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Emergent transnational social formations coupled with the persistence of structural inequalities evidenced in the core-periphery hierarchy suggest the need for theoretical consilience between the global capital school and world-systems perspectives. To this end, we draw upon the Arrighi's (1994) systemic cycle of accumulation model to account for the novelty and continuity of nascent transnational social structures such as the Transnational State apparatus (Robinson 2004), the Transnational Capitalist Class (Sklair 2001) and the global proletariat. In addition, we analyze the effects of core-periphery differentials on the experiences of global capitalist and proletarian class-life, assess the conditions under which global social structures can be viewed as exemplars of the next cycle of accumulation, and assess the degree to which transnational capital is capable of internalizing reproduction costs (Arrighi and Moore 2001) associated with globalization. We also offer a typology of class structuration that seeks to manage theoretically the complexities of the core-periphery hierarchy and transnational relationships conditioned by contemporary circuits of capital, and propose historical-comparative and quantitative methods for its study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the U.S. private sector of elder care services, specifically related to gendered, immigrant care economies and the home care industry. We interviewed 45 immigrant Filipino women who have been care workers for older adults with chronic health conditions in Southern California for at least 10 or more years. Our major findings pertain to the new forms of domestic servitude in this sector. This phenomenon is exemplified by the 1) complex combinations of oppression and privilege given the social location of both the care recipient and care provider; 2) a unique and highly undervalued labor of companionship; and 3) the formation of a triangular relationship occurring between the care worker, care recipient, and home care agency. These findings underscore the continued consequences of economic globalization alongside new relations of oppression and privilege as global inequalities intersect with the privatization of the U.S. welfare state. We argue that they require an extension of intersectional theory to incorporate the nuances of the immigrant elder care economy in the U.S today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business leaders are increasingly asked to act morally to help to ameliorate persistent global inequalities and injustices. However, this is not an easy task especially if moral dilemmas such as gender-based violence emerge in the workplace. In this study, we review a real-life case of a family owner, from a multibillion family business in Brazil, who faced a difficult moral challenge in the workplace when an employee was killed by her intimate partner. Based on the moral conation theory, this study shows how a business leader can think and act morally to respond to societal challenges such as violence against women and girls. We examine how moral conation (i.e., moral ownership, efficacy, and courage) enhance a business leader's moral cognition to process a moral challenge from recognition to action. We expand a theoretical framework by showing that component moral capacities of business leaders can generate responsibility and will to take moral action, particularly in family firms whose fundamental business orientations include strong moral and ethical values developed and maintained through generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically altered the lives of people around the world. College students are especially vulnerable to the pandemic, given the requisite gathering of students during instruction and often-crowded living conditions in college dormitories. Adapting quickly to the new normal during the global pandemic change was critical to chart a viable path towards a sustainable future. The current study is focused on obtaining systematic meaningful insights on the satisfaction of minority students in higher learning institutions as well as gaining perspective on different aspects ft their lives during the pandemic, including personal, financial, healthrelated, and educational. The inability of higher education institutions to understand the quickly address the ongoing difficulties in the lives of students may resulted in students taking time off before enrollment, the postponement of a semester or two by already enrolled students, or the abandonment of college education altogether as a realistic life goal. The data collected by conducting a survey completed by minority students at Johnson C. Smith University and analyzed using data mining and machine learning methods and techniques to pinpoint the factors that might hinder minority students from continuing their education during the virtual learning in effect. This study analyzed and identified students' transition difficulties, personal psychological resilience, stress, and anxiety due to health, technology, and pedagogical/learning issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital business models (DBMs) are built on digital technologies with complexity-inducing characteristics. Thus, they form ever-more complex (eco)systems as they connect heterogeneous actors for value cocreation and blur the boundaries of organizations, markets, and industries. The co-existence of actors’ multiple logics in pluralistic settings has been associated with tensions and controversies. However, information systems (IS) research has ignored controversies’ role in DBMs in settings of logic multiplicity. Drawing on the ‘orders of worth’ framework, we follow the controversies over DBMs in the academic publishing ecosystem. Building on our in-depth case study data, we develop a model highlighting three roots of controversies in sociotechnical DBMs. We add to the literature by furthering our understanding of controversies’ role in DBMs and enriching the community’s methodological toolbox in applying a theory from French pragmatic sociology to study pluralistic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine food riot versus non-food riot countries from a crossnational perspective to determine the factors associated with this form of violent conflict and its relationship to deprivation in many forms. Using data from multiple sources including the UN Development Programme, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and World Food Programme among others, I connect food riots to the hunger and food insecurity foundation reflected in them. Extending this I find that this form of protest echoes larger patterns of underdevelopment and human insecurity, thus accounting for multiple global inequalities. Whether it is economic opportunity or poverty, population and health, the environment, or politics and human rights among other concerns food riot countries reveal many facets of deprivation and inequality that play out in the political economy of the world system. Thus connected by globalization and viewed on a world stage, food riots and other forms of unrest are certain to garner increased attention to the causes they represent for the world's poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cosmopolitan theory has experienced a resurgence with its appeals to a global human community and corresponding promise of human equality. As it tends to presuppose an emergent consciousness of human interconnectedness, and generally takes human improvement for granted, it devotes little space to evaluating itself as the basis for an intentional developmental project. And when advanced as just such a project, it often fails to account for its myriad limitations which unintentionally maintain or perpetuate global inequalities. This paper develops an emancipatory cosmopolitanism that is founded on neither purely ethical nor political grounds. As ethics is empty without action, and effective action demands a consciousness of the intricacies of risk, Craig Calhoun's critique of the "emergency imaginary" and Ulrich Beck's analysis of "risk society" serve as a foundation on which emancipatory consciousness and action are set. Applied in an analysis of the World Social Forum, this emancipatory cosmopolitan framework is used to consider the current state of counter-hegemonic global civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses Priti Ramamurthy?s suggestion that feminist theory should ?engage with feminist development studies more centrally and accountably in the current age of globalization? (2000:240). I argue that prior to such engagement it is important to examine the problematic baggage attached to feminist development studies through its historical dependency upon and support of the development paradigm. By revisiting Mohanty?s critique of Western development discourse I begin unpacking the historical baggage and identify some important questions that must be asked before such an engagement proceeds. Most significantly, I suggest that the history of feminist development studies demonstrates a tendency to subsume any real critique of global inequalities in the name of ?helping women? and that the general approach to women in development supports rather than significantly challenges development policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AI language models trained on Web data generate prose that reflects human knowledge and public sentiments, but can also contain novel insights and predictions. We asked the world's best language model, GPT‐3, fifteen difficult questions about the nature, value, and future of library and information science (LIS), topics that receive perennial attention from LIS scholars. We present highlights from its 45 different responses, which range from platitudes and caricatures to interesting perspectives and worrisome visions of the future, thus providing an LIS‐tailored demonstration of the current performance of AI language models. We also reflect on the viability of using AI to forecast or generate research ideas in this way today. Finally, we have shared the full response log online for readers to consider and evaluate for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coping with work role transitions can be a major challenge for workers in globally distributed IT teams. Our case study extends the relational dialectics perspective to explore the discursive and material nature of work role tensions experienced by a local IT team in a globally distributed technology organization. Drawing from 18 in-depth interviews, we use thematic and contrapuntal analysis to explore the competing discourses onsite local IT managers and specialists expressed about their work role transitions with an offshore global IT headquarters. Our results show how an overarching autonomy versus control tension and three interrelated subtensions: flexibility versus standardization, strategic position versus compliant position, and empowerment advocacy versus bureaucratic dictates, animated meanings about their new work roles. Our study provides a cautionary note about potential work role tensions in globally distributed IT teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are millions of LGB and transgender individuals in the world. However, conducting LGBT health‐related studies are labor‐intensive and time‐consuming because of the challenges inherent in studying these hidden populations. Social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for LGBT users to share their health concerns, giving researchers the opportunity to collect and analyze these social comments. This research used a mixed method to examine the linguistic and semantic characteristics of health‐related tweets shared by self‐identified LGBT individuals. Findings uncovered several health‐related topics shared by LGBT users. Further, while LGB and transgender communities are within the LGBT umbrella, we found a significant linguistic difference between the tweets shared by LGB and transgender individuals. These findings show further disparities within an already marginalized group, indicating the need for customized healthcare to improve the health of all people. Our research approach can also inform studies in the areas of informatics, health, and medicine for analyzing the health concerns of not only sexual and gender minorities but also other hidden populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents initial research from a broader project about the impact of libraries on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In 2015, the UN launched the SDGs, a set of 17 goals for global development by the year 2030. Librarians helped shape the inclusion of access to information in these goals and are involved in furthering them through providing access to information. The OCLC Global Council has selected the SDGs as its area of focus for 2020 and is formulating a research program that will identify and advocate for the ways that libraries can help further the SDGs. This paper details the history of the SDGs and the role that librarians played in shaping them. It shows examples of ways that librarians and library initiatives have helped further them through providing access to information and information literacy skills. Finally, it offers suggestions for ways that library leaders could structure their information activates around the SDGs, based on data from a survey of OCLC Global Council delegates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical analysis of institutionalized feminist activism through a postcolonial reading. It investigates leadership development engagement within an international feminist non-profit organisation, with an espoused mission of global advocacy and contributes to the postcolonial feminist debate through empirical investigation into the lived experienced forms of 'otherness'. It argues that Women of colour have not been full participants in White feminist organisations, despite these organisations' claims that their concerns are universal to all women'. Specifically, the paper contends that it is possible for feminist organisations, which exist as platforms for resistance and promote 'voice', to themselves become perpetuators of the global inequalities they seek to resist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a wonderful succinct article written 35 years ago Peter Evans identified the crucial structural/relational insight of world-system analysis that claims a "single ongoing division of labor.based on differential appropriation of surplus produced [such that] positions are hierarchically ordered, not just differentiated" (1979:15-16). Later we summarized a major theme of the paradigm: a "country's world system position, in a macro-structural sense, is considered a key determinant of the society's capacity for sustained economic growth and development" (Crowly, Rauch, Seagrave and Smith 1998: 32). The key hypothesis is that if a scholar knows where a country or region "fits" in that hierarchy, one should also be able to predict various developmental outcomes - and the core/semi-periphery/periphery stratification should also align with various sorts of international/global inequalities. A vexing issue becomes how to shift and sort places into the strata. In the seminal writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, these are historically defined, based on "unequal exchange" in 15th century Europe that led to a continentand later world-wide division of labor reliant on long-distance trade. For him, the semi-periphery (SP) takes on a key political role as a "buffer zone" between the core/periphery - but it's defined by its economic role. Christopher Chase-Dunn (1998), argues that SP countries contain "a relatively equal mix of core and peripheral types of production" (77) or "a predominance of activities which are at the intermediate levels with regard to the current world-system distribution of capital intensive/labor intensive production" (212). This "middling" level in terms of forces of production means that the SP strata simultaneously has a global competitive edge over the core in terms of lower labor costs and an advantage over the periphery via its existing economic base (infrastructure, human and other forms of capital) to implement advanced production processes. A portion of my own empirical research over the decades takes focuses on attempting to empirically capture the relational aspect of the international division of labor via quantitative network analysis that attempts to "model" the worldsystem, examining international commodity trade between nation states. In this paper, I will draw on the most recent attempt to do that (Mahutga and Smith 2011), which provides a recent data-driven "sorting" of countries into core/semi-periphery/periphery - and also examines that global structure over time (from 1965-2000), permitting some discussion of which countries are "mobile"/"moving up" as we moved into the current century. But this essay will use the empirics of that analysis as a starting point, and focus on central questions about social change in the 21st century. Are the BRICS best considered S-P, more emerging core states? Where does China "fit"? Are the peripheral states of Europe S-Ps? In attempting to answer some of these questions, I hope to return to some basic issues about what "semi-peripherality" might mean in the future, how it is different from the past, and whether it is still relevant as a category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the sample data from four largest cities in China, we have examined various impacts of economic growth and government expenditure in health-related fields on life expectancy. Our analysis shows that several factors have contributed to the increase of average life expectancy. In summary, each additional unit of GDP per capita, hospital bed and healthcare technician will improve average life expectancy by 9 days, 15 days and 14 days respectively. Our research will shed some lights on factors that impact life expectancy in Chinese urbanized areas and also help to make a global comparison between metropolitan cities around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While distancing themselves from Eurosceptic views, major findings have been critical in their assessment of certain theoretical approaches that have focused on various scenarios of the reconstruction of the European institutional framework through modification of the economic, political and social subsystems. To put it more specifically, individual perspectives proposed by European intellectual opinion leaders, such as Ulrich Beck and Jürgen Habermas, have offered different solutions for their improvement. When pointing to the crisis of the Eurozone, which threatens the existence of the European Union, Habermas reconstructed a conception of the world order of Immanuel Kant and ascribed special importance to legal universalism and its importance for human dignity. When differentiating between cosmopolitan claims and methodological nationalism, Ulrich Beck created a thesis about cosmopolitan vision anchored in a cosmopolitan worldview as well as the superiority of cosmopolitan realism to national standpoints. Ulrich Beck and Jürgen Habermas have also been two important thinkers who have dealt with issues of transnational democracy, the European Union, democratic juridification, human rights and the importance of human dignity. Given the similarities of their reflections and perspectives, the article highlights distinctions between Beck's and Habermas's conceptualizations of the institutionalization of European space, their understanding of human rights as well as their critical attitudes to the policies of the current Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineers play a significant role in society, but the extent to which students consider this role as a desirable career attribute and extend their beliefs about the social responsibility (SR) of engineers beyond basic ethical foundations is not fully understood. A qualitative study was completed to understand how first year engineering students define SR and how it relates to engineering. Thirty-four first year engineering students with a range of attitudes toward SR, as previously assessed by a valid survey instrument, were invited to participate in interviews. The majority of these students were initially majoring in mechanical, civil, or environmental engineering at four institutions. Students defined SR differently, but generally linked engineering to SR in some manner. First year introduction to engineering courses that discussed ethics were cited by more than a third of the students as contributing to their ideas about SR. Three students with strong views of SR left engineering, due in part to the disconnect they felt between their goals to help people and society and the impacts they felt they could have as engineers, as judged from what they learned in classes. From the interview analysis, it seems that first year courses, specifically the ethics component, may have a high potential to affect students' connections of the engineering profession to social issues and problems they care about addressing. All students who participated in the interview will be interviewed again in their second and third years to understand how their ideas about SR and engineering change as they continue their college careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the underlying causes of food insecurity in the post-independence Sub- Saharan Africa with a view of determining the proper remedies. While some scholars believe that the problem lies on the legacy of colonialism, overpopulation, food aid, and drought, others argue that mismanagement and urbanization were the major contributing factors. The paper takes a holistic approach by contending that food shortages in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa have been caused by not only the colonial legacy, food aid, natural disaster or geography, urbanization, and overpopulation, but also by the rampant shifting cultivation, brain drain, wars, and the culture of corruption. It is further argued that the pervasiveness of famine will continue unless and until genuinely transparent, accountable, and responsive governments that are devoid of culture of corruption and recognize the values of rule of law, democratization, and good governance have been firmly established around the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent sociological investigations of well-being debate the role of economic growth in improving physical quality of life measures in less-developed nations. This study employs multi-level models for change to examine the effects of several development indicators, including GDP per capita, education, exports, and urbanization on the rate of well-being acquisition in less-developed nations over time, 1980-2008. The results indicate that the beneficial effects of economic growth, as well as other development indicators such as education, on well-being attainment are decreasing over time. In addition, more nuanced assessments of Sub-Saharan African and periphery countries reveal that these nations have well-being conditions that are significantly different from other nations. Overall, the results illustrate that developmental decoupling is most severe in the lowest strata of nations, which suggests that global inequalities in physical quality of life will not be resolved through traditional growth consensus ideologies of GDP growth and educational expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]