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AbstractResearch into the social correlates of free-market institutions has significantly expanded during the past 15 years with the widespread use of indexes of economic freedom. One crucial issue, however, has been only very sparsely probed: the relationship between free markets and homicidal violence. The few studies that do exist are mostly beset by one or multiple serious methodological weaknesses, such as reliance on single cross-sections, failure to disaggregate the index of economic freedom, not investigating its potentially heterogenous effects in developed and developing societies, ignoring possible endogeneity, etc. The present study addresses these issues in a panel sample of 131 developed and developing countries between 2000 and 2021. A key novel finding, robust to dynamic panel estimation techniques addressing endogeneity concerns, is that the aggregate economic freedom index has a negative over-time relationship with homicide in developing countries. Conversely, it exhibits a positive relationship in the developed world, exacerbating homicide rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'standard narrative' about capitalism and extreme poverty holds that the transition to the former was associated with a staggering reduction of the latter. Recently, this has been strongly called into question by a critical narrative grounded in a battery of non-GDP-based measures of extreme poverty and living standards, such as subsistence welfare ratios, skeletal height data, and famine reports. This critical narrative holds that extreme-poverty conditions were + rare in normal circumstances before the transition to capitalism, and that a significant deterioration amounting to extreme poverty happened in Europe and globally only afterwards. The present paper re-examines the issue, drawing on these and additional non-GDP-based historical sources of living standards, including formerly overlooked cases, such as pre-conquest Aztec Empire and Tokugawa-era Japan. It finds that the standard narrative's portrayal of the prevalence of extreme poverty before capitalism is indeed mistaken. However, it also takes issue with parts of the critical narrative, mainly the idea that capitalism caused severe deterioration in living standards. On a widely shared definition of capitalism, and a quantitatively demonstrated periodization of the transition, the notion that living standards were generally poor before a society's transition to capitalism and only started systematically improving afterwards has better support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2000s, democratization has slowed, stopped, and even reversed across the world. At the same time, societies have become more oriented toward free markets as measured by indexes of economic freedom. Relying on a panel sample of 141 developed and developing countries between 2006 and 2017, this paper is the first to investigate whether the two phenomena are related by employing economic freedom data. It finds that there is no net-negative relationship between aggregate economic freedom and democracy in this time-period. Instead, mixed findings of both an overall positive and overall neutral (but not negative) association are uncovered in between-country and within-country analyses, respectively. In between-country analyses, using the disaggregated index shows that the legal system/property rights component drives most of the positive relationship between aggregate economic freedom and democracy in the developed world. The same between-country analyses in the developing world show that freedom of international trade is positively associated with democracy, while modest regulation has a negative relationship. However, additionally controlling for omitted variable bias using country-fixed effects, the paper does not find evidence for either a positive or negative relationship between subsequent changes in levels of economic freedom and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intervention aimed at reducing gender stereotyping was carried out among teachers from 7 Serbian and 12 Slovenian primary schools. A quasi-experimental study was based on pre-test/post-test design. A pre-test among 354 teachers confirmed the existence of the predicted stereotypes and a post-test among 287 teachers participating in intervention workshops enabled assessment of the intervention's effects. Results show that most of the measured gender stereotypes were less present within the post-test group. The intervention was especially successful in addressing the most frequent stereotypes and for descriptive stereotypes. For example, girls and boys were perceived as substantially less different in terms of aggressiveness, talent, and interest in sports or work with computers. More importantly, certain prescriptive stereotypes were also significantly reduced. These include, for example, the idea that sports are more important for boys than for girls or that more emotional support should be devoted to girls than to boys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents and critically assesses the latest anthropological and archaeological research on the chronology, lethality, and frequency of violence and war in human history. Stepping back from the rhetorically polarized dispute between 'Hobbesians' and 'Rousseauans', the article examines the methods and findings of the latest research in a conceptually novel way, i.e. by dropping the existing and widely used polarized terms that have inevitably framed the literature so far. The article demonstrates that multiple sources of evidence point more in the direction of the modal human prehistoric social organization, i.e. nomadic hunter-gatherers, likely having warfare only in a minority of cases, or war even being virtually non-existent (with interpersonal violence being more common). The dispute over this claim so far is found to stem, at least in part, from the varying definitions of war and the grouping together of nomadic with complex foragers. More significantly, the disagreement is due to different sampling and sourcing techniques of different researchers, the biggest divide being between self-selection/systematic sampling and first-best/second-best sources. Important potential warlike exceptions are also noted and discussed in the article from multiple angles (Jebel Sahaba, Nataruk, Aboriginal Australia, etc.), as are the discovered precursors and enabling conditions of war, such as the complexification of (nomadic) hunter-gatherer societies with the transition to settled life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologija/Sociology: Journal of Sociology, Social Psychology & Social Anthropology is the property of MOD International 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.)

Copyright of Družboslovne Razprave is the property of Druzboslovne Razprave 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.)

Copyright of Družboslovne Razprave is the property of Druzboslovne Razprave 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.)

Copyright of Družboslovne Razprave is the property of Druzboslovne Razprave 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.)

Copyright of Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies / Sodobna Pedagogika is the property of Association of Slovenian Educationalists 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 concept of the knowledge society or, better, knowledge economy was initially developed in the USA in the 1960s, but it has also been gaining considerable momentum over the past two decades in Europe. Proponents of the knowledge driven economy, in which knowledge becomes the main productive resource, claim their idea represents a genuine shift to a new phase of capitalist accumulation, in which the old problems of chronic unemployment, material scarcity and competitive disadvantage are solved. In this article, we show that the claims of these ideologues are (a) misleading, and (b) that the mechanisms required for the implementation of such a society have detrimental consequences on the function and role of education and knowledge. The knowledge society is not a new, qualitatively different phase of capitalism, where systemic crises are eradicated; rather, it is a society in which educational and research activities are implicitly and explicitly subjugated to the requirements of a flexible labor market and the global competitive struggle. In other words, the once universally accessible schooling and nonmarket scientific research are restructured in such a way that they serve the imperative of production for the sake of profit, not the maxim of production for the sake of satisfying societal needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]