Close Personal Ties Research Articles

Dante en la cultura catalana a l’entorn del Casal de Barcelona (1381-1410/12)

This article analyzes in a historical context the earliest evidences of Dante’s influence on Catalan culture during the reigns of Kings Peter IV, John I and Martin of Aragon, until the interregnum (1410-12) and the change of dynasty resulting from the Compromise of Caspe (1412). French courts, Avignon papal curia and the close personal, political and dynastic ties between the kingdoms of Sicily and Aragon constitute the background on which this paper studies the many echoes of Dante —from the Commedia, from the commentaries on Dante and from the so-called silloge boccaccesca — to be found around the chancellery and the court of Aragon: specifically, in Bernat Metge’s Llibre de Fortuna e Prudencia (1381) and Lo somni (c. 1398); in Andreu Febrer’s, Gilabert de Proixida’s and Melcior de Gualbes’ poetry; in one letter from Martin of Aragon (1408), and in Felip de Malla’s early predication (1411, 1413).

The Austrian Connection: SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik and His Staff in the Lublin District

The Office of the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District under Odilo Globocnik contributed to two objectives of Nazi rule in Poland: the murder of the Jews and “Germanization.” Globocnik’s enormous activism is often explained by his socialization and the experience of failure as Gauleiter of Vienna. His staff in Lublin has received little attention. Austrians occupied almost all important positions on that staff. Decisive for their recruitment, however, was not their origin but their affiliation with Globocnik’s network when the Nazi movement had been illegal in Austria. These were not just any men, but a group of perpetrators with very close personal and ideological ties.

The Trust Paradox in Nuclear Smuggling

ABSTRACTThis article explores the paradox of trust in the largest nuclear smuggling operation involving highly enriched uranium (HEU) discussed in open source literature. In the first effort to understand the type, extent, and role of trust in nuclear smuggling enterprises, it draws from literature on trust development in legitimate businesses as well as criminal enterprises. Observed behavioral patterns in this case challenge traditional notions of the internal dynamics of temporary groups engaged in nuclear smuggling and operational realities of such activities. The article seeks to explain why individuals agree (and continue) to operate in this high-risk environment, unbound by close personal ties, without any effort to verify the background, motives, or qualifications of the fellow conspirators. It offers ways to advance current nonproliferation efforts in non-state actor interdiction by exploiting the environment of shallow trust in temporary groups.

Double-embeddedness: Spatial and relational contexts of tie persistence and re-formation

Personal relationships are embedded in both spatial and relational contexts. Using data on 60 intentional communities from the Urban Communes Data Set, we examine how such embedding is related to the persistence and re-formation of close personal ties over a thirteen year period, beginning from when most members had been out of their group environments more than a decade. We find that local network structure—the pattern of dyads immediately surrounding any dyad—is extremely weighty in which ties persist, which lapse, and which are re-initiated, but that the precise ways in which local structure affects contact are bound up with the distance between dyad members. We also find asymmetries in these processes that other studies have been unable to uncover—that processes that lead ties to be dropped are not the same as those that lead them to be renewed; that increases in local embeddedness are not opposite of decreases; that change in contact is not the same as change in friendship. Finally, there is evidence of hierarchical effects influencing the retention of friendships more than twenty-five years after most respondents left their groups.

Making Singapore's tripartism work (faster): the formation of the Singapore National Employers' Federation in 1980

We locate the 1980 formation of the Singapore National Employers' Federation (SNEF) within a history of Singaporean tripartism. This redresses a general neglect of employer associations in that system and suggests re-conceptualising Singaporean tripartism into three overlapping phases between 1960 and 1985. The motivations for the first two are well understood. Once in government, the People's Action Party (PAP) suppressed political and union opposition and then sought legitimacy and the integration of Singapore's working class, including by providing a central role for a subordinated union movement. We argue that in a third phase, emerging during the 1970s, PAP brought employer associations into its national distributed leadership model that meshed close personal ties and institutional tripartite roles. SNEF's formation was necessary for rapid tripartite implementation of the PAP's radical shift in economic strategy.

Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China

Given widespread perceptions of risk and uncertainty in nondemocratic systems and developing democracies, why do some citizens still take action and make complaints to authorities? The resource mobilization model identifies the importance of time, money, and civic skills as resources that are necessary for participation. In this paper we build on this model and argue that political connections – close personal ties to someone working in government – can also constitute a critical resource, especially in contexts with weak democratic institutions. Using data from both urban and rural China, we find that individuals with political connections are more likely to contact authorities with complaints about government public services, despite the fact that they do not have higher levels of dissatisfaction with public service provision. We conduct various robustness checks, including a sensitivity analysis, and show that this relationship is unlikely to be driven by an incorrect model specification or unobserved confounding variables.

Andreeva, E. and Belobrovtseva, I. (eds). ‘Tolko Vy poimete sleduiushchii tekst. Perepiska N. E. Andreeva i L. F. Zurova (review)

REVIEWS 533 this is a tremendously useful book, and one that expertly demonstrates how Nabokov’s texts have still so much to disclose to the curious and attentive reader. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Andreeva, E. and Belobrovtseva, I. (eds). ‘Tol´ko Vy poimete sleduiushchii tekst...’. Perepiska N. E. Andreeva i L. F. Zurova. Baltiiskii arkhiv: Russkaia kul´tura v Pribaltike, 13. Tallinna Ülikooli Slaavi Keelte ja Kutluuride Instituut, Tallin, 2013. 298 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. $42.00 (paperback). It is a fact, noted by Nikolai Andreyev in his work on Diak Viskovatii and the cultural heritage of Pskov and Novgorod, explored with great poignancy by Iurii Lotman in the context of the semiosphere, that peripheral cultural outposts frequently foreground the central culture from which they stem: Venice, St Petersburg, Byzantium. When the political geography changes, there is always a danger that this subtle apotheosis of the non-native, nonhomegrown heritage may be lost. It is, therefore, particularly important that Tallin, capital of present-day Estonia, has given us such an excellent ‘Russian’ seriesasBaltiiskiiarkhiv,editedbyAlexanderDanilevskiy,andthispublication is one more very cogent reason to be grateful for it. The correspondence between Nikolai Andreyev and Leonid Zurov, springing as it does from a shared interest in the archeology of the Pechorskii Krai, is of more than provincial interest. Andreyev’s research during the prewar expeditions on which the two cooperated was funded by the Kondakov Institute in Prague, Zurov’s by the Musée d’Homme in Paris. The detail of their archeological and ethnographical discoveries is fascinating: both men not only met with predictable difficulties from local bureaucracy and border authorities but also from monastics in residence in the ancient monasteries they were investigating and, in Zurov’s case, restoring. The monks liked things as they had been yesterday, not as they were four to six hundred years previously, and regarded the two young lay scholars as, at best, heretically inclined ignorami, at worst — godless ‘Free Masons’. The ethnically Russian peasant population, however, had, as Zurov noted, much longer memories and were sometimes of great help in determining the academically disputed exact position of Ivan the Terrible’s heavy artillery, where the Russians had baked their bread and the Novgorodians buried their dead, or what precisely occurred when Abbot Kornilii surrendered his fortress monastery to the Muscovites — events which lived on in the folk-memory with extraordinary immediacy (p. 94). SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 534 The fact that Zurov was also, and indeed primarily, a creative writer and Andreyev a percipient literary critic (usually under a pseudonym) adds further interest to their correspondence, which was renewed with great mutual sympathy after a period during and immediately after the Second World War when they lost touch. Zurov’s very Russian Russian syntax and rich vocabulary, full of local words and echoes from the pre-Petrine past, is not at all in the tradition of Bunin, to whom and to whose family he was known to be bound by close personal ties. Critics tended to dismiss him as an epigone ‘of the Bunin school’ and he was appreciative of the fact that Andreyev never regarded him as such but perceived his individuality as a writer, took a supportive interest in his plans for new publications and wrote and lectured, with insight and enthusiasm, about his colourful and highly original prose. Zurov, in his turn, responded eagerly to his friend’s scholarly work and took a lively, vicarious interest in his happy marriage to an English woman (‘Dzhill — umna, sil´na, glaza iasnye. Vse vidit i vse ponimaet’, p. 71) his children and reunion, after years of separation, with his mother, repatriated after the war to Soviet Estonia, whom Zurov remembered fondly from Izborsk, Pechory: ‘Kak legko, svobodno tantsevala... kakoy rost´, kakaya stat´, Gera!’ (p. 79). Both men took a lively interest in creative and critical literature in the Soviet Union and in what was going on in their own field of study in the world of scholarship. They were also actively involved in émigré literary events and publishing. Andreyev, firmly tied down by academic and family responsibilities in Cambridge and Cornwall, where the family spent their holidays, was always hungry for news which...

