediator between self-disclosure and social adjustment. Capitalization theory has been used as theoretical framework to examine the proposed relationships. Results indicate that high self-disclosure has positive association with social adjustment. Results also suggest that emotional stability partially mediates self-disclosure and social adjustment relationship. Implications for future research include further examination through additional mediators and other dimensions of self-disclosure from capitalization theory in understudied non-U.S. cultures like India.     

基于模糊理论和大数据的医学院校学生体质健康测试结果分析

基于2014年国家最新颁布的《学生体质健康标准》和湖南省医学院校体测大数据,运用模糊理论,对其进行研究与分析。研究表明湖南省医学院校学生体质健康测试结果不太理想,主要集中在及格区域,达到优秀和良好的学生比例男生仅为1.68%、女生0.73%,且男生7.54%没有达到及格要求。     

Tinkering through transition: on ‘doctoring’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy

This article addresses the notion of ‘making it’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy. In it, we draw on the tradition of material semiotics to reflect on our shared journeys from doctoral student to beginning scholar and beyond. By attuning ourselves to the relationality, materiality and precariousness of our experiences, we offer an answer to the question of what it takes to ‘make it’ as an early-career academic by advocating the practice of ‘making do’ or ‘doctoring.’ We develop this argument, first, by describing the narrative methods we used to conduct our inquiry and by explaining the material-semiotic ideas we used to explore the stories it generated. Then, we tell tales of our transitions from higher degree research student to early-career academic, focusing specifically on our ongoing, collective efforts to make do. In our discussion, we explore these narratives and attend to three features of our actions and activities as early-career academics; namely semiotic relationality, material heterogeneity and the precarious processes of heterogeneous engineering through which we sought to make a career in our field. We conclude by encouraging beginning scholars in physical education and sport pedagogy to become sensitive to these aspects of their own agency, and to experiment, experience and tinker together in ways that are attentive, inventive, caring and persistent.     

‘Playing with space’: a conceptual basis for investigating active sport tourism practices

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a conceptual tool, the expression ‘playing with space’, for the analysis of active sport tourism as a meaningful social practice. The expression issues from practice theories and pragmatic understandings of space, which emphasize the processual and contextual dimensions of human action and seek to seize altogether the corporealities and shared conceptions that constitute action. On such views, sport tourists are considered as reflexive and embodied beings, enjoying sensations, mobilities and places, and constantly (re)making sense of their own practices. I argue that the notion of ‘play’ allows for a comprehensive understanding of the ways active sport tourists engage with space, where space is viewed as an object or material for this play. Three major dimensions of active sport tourism are then identified: a set of playful and game-like practices with global space resulting in shared imaginaries and large-scale mobilities; a kinaesthetic play, based on freedom and sensations and deeply engaged in the materiality of the places and the omnipresent media practices that support the other dimensions of play while being fully integrated into the experience of sport tourism. This conceptual framework is a way to better understand the motives and practices of sport tourists; it is also a way to underline wider trends of contemporary leisure cultures: such cultures are increasingly integrated into the daily spheres of activity, increasingly playful and increasingly mediatized.     

京族民族民间体育起源分类特征的分析与研究*

采用文献资料、田野调查、访谈法等对我国唯一海洋民族京族的民族民间体育的起源、分类、特征以及发展方向进行分析,认为京族民族民间体育可分为嬉戏娱乐、节庆习俗、比赛竞技三类,并具有亲海性、宗教性、娱乐性的特征.课题根据“四层文化理论”对京族民族民间体育进行分析与研究,科学而准确地把握其的产生、分类和发展方向,促进京族民族民间体育的发展,努力发掘京族民族民间体育文化资源,推广民族体育文化.     

How does education have an impact on ethnocentrism? A structural equation analysis of cognitive,occupational status and network mechanisms

Previous studies have distinguished cognitive, occupational status and network mechanisms in the relation between education and ethnocentrism. Hypotheses on these mediating mechanisms are derived from socialization theory, realistic group threat and contact theory. In the current study we use structural equation modeling to investigate the explanatory power of these three mechanisms simultaneously. The analysis is based on a representative population survey from the Netherlands (NELLS 2009, n = 1910). The results show that more than half of the initial association between education and ethnocentrism can be attributed to cognitive ability and occupational status mechanisms. The remaining part of the overall association, however, still has to be modeled as a direct relationship between education and ethnocentrism. This direct association can be attributed either to social desirability or to a direct liberalizing effect of education on social and political attitudes. Our analysis tentatively suggests that the rise of average education levels in Western societies might lead to less ethnocentric attitudes via the cognitive sophistication mechanism.     

English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom

In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo‐liberal ‘free‐market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro‐American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues that the recovery of film from the bureaucratization of its study and its rediscovery as one of the modalities of modernization require both a framework of analysis that is fully conscious of its own historicity and critical role, and a new topography of cinema.     

Keep Fit and Play the Game

ABSTRACT

This article provides new insight into the modernization of the monarchy after the First World War by exploring how George VI promoted fitness and outdoor recreation during the interwar years. Sport functioned as a site of cross-class male bonding which formed part of a wider strategy by the monarchy to strengthen social cohesion. The new royal charities raised substantial funds, and they established a national fitness movement during the 1930s which was supported by the National Government, Labour leaders and the Trades Union Congress, but eschewed extremes on both left and right.     

企业异质性与贸易中介理论研究新进展

新新贸易理论诞生近十年来,贸易理论家围绕企业异质性假定进行了细致而富有成效的拓展研究。其中引人注目的是融入贸易中介的分析,打破了已有研究关于直接出口的局限,并分别基于异质性和企业内生边界视角,解释了中介技术和不完全合约对企业直接出口和中介出口等不同出口决策及福利分配的影响。本文梳理了国外最新文献中企业异质性与贸易中介理论的研究进展,解析了将贸易中介引入新新贸易理论的微观机理,并展望了其未来的发展方向。