Social Sciences — Open Access Journal

This paper provides a framework to analyze the maturity of humanitarian logistics systems to face crisis situations related to recurrent events, and thus to identify the main areas of action and the community needs in terms of crisis logistics planning. First, the main notions of humanitarian logistics systems planning, and the theoretical contribution of maturity models are presented. Second, a maturity model for humanitarian logistics systems is proposed and the main categories of elements defining maturity extracted from literature. Then, the methodology to define the main elements of the maturity model via evidence is presented. This methodology combines a literature overview, a documentary analysis, and the development of three case studies, two located in Colombia and one in Peru. The main elements that characterize capability maturity model in humanitarian logistics systems facing recurrent crises are identified, from which the administration of donations, design of a distribution network, and the choice of suppliers are highlighted. The practical implications of the framework are proposed to allow its use to anticipate humanitarian logistics system for future crises. The framework allowed a first analysis guide and will be further extended. Full article

Research has shown that low openness and low transparency in the process of recruitment of new (associate) professors put women at a systematic disadvantage. Examples include professorships awarded by direct invitation (as opposed to job calls); contexts where nominally open job calls routinely get only one applicant; and procedural rules that allow the filtering out of qualified applicants without sharing the grounds of the decision with the candidates. We investigated one decade (2007–2017) of hiring of new (associate) professors in one Faculty at the largest university in Norway, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) (N = 79). The Faculty is a highly gender-equal setting, in that the share of women among associate professors has been >40% for over a decade. We found (1) a high share (about 40%) of women among applicants, maintained among winners; (2) a very sporadic use of direct invitations (two in a decade) and no sign that their use advantages men; (3) no nominally ‘open’ job calls with only one applicant; (4) no disadvantage for women when the pool of applicants is small; (5) no systematic filtering out of women when low-transparency internal formal preselection procedures are used because of organizational contingencies (e.g., a high number of applicants). We found an overall high degree of openness in the selection procedure when compared to other Scandinavian and Western European studies. Contrary to our expectations (based on the relevant literature), we found no link between low openness in the selection process and gender inequality in the outcome. The latter finding must be interpreted in context. We conclude that the overall good gender balance locally is an antidote to the potential biasing effect of low-openness and low-transparency procedures, so long as such procedures are used only exceptionally, and their use is clearly tied with organizational contingencies. At the same time, we found no indication that low-openness and low-transparency procedures systematically advantage women. Full article

Increased globalization has ushered in changes in diplomatic purposes and practices. As such, global health diplomacy (GHD) has become a growing field connecting the urgencies of global health and foreign affairs. More academics and policy-makers are thinking about how to structure and utilize diplomacy in pursuit of global health goals. This article aims to explore how the health, peace, and well-being of people in the region can be achieved through global health diplomacy. A systematic review of the literature was conducted on various terms such as “Global Health Diplomacy OR Foreign Policy”; “Disasters”, “Infectious disease epidemics” OR “Non-Communicable diseases” AND “Caribbean” by searching PubMed, Scopus, Embase, Web of Science databases, and Google Scholar search engines. A total of 33 articles that met the inclusion criteria were analyzed, and the critical role of GHD was highlighted. There is an increasing need to understand the complex global health challenges, coupled with the need to design appropriate solutions. Many regional initiatives addressing infectious and chronic diseases have been successful in multiple ways by strengthening unity and also by showing directions for other nations at a global level, e.g., the Port of Spain Summit declaration. GHD has a great scope to enhance preparedness, mitigation, peace, and development in the region. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the region needs to strengthen its efforts on equity issues, health promotion, and sustainable development to promote peace and well-being. Full article