MEMORIAL TO ADRIAAN C. VAN GINKEL (1931-2013)

Adrianus (Adriaan) Cornelis van Ginkel, a well-known specialist of fusulinid foraminifera, passed away on September 10, 2013, in Leiderdorp, Holland. Born in Wageningen on March 31, 1931, he was the son of Cornelis van Ginkel, the local veterinarian, and Margreta van Ginkel-Schouten. Throughout his primary and secondary school education in Wageningen, he showed a broad interest in any aspect of natural history. From 1950–1955 Adriaan studied geology at Leiden State University, where he received his undergraduate and M.Sc. degrees. His Master’s thesis dealt with the Carboniferous fusulinids and stratigraphy at the headwaters of the Pisuerga River, an area along the southern slope of the Cantabrian Mountains in northern Spain. That field work was his first contact with a region in which he developed close personal and professional ties that lasted for the rest of his life. After graduation Adriaan accepted employment as a micropaleontologist in the Turkish Geological Survey (MTA) in Ankara from 1957–1960, until returning to Leiden University to start his Ph.D. research supervised by Professor Aart Brouwer, head of the Department of Stratigraphy and Palaeontology. He focused on the Carboniferous fusulinids of northern Spain as part of a major project, led by Professor Lamoraal Ulbo de Sitter, on the stratigraphy, structure, and mapping of the southern slope of the Cantabrian Mountains. Based on this research Adriaan received his Ph.D. degree in May 1965 and later that year published an expanded version of his thesis entitled “Carboniferous fusulinids from the Cantabrian Mountains (Spain)” (van Ginkel, 1965) that included an extensive chapter on systematics. It was a pioneering work that offered a comprehensive study of the until-then poorly known fusulinids …

Academic Relations Between Italian and Spanish Archaeologists and Prehistorians, 1916–1936

Relations between Spain and Italy are always described, by the inhabitants of both countries, as ‘fraternal’. Spanish archaeologists had close intellectual and personal ties with Italian archaeology and its archaeologists, after all they shared a Latin culture and a Roman past. Prior to the Spanish Civil War, and through the efforts of Spanish archaeologists Bosch Gimpera and Hugo Obermaier, this network, that spanned both Classical and prehistoric archaeologies, was used to support the holding of the IV International Congress on Classical Archaeology in Barcelona in 1929, and this lead, among other things, to the foundation of the Congres International des Sciences Prehistoriques et Protohistoriques in Berne in 1932 (CISPP), the forerunner of today’s UISPP. However, common Spanish and Italian archaeological interests also caused the development of Italian-style monumentalist archaeological projects at Romano-Hispanic sites. Eventually under the new Fascist government in Spain, and archaeologists such as Garcia y Bellido, Santa Olalla, Taracena and Almagro, archaeology was used to justify Spanish nationalism, and its ideology of empire, strong central leadership, and political and linguistic unity.

Musik als Bekenntnis: Christus-Oratorien im 19. Jahrhundert (review)

Reviewed by: Musik als Bekenntnis: Christus-Oratorien im 19. Jahrhundert Jesse Rosenberg Musik als Bekenntnis: Christus-Oratorien im 19. Jