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Acceptance of family diversity has increased. However, families that differ from the standard North American family (SNAF) are still confidently portrayed as the cause of numerous social problems, even when evidence may be lacking or mixed. This article describes and critiques five assumptions that inform advocates' claims: the belief that the heterosexual nuclear family is the most (1) real, (2) divine, (3) natural, (4) longstanding, and (5) functional form of kinship. These ideas, though dubious, can exert harmful influence on Americans in their personal lives and in public policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classic novels retold for children have received limited scholarly attention. Often cheaply printed, the interest they arouse is also transient: child readers become adults and either lose interest or move on to the unabridged text. Despite their transience and ephemerality, "classic" novels rewritten for children, especially retellings of Dickens, merit scholarly examination. These retellings appeal to child readers by centring the plots that revolve around child characters, shaping the popular imagination and reception history of these works. Since their initial publication, Dickens's novels have been adapted, abridged, and anthologized for young readers by editors and publishers with various motives: to profit off Dickens's fame, to promote literacy, and to support social change. Texts that rewrite "classic" authors like Dickens for young audiences reveal our cultural assumptions and anxieties about literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Drama Therapy Review is the property of Intellect Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As part of an increasingly multicultural society issues concerning integration and relationships between ethnic groups and different communities are receiving a great deal of attention in the social and scientific debate. The skills of design can be made available as a tool to systematise this multiplicity, promoting an innovation respectful of diversity, comparison, and interaction between people and cultures. This article concerns practical product design applications, that explore the relationship between multi-cultural society and cultural accessibility. Moreover, this contribution aims to reflect on which and how methodological strategies could be implemented within a design process that focuses on an intercultural approach. A series of case studies of narrative artifacts capable of bringing different cultures together and making them recognizable to different users will be analysed with the lens proposed in the methodological overview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the mechanism, that is, the way in which organisational culture impacts corporate entrepreneurship. Additionally, the paper analyses the direction of this impact, that is, the assumptions, values, and norms through which culture creates a positive context for corporate entrepreneurship. Corporate entrepreneurship, broadly defined as entrepreneurship within organisations, becomes a prerequisite for the organisations’ survival and development in the era of globalisation, and radical technology and market changes. Organisational culture as a system of assumptions, values, and norms shared by employees and managers significantly determines their opinions and behaviour. The paper demonstrates that organisational culture impacts corporate entrepreneurship by shaping the employees and managers’ interpretative schemes through its assumptions and values. Thus, organisational culture impacts employees and managers’ behaviour in everyday work, and thereby the extent to which this behaviour will be entrepreneurial. We applied the fragmented and integrated approaches in identifying the cultural assumptions, values, and norms through which organisational culture positively impacts corporate entrepreneurship. The fragmented approach showed that organisational culture positively impacts corporate entrepreneurship if it highly values innovations and changes, people development, open and intensive interactions and communications, the autonomy of employees and loose control, identification with the company, focus on work, and openness towards the environment. The integrated approach showed that the following culture types positively impact corporate entrepreneurship: adhocracy culture in Quinn and Cameron’s classification, and constructive culture in Human Synergetics’ classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

King Ravana has already attained a cult status in modern Sri Lanka owing to a resurgence of texts about the legendary king that suddenly flooded the bookshops as well as the mass media. Yet, unseen by this phenomenon, a folktale collection focusing on Ravana was released for public consumption by Gunasekera Gunasoma under the titled Sabaragamuwa Ravana Jana Katha (Ravana Folktales of the Sabaragamuwa Region). This study undertakes a re-reading of these folktales using the folkloric postulate of ‘folk ideas’ in order to locate the modes of construction of the personality of ‘King Ravana’ and the insights such constructions might offer into the material conditions of the story creators/tellers/listeners. Folktales tend to carry cultural assumptions, as well as cultural prejudices, of common folks through the implicitly embedded ‘folk ideas’ in their narratives and this study intends to locate such ‘silent’ articulations and analyse them to understand a group of people’s own perceptions about the notions of leaders and leadership.

Kevin Dorst has recently provided a novel argument for the KK principle. In this paper I sketch a rejoinder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the therapist and patient are from different cultures, there may be impediments to the development of empathy and a therapeutic alliance. South India culture provides an example of contrasting values and customs about which patients may be reluctant to discuss. The initial case history is of a South Indian who sought treatment in the United States. The remaining cases, drawn from a village in South India with which the author has had a 55-year history of research, illustrate cultural factors potentially inhibiting or facilitating the development of empathy and a therapeutic alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakültesi Dergisi DTCF Dergisi is the property of Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakultesi (DTCF Dergisi) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The labor participation of women has had an increment in the last years, although there are different constraints of type personal and cultural that are obstacles in this ambit. Komchén, is a community of Merida where there is a low percent of labor participation, although is urbanized with a big labor mobilization, but their cultural practices and daily activities based on gender. The objective of the investigation is to analyze the influence of the cultural assumptions in the labor participation in the Komchen's women on the labor ambit. The methodology is quality, exploratory descriptive, and transversal, with the phenomenological method. The technique was the interview semi-structured through sample not probabilistic with a snowball, had ten participants. The results indicate there are different types of limits in the women of the community, identifying type personal and cultural, there are recognized three cultural assumptions that influence in the making decisions, search, start or development in the labor participation. From the above, identified that gender has a relation with the roles culturally assigned and influence labor participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural distance and psychic distance are two concepts that are widely used in the marketing literature to assess the differences between countries. The purpose of this study is to draw attention of researchers and managers to the general failure in the literature to differentiate between the cultural distance and psychic distance concepts. A critical review of the use of these concepts, outlining their theoretical and methodological properties, shows that a large number of studies use both concepts interchangeably with no clear distinction between them. The concepts are, however, conceptually distinct and address different phenomena. A framework is proposed that allows researchers and managers to recognise the exclusive properties of the two concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the therapist and patient are from different cultures, there may be impediments to the development of empathy and a therapeutic alliance. South India culture provides an example of contrasting values and customs about which patients may be reluctant to discuss. The initial case history is of a South Indian who sought treatment in the United States. The remaining cases, drawn from a village in South India with which the author has had a 55-year history of research, illustrate cultural factors potentially inhibiting or facilitating the development of empathy and a therapeutic alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under Iran's growing contact with the West from 1925 until 1979, which caused cultural changes, modern writers were stuck between two realities: the vanishing culture of the past with its unified view of women and the modern Western-oriented culture of the present with its doubting, ironic, and fast-changing view of women. Both labels, the 'ethereal' (or inaccessible paragon) and the 'whore' (or accessible temptress) for female characters emerged in a major literary work of the 20th century in Iran, The Blind Owl (1937), by Hedayat due to these cultural changes. Furthermore, the labels appeared within some later modern Persian fictional works such as Prince Ehtejab (1969) by Golshiri, The Night of Terror (1978) by Shahdadi, and Her Eyes (1952) by Alavi. This essay aims to discuss why and how the two aspects of the ethereal and the whore appear in these four, modern works of Persian fiction. To do so, the paper displays the similarities that these female characters share with one another, the way they appear to share similarities with the male narrator's mother, and their relevance both to fine arts and with nature. Analyzing these four modern Persian fictional works in this essay is something more than just an effort to show how women were underestimated in literature even after Iran's modernization, but also to offer insights into persistent cultural assumptions, including relationships between women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examined the critical incidents of 10 United States (US) early childhood student teachers during a three-week university-sponsored international field experience conducted in three urban preschools in Kathmandu, Nepal. The purpose of employing the critical incident technique was to allow the US student teachers to reflect critically on successful and unsuccessful intercultural interactions in an effort to identify cultural assumptions about teaching young children. The approach was used not only to make assumptions visible, but also to make conceptual and behavioral changes based on what was learned from the critical reflection. The student teachers wrote weekly critical incidents, which were then discussed during weekly individual interviews. Three group discussions, a research journal, and field notes were used to triangulate the findings. A qualitative thematic analysis revealed five types of written critical incidents: descriptive, hypothetical, resistive, reflective, and integrative. Illustrative critical incidents are presented to compare and contrast how the international field experience allowed for productive reflection of cultural assumptions for some student teachers while leading to resistance to cultural assumptions for other student teachers. The findings suggest that outcomes vary based on the student teachers' ability not only to identify their cultural assumptions, but also to challenge their cultural assumptions with actions grounded in ethnorelative reflection when teaching diverse groups of young children in the US and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we focus on how indigenous Head Start teachers in American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the US located in the South Pacific negotiated imported policy and curricular models that were not always congruent with local, indigenous approaches to educating young children. Here we place our focus on the negotiation of curriculum within these spaces and in doing so, show that through the reweaving of curriculum, western discourses and influences from the US were altered. We conclude with implications for US territories and other contested spaces across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural assimilation of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest is assessed by comparing their food consumption patterns with those of income-matched Anglos living in the same region and those of income-matched Mexicans living in Mexico City. Rather than relying on self-report data as indicators of consumption patterns, data concerning the contents of the garbage of these three types of households are used. The results suggest that, contrary to predictions based on the traditional model of assimilation. Mexican-American consumption patterns are not a simple blending of Mexican and Anglo patterns. Rather, Mexican-American consumption patterns suggest the emergence of a unique cultural style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An inherent component of relocation narratives is the description of the protagonists’ process of building up their intercultural competence - whose range will vary from one expatriate narrator to another. Closely connected to all the four types of cultural intelligence (CQ), in general, and to the metacognitive CQ, in particular, the account of the sojourn in foreign lands conjures up a raft of reflections on what exactly gives one the sense of cultural belonging. Noticing the difference, analysing it, integrating or dismissing it are as many steps taken during/after cross-cultural interactions. This paper addresses the verbalisation of the cultural differences in accounts that sometimes embrace and other times reject them, by resorting to risqué language in snide remarks meant to perform an evaluation of the received ideas in relation to both the native and the host country of the expatriate. The corpus examined is the construction of the paratext prefiguring the spot-on satire comprised by the text.

In this paper, I aim to reconsider MacIntyre's notion of an educated public. In particular, I aim to do so in light of his recent elucidation of the role of philosophical education in rejecting, or at least challenging, predominant and shared cultural assumptions. I begin by outlining MacIntyre's original case for an educated public as found in The Idea of an Educated Public. I then briefly consider and respond to three prominent criticisms of MacIntyre's original explication of the notion. In responding to these criticisms, it will be made clear that subtle shifts in MacIntyre's subsequent treatments of the notion reduces the dependency of such a public's existence on the university. I conclude by arguing that the development in MacIntyre's articulation of the necessary conditions for an educated public when considered in conjunction with his recent defence of the conditions for an 'adequate philosophical education' provides his philosophy of education with the conceptual resources needed to break free of a final difficulty which MacIntyre himself has articulated. Specifically, I contend that the four stages of an adequate philosophical education MacIntyre outlines are such that they need not be restricted to implementation in formal educational institutions such as the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the socio-economic approach to management (SEAM) intervention in a rural health care system. It mentions to compete with other healthcare organizations, the St. Croix Regional Medical Center had to simultaneously increase patient experience, improve the quality of services provided, reduce overall costs, and increase organizational effectiveness; and also mentions changing the deep beliefs, or cultural assumptions, that led to the dysfunctions.

In this reflection, I critically examine two moments in the ten-year practice of the Winter/Summer Institute (WSI) that illuminate the complexities of working across multiple layers of distance – geographic, cultural, linguistic, racial and educational. WSI, an applied theatre project co-founded by eight artists and educators from the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Lesotho, Southern Africa, has provided a space for exploration, interaction and collaboration with participants from vastly different cultures. It began in 2006 in Lesotho, in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and has brought people together to question assumptions and biases, engage in problem-solving, improvise ideas and create exciting theatre. Using WSI's Lesotho work as its foundation, I seek to explore a number of key questions: How, in taking up contentious social issues, can participants – including facilitators – be pushed to grapple with embeddedness in our own cultural landscapes? How does one prepare to work across huge differences while refraining from imposing our own normative outcomes? And, in collaborative theatre working across distances and differences, how do we weigh and address conflicting claims to truth, particularly when so much is at stake? This reflection describes how, in grappling with these kinds of questions, the best preparation for our applied theatre work is that which allows us to think deeply ahead of time and to be as nimble as possible in navigating the moment to moment, the unexpected. This article points to the importance of recognizing the rich potential that exists for competing narratives and for multiple interpretations, and the value of being critically aware of our own discomforts and of trying to step back from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture plays a pivotal role in adaptive and maladaptive development. However, culture remains disconnected from theory, research, training, assessment, and interventions in developmental psychopathology, limiting our understanding of the genesis and epigenesis of mental health. Cultural development and psychopathology research can help overcome this limitation by focusing on the elucidation of cultural risk, protective, and promotive factors, at the individual and social levels, that initiate, derail, or maintain trajectories of normal and abnormal behavior. The goal of this Special Issue is to showcase research on the association between culture, development, and psychopathology that investigates equifinality and multifinality in cultural development, the interplay between culture and biology, cultural assessment and interventions, and cultural differences and similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Level-1 consensus is a recently-introduced property of a preference-profile. Intuitively, it means that there exists a preference relation which induces an ordering of all other preferences such that frequent preferences are those that are more similar to it. This is a desirable property, since it enhances the stability of social choice by guaranteeing that there exists a Condorcet winner and it is elected by all scoring rules. In this paper, we present an algorithm for checking whether a given preference profile exhibits level-1 consensus. We apply this algorithm to a large number of preference profiles, both real and randomly-generated, and find that level-1 consensus is very improbable. We support these empirical findings theoretically, by showing that, under the impartial culture assumption, the probability of level-1 consensus approaches zero when the number of individuals approaches infinity. Motivated by these observations, we show that the level-1 consensus property can be weakened while retaining its stability implications. We call this weaker property Flexible Consensus. We show, both empirically and theoretically, that it is considerably more probable than the original level-1 consensus. In particular, under the impartial culture assumption, the probability for Flexible Consensus converges to a positive number when the number of individuals approaches infinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the degree to which Karl Marx used the Round Reading Room of the British Museum and whether this degree corresponds to the prevailing cultural assumption. By using Marx's correspondence, contemporary reminiscences, and British Museum archival documents, Marx's use of the Reading Room is verified, but his visits are shown to be discontinuous and irregular. Marx's presence in the Round Reading Room has become an untested assumption in library history: this paper concludes that the facts and the conceit are at odds. Sources and mechanisms for the emergence of the myth are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to foster safe and independent mobility for blind people, Tactile Walking Surface Indicators (TWSI) are used in many countries throughout the world. Unfortunately, TWSI have witnessed a rapid and often uncertain proliferation without sufficient attention on their impact on spatial contexts in general, and on cultural assets in particular. With the aim of contributing to the ongoing debate concerning accessibility to cultural heritage, this paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of TWSI and explores the communicative capacities of a tactile paving typology (Contrasting Walking Surface Materials—CWSM) based on the appropriate combination of common paving materials. Through a structured observation study conducted in a controlled environment, this paper offers a methodological design, the first quantitative data, and some food for thought regarding CWSM detectability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a significant way, the growing body of place-responsive research and practice within outdoor education in Australia can be perceived as an eco-inspired response to both the devastating impact of colonization on our ecological communities and the concomitant sense of "placelessness" or lack of a sense of belonging and purpose experienced by many Australians. In this regard, there has always been an ally in Aboriginal Lore, which worked to maintain ecological and social balance and wellness in Australia for thousands of years prior to the arrival of Europeans. Yet, it has been argued that many outdoor education programmes continue to perpetuate the colonial and anthropocentric discourses clearly responsible for much of this ecological and social damage. Not surprisingly, several place-responsive proponents have flagged the value of local partnerships between outdoor educators and Aboriginal people. This paper offers a brief critique of these dominant discourses and their impact upon outdoor education practice, followed by an exploration of what partnerships with local Aboriginal people might look like and offer. To this end, transformative and conversational processes will be proposed, supported, and nuanced with evidence from an intercultural collaboration project undertaken in the Northern Territory in 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Movies embody cultural values; those of class, gender, ethnicity, region, and nation come immediately to mind. They also reflect deeper civilizational assumptions such as Enlightenment values of moral redemption through human agency toward social progress that will be examined here by comparing the movies Avatar (2009) and District 9 (2009). The methodology is to identify backstage cultural assumptions that have to be assumed to make sense out of frontstage plot development. The idea of 'species jumping' is introduced to illustrate the deteriorating idea that distinctly human agency is capable of producing a better social world and attaining secular moral redemption as the protagonists in both films reincarnate into alien species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superficially considered, the connection between Paul Tillich's theology and the postmodern cultural debates is an anachronism. A more thorough analysis, however, produces elements of his thought that are quite compatible with postmodern ideas on culture. In my essay, I interpret Tillich's theology as a kind of 'meta-theoretical' reflection on cultural theories, making it able to critically connect to the postmodern cultural debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined cultural reflections online of audience comments on social network sites regarding vocal talent shows in China and the United States. The study applied dimensions of cross culture to investigate audience comments on the official social networking sites of The Voice of China and The Voice. Findings reflect Hofstede’s dimensions as applied to social media and illustrate how individuals alter their “local” cultural norms in the new media environment. The study specifically enhances the exploration of cultural manifestations in cyberspace, which fewer cross-cultural studies have researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social category of “teen” has become ubiquitous in Western English-speaking popular culture. Also, with the global success of cultural products from the United States of America, such as music, movies and television programs featuring teens, the word “teen” is being employed in other cultures and languages. However, a comparison of the girl teen—often portrayed as a vulnerable stage of human development—with other cultural representations of developing womanhood (the Japanese shoujo and the French jeune fille en fleur) shows the representation of the “teen” to be a construction of its cultural context and questions its universal applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sought to determine if cultural variables might explain differences in press freedom across nations. The results confirmed that two of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions – power distance and individualism – explained a significant amount of variance in press freedom rankings produced by Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders. For example, the two factors combined to explain 48% of the variance in Reporters Without Borders rankings and accounted for 42% of the variance in Freedom House’s civil liberties scores. The results suggest that those who seek to promote freedom of the press around the world would be wise to pay more attention to cultural factors that may stand in the way of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversies surrounding ethnic dress such ashijabhave increased public awareness about cultural diversity. The number of comments posted on online media make it evident that many people are concerned about ethnic attire, cultural differences and social cohesion. Although researchers have examined the meanings of veiling, the relationships betweenhijaband public opinion have seldom been investigated. The overarching objective of this study was to understand the relationships between Islamic attire and online readers’ opinion. In light of the limitations in the previous studies on this topic, this study attempts to fill the gap by studying posters’ opinions towardhijabthrough publicly available online information in the form of posted comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the identities of Indian women engineers in the gendered organizational context of US engineering programmes. Participant narratives discuss the ways in which women are subjected to identity struggles in India due to gendered patrifocal norms that impose structural, societal, and familial pressures on women. Subsequently, when these women enter US engineering programmes, they encounter a highly masculine organizational and cultural space. Participants discuss identity dislocations, transformations, and assimilation as they seek to meld into the existing structures and find a career trajectory. I draw upon liminality theory to explore the cultural transitions, identity restructuring, and negotiations of Indian women engineers, navigating the intersections of competing and intersecting cultural norms of gender and engineering in India and the US, work, and family. The findings indicate the layers of gendered ideology that constitute engineering education in India and the US, the societal pressures of marriage and family rooted in patrifocal Indian norms, the barriers to finding an engineering job, the resources within the structures that support women, and the identification of patriarchy as the enactment of agency and as a site for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The disruption of retrieval strategies hypothesis (Basden, Basden. Bryner, & Thomas, 1997) has been identified as the main reason for the occurrence of the collaborative inhibition effect. This study aims to test this hypothesis applying the same retrieval strategy to all participants. Method: To accomplish this, we compared nominal and collaborative (pairs) performance in a serial recall task in two conditions: use of own strategy vs. use of the method of loci, in a classic experimental paradigm of collaborative memory. Results: Results revealed that endowing participants with the same strategy of coding and retrieval of information eliminates the collaborative inhibition effect. Conclusions: This result provides evidence for the hypothesis of the retrieval strategies disruption. The method of loci proved to be an effective mnemonic by increasing the amount of recalled information, both in the nominal and collaborative recall, when the information has to be recalled in the order that was presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this research is to present an exploratory study that examines some of the cultural assumptions on which the opposition to the social and legal recognition of homosexual marriage in Italy is based. These assumptions are based on a naturalistic anthropology which considers human nature, possibly created by God, structured exclusively in the complementary forms of male and female. Some recurring narrative elements which emerge from the social networks and from websites of a network of traditionalist movements, mainly linked to the Catholic area, are illustrated here, to propose, at the end, an interpretation, including with resort to some of the sociological categories devised by P.T. Berger and T. Luckmann. The naturalized ideas of humankind and the family seem to be the sacred foundations of the symbolic universe of the group; for this reason, the perception of any serious threat to the family is experienced by the members of the group as a serious profanation of the entire sacred order that is based on these foundations. Coherently with this, the forces identified at the origin of the profanation are shown as evil forces that seek to destroy the whole of humanity. The defence of the sacred values of the family therefore assumes the form of defence of cosmic order from the powers that seek to spread chaos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement frames are dynamic, shifting and embedded within an already existent cultural milieu--a milieu that affects mobilization opportunities. In this article, we invoke the concept of the "cultural clearinghouse" to tackle how broader cultural structures translate to frames or influence frame resonance. Our illustrative case, the Nobel Peace Prize, along with our use of topic modeling, a computational technique that identifies commonalities between texts, offer an important methodological advance for social movement scholars interested in culture, frame formation and resonance, and dynamic approaches to social movement discourse. Our findings show how peace discourse--as represented by Peace Prize acceptance speeches--increasingly has become embedded within broader cultural emphases on globalization and neoliberalism, versus earlier Christian and global institutional schemas. We conclude by discussing the usefulness of our conceptual and methodological advance for movement scholars with special attention to the coupling of new computational techniques and more traditional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]