During disease outbreaks, women endure additional burdens associated with paid and unpaid work, often without consideration or the alleviation of other life responsibilities. This paper draws on the concept of the triple burden in theorizing the gender divisions in productive and reproductive work and community activities in the context of disaster. Events that include famine, war, natural disaster or disease outbreak are all well documented as increasing women’s vulnerability to a worsening of gendered burdens. In the case of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, this is no different. Focussing on Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia, the four vignettes in this paper serve to highlight the intersections between Covid-19 and gendered burdens, particularly in frontline work, unpaid care work and community activities. While pre-disaster gender burdens are well established as strong, our analysis during the early months of the pandemic indicates that women’s burdens are escalating. We estimate that women will endure a worsening of their burdens until the pandemic is well under control, and for a long time after. Public policy and health efforts have not sufficiently acknowledged the issues concerned with the associations between gender and disease outbreaks. Full article

Frozen 2 (2019) provided Disney with the opportunity to move past discomfort about the confluence of women’s sexuality and power in Queen Elsa portrayed in Frozen (2013). Yet in Frozen 2, Elsa remains romantically unattached, despite audience interest in her love life in the six years following the release of Frozen. In Frozen 2, Elsa forms a bond with a mythological male horse, a Nokk, whom she first battles, and then tames, showcasing her horse-whispering talents while building intimacy with the equine. The symbolism of Elsa’s domestication of the willful Nokk relates to the gynocentric horse and pony genre that explores girls’ desire for intimacy within a fictional world. In Frozen 2, however, substituting a male horse for a relationship with a human allows Disney to sidestep two potential controversies: (1) a queer love interest for Elsa, and (2) the portrayal of Elsa as wielding more power than a non-magically endowed male partner. In addition, Elsa’s taming of the horse in Frozen 2 places her in the realm of equestrianism, a woman-dominated sport where femininity is nevertheless devalued. As a result, her skills as a horse whisperer do not threaten men’s ascendancy, reflecting real-life gender dynamics in equestrian sport. These themes show how Disney balked at modernizing Elsa, retreating to outdated conceptions of gender roles rather than depicting progressive gender dynamics and sexuality in Disney royalty. Full article

This study aims to define the perspectives taken by single mothers when combining work and motherhood in a stressful work–life constellation. One of the challenges for single mothers after divorce is to find a work–life balance in their single-parent family system. Regarding work-life balance, we take a General Strain Perspective, describing the work-life conflict as a combination of financial strain and role strain. We argue that both strains are the most problematic for single mothers in comparison to their married and/or male counterparts, as both finances and parenthood ideologies are more under pressure. For this reason, we explore how single mothers coped with this strain, answering the question: ‘Which perspectives on the combination motherhood and work do single mothers take in their attempt to balance role strain and financial strain after divorce?’ To answer this research question, we used a qualitative approach, based on 202 in-depth interviews with single mothers in Belgium. These interviews involved two groups: A primary research population of 13 single mothers and an elaborative research population of 189 single mothers. Timelines were used to structure the single mothers’ narratives. The analysis resulted in the contruction of a typology of four different perspectives based on how single mothers dealt with maternal role strain and financial strain: the re-invented motherhood perspective, the work-family symbiosis perspective, the work-centered motherhood perspective and the work-family conflicted perspective. We found that perspective of single mothers in their work-life strain can be described by the flexibility and/or strictness in either their motherhood ideology and/or their work context. These results point at the needs for policymakers, employers, and practitioners to focus on initiatives improving the work–life balance of single mothers by reducing financial and role strains. Full article

The decision to stay or leave an abusive relationship is multifactorial and frequently involves a cyclic process involving several phases. This article presents a qualitative analysis regarding the reasons and barriers to stay or leave an abusive dating relationship, as well as the challenges that it implies. A semi-structured, in-depth interview was used to collect data from thirteen dating victims, aged 17–30 years and mainly female (n = 12). The emotional and affective dependence of the partner and the belief that behaviour may change emerge as the main reasons presented by the victims to remain in an abusive relationship. Shame, fear of losing the partner, and failure to recognize the abusive relationship were reported as the main barriers to leave the abusive relationship, thus making it difficult to seek help. Understanding reasons to stay in, or barriers to leave, an abusive relationship is fundamental to promoting help-seeking behaviours in victims of dating violence (DV), particularly in the case of young people, since it has serious implications in the developmental pathway of this age group. Full article

The family is increasingly a site of political intervention as a locus of pervasive social inequalities and a potential resource for resolving injustices. Contemporary political theory has engaged in extensive debate about what justice in the family requires, but rather less on how family is understood: ethicists have tended to use placeholder definitions which dismiss the need to engage with real-world practices. We show that this is problematic because it obscures morally important aspects of day to day family life and risks taking privileged positions as representative. The paper proposes that theorists could gain from adopting the sociological ‘family practice’ framework, which we argue can form the basis of a distinct and plausible ethical theory of family. This can provide a fruitful basis for further research and engagement in political debate because it better conceptualizes contemporary family life. The paper therefore also illustrates how research from empirical social sciences can be helpful to the development of normative principles. Full article

This paper aims to understand the social-psychological dimension of the Normative Power Europe discourse using ingroup projection as a discursive/cognitive practice of othering. It takes issue with most poststructuralist studies that conduct analyses of Normative Power Europe based on the dependence of identity on difference through the discursive tendency to construct reality by opposites. Ingroup projection is based both on the need for differentiation to obtain positive distinctiveness and on the natural tendency for categorization processes by which groups share a common higher-order category. In this way, groups tend to project (ingroup projection) their traits and distinctive values onto this higher-order category to legitimate intergroup status differences. The EU’s response to the Arab uprisings serves as an empirical test for this argument, insofar as the uprisings implied a cognitive change of the EU’s “other” in the construction of the Mediterranean. Through ingroup projection, the EU (ingroup) differentiates itself from this new Arab Mediterranean other (outgroup) and projects EU’s idealized identity onto the Mediterranean region (higher-order category) to legitimate its new policies after the uprising. Full article

Since the last global crisis, the critical debate on economy and the teaching of heterodox economy has resurfaced. To review the magnitude and pedagogical consequences for critical education in economics and finance is the objective of this paper, which also proposes a didactic strategy based on an experience developed at the University of Extremadura (Spain) within the framework of the Didactic Innovation Group named “Ethics of University Teaching”. For this purpose, the educational implications of teaching and learning the conventional economy that derive from behavioral and cognitive psychology and discourses on entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility are reviewed. It is concluded that the bias in the education of heterodox economy supposes a deterioration of the fundamental educational objectives, tending towards an indoctrination in the neoliberal ideology (patriarcapitalist) and to a serious loss of democratic values. For all the above, a more pluralist pedagogy at the epistemological and methodological levels—from critical psychology to critical economics or critical management studies—would help to favor a more emancipatory educational process, committed to social justice. Full article

Ninety percent of the people added to the planet over the next 30 years will live in African and Asian cities, and a large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighborhoods defined by slum conditions, informal settlement, or inadequate housing. The four current approaches to neighborhood deprivation mapping are largely siloed, and each fall short of producing accurate, timely, and comparable maps that reflect local contexts. The first approach, classifying “slum households” in census and survey data, reflects household-level rather than neighborhood-level deprivation. The second approach, field-based mapping, can produce the most accurate and context-relevant maps for a given neighborhood, however it requires substantial resources, preventing up-scaling. The third and fourth approaches, human (visual) interpretation and machine classification of air or spaceborne imagery, both overemphasize informal settlements, and fail to represent key social characteristics of deprived areas such as lack of tenure, exposure to pollution, and lack of public services. We summarize common areas of understanding, and present a set of requirements and a framework to produce routine, accurate maps of deprived urban areas that can be used by local-to-international stakeholders for advocacy, planning, and decision-making across Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). We suggest that machine learning models be extended to incorporate social area-level covariates and regular contributions of up-to-date and context-relevant field-based classification of deprived urban areas. Full article

The implementation of neoliberal reforms in higher education coincides with the radical institutional changes in the transition from a planned to a market economy. The modernization of higher education is also connected with the concept of the “entrepreneurial” university that represents a third-generation university with an emphasis on optimization and marketing. However, economic policy aimed at reforming and developing the public sector is based on the import of institutions related to the production of public and mixed goods. In this paper, we show that neoliberal reforms threaten the welfare state in transition economies such as the Russian Federation. In addition to marketing, monetization, and commercialization, all areas of the public sector underwent an optimization policy, which primarily implied a relative reduction in the cost of producing public goods. The rhetoric of the marketing of education represents the modern state’s masked refusal to fulfill a part of its social obligations. Moreover, we argue that market channels intended for financing education are highly dependent on the income level of the population, the availability of institutions and the infrastructure for raising funds, and, most importantly, the development of the educational services market. Within this context, another significant factor is represented by the positive externalities from the prevalence and quality of education. Thence, our results show that insufficient private demand for education, including higher education, can negatively affect the prospects for the country’s socio-economic development in the medium and long run. Full article

This special issue explores underrepresented aspects of the political dimensions of global warming. It includes post- and decolonial perspectives on climate-related migration and conflict, intersectional approaches, and climate change politics as a new tool of governance. Its aim is to shed light on the social phenomena associated with anthropogenic climate change. The different contributions aim to uncover its multidimensional and far-reaching political effects, including climate-induced migration movements and climate-related conflicts in different parts of the world. In doing so, the authors critically engage with securitising discourses and resulting anti-migration arguments and policies in the Global North. In this way, they identify and give a voice to alternative and hitherto underrepresented research and policy perspectives. Overall, the special issue aims to contribute to a critical and holistic approach to human mobility and conflict in the context of political and environmental crisis. Full article

Limited research in the psychology literature has addressed the specifics of children’s future orientations. Using a thematic approach, the present study investigates children’s personal aspirations for their adult lives via a questionnaire that addressed (1) the types of aspiration profiles present in a sample of 456 Italian students aged 8–13 and balanced for gender, and (2) how these profiles differ according to demographics, the number of aspirations, academic and social self-efficacy, life satisfaction, and academic achievement. Using cluster analysis, three aspiration profiles emerged, which include individualistic (focused on the possible future self), independent (concentrated on one’s own future family and independence), and social (focused on future friends and the family of origin). The independent profile demonstrated better overall psychological and academic adjustment than did the other two profiles. The article discusses the results of the study using the framework of self-determination theory in the context of Italian society. Full article

Lead instructors discuss the structure, opportunities, and pedagogical challenges of an interdisciplinary team-taught course on urban sustainability involving seven professors from six departments across four of George Washington University’s schools over five years. The teaching team prioritized presenting and exploring diverse perspectives on urban sustainability, seeing a key learning objective of this course in students (1) learning to make links between disciplines; (2) having opportunities to reflect, disagree, share, and develop their own perspectives; and (3) developing a life-long engagement and openness with ideas and learning. This is challenging for many students. To promote student learning and engagement in the class, we utilize active-learning and cooperative discussion techniques, and see these as times that the class reaches “interdisciplinarity”. We employ place-based pedagogical approaches, focusing the class on the case-study (and students’ adopted hometown) of Washington D.C., finding that a “layering” of perspectives on a single city helps students see disciplinary similarities and differences more clearly. For those considering a large-team interdisciplinary course, we stress the importance of a lead instructor for coordination—both conceptually and administratively—and adequate institutional support for this unique and challenging endeavor. Full article

Empirical analysis has found that mandatory reporting legislation has positive effects on case identification of child sexual abuse both initially and over the long term. However, there is little analysis of the initial and ongoing impact on child protection systems of the rate of reports that are made if a reporting duty for child sexual abuse is introduced, especially when compared with rates of reports for other kinds of child maltreatment. This research analysed government administrative data at the unique child level over a seven-year period to examine trends in reports of child sexual abuse, compared with child physical abuse, in two Australian states having different socio-legal dimensions. Data mining generated descriptive statistics and rates per 100,000 children involved in reports per annum, and time trend sequences in the seven-year period. The first state, Western Australia, introduced the legislative reporting duty in the middle of the seven-year period, and only for sexual abuse. The second state, Victoria, had possessed mandatory reporting duties for both sexual and physical abuse for over a decade. Our analysis identified substantial intra-state increases in the reporting of child sexual abuse attributable to the introduction of a new legislative reporting duty, and heightened public awareness resulting from major social events. Victoria experienced nearly three times as many reports of physical abuse as Western Australia. The relative burden on the child protection system was most clearly different in Victoria, where reports of physical abuse were relatively stable and two and a half times higher than for sexual abuse. Rates of children in reports, even at their single year peak, indicate sustainable levels of reporting for child welfare agencies. Substantial proportions of reports were made by both legislatively mandated reporters, and non-mandated community members, suggesting that government agencies would benefit from engaging with communities and professions to enhance a desirable reporting practice. Full article

This study investigated consumer attitudes and the motivation of small business owners who participated in the 2019 anti-Japan boycott in South Korea (hereafter, Korea). The main areas of inquiry involved self-expression, the realization of justice, and consumer attitudes as elements of patriotic consumption. A seven-day survey was conducted among 500 adult consumers aged 18 years and older in Korea. The retrieved data were subjected to frequency analyses, reliability analyses, factor analyses, paired t-tests, and regressions. Declining Japanese product sales indicated high levels of a consumer boycott. The analyses demonstrated that consumers held positive attitudes toward small business owners who shared their boycotting beliefs and goals. Second, self-expression and the realization of justice motivation were relatively high, as were attitudes toward the participation message and small business owners who were participating in the boycott. Korean consumers had relatively high intentions to visit the stores of small business owners who were participating in the boycott. Lastly, self-expression motivations, motivations to realize justice, consumer attitudes toward the boycott participation messages of small business owners, and consumer attitudes toward the small business owners themselves had statistically significant positive effects. Small business owners holding general consumer beliefs about boycott participation should actively spread their support messages, and this would provide an excellent opportunity to create positive long-term awareness. This study provided a unique insight into Korean consumer behaviors when patriotism was considered. The findings have significant implications for small business owners looking to sustain themselves during product boycotts. Full article

Nowadays, multiple phenomena have promoted an impact on society, constituting in some cases, not only a contribution of benefits but also of risks. Among them, the fake news phenomenon is considered one of the most burning phenomena today due to the risk it poses to society. In view of this situation, the research community has carried out numerous studies that seek to address this issue from a multidisciplinary perspective. Based on this, the objective of this work was to analyze the productivity and, therefore, the impact of this topic in the research community. To this end, this work advocated a scientometric-type methodology, through scientometric laws, impact indicators, and scientific evolution of 640 publications of the web of science (WOS). The results showed the impact of the fake news discipline today, which is considered an emerging issue that is of interest to many knowledge disciplines around the world. Likewise, the results showed that the publications not only have a focus on analyzing the veracity or not of the news, but that it begins to vertebrate a new line of an investigation directed to the informational education and towards the prevention of the consumption of this type of news through the internet. Full article

In order to link learning and the brain, it is necessary to carry out a restructuring of pedagogical practice so that it can be linked to the contributions of Neurosciences. In this sense, Neuro-education is emerging as a new science that has as its main objective the synergy of Pedagogy, Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience, and with this, being able to bring the different educational agents the necessary resources in terms of the brain and learning binomial This article focuses on the importance of education in values, and the acquisition of prosocial behavior and how this educational field can be developed from the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). The challenge before us is to build the map of values, which make the individual a fulfilled being and, in turn, a collaborator of the social environment. On the other hand, ICTs offer enormous potential in terms of their application in the field of education. In this article we will show the role that this type of tools can play in the learning and assimilation of values, bearing in mind the contributions of neuro-education. Full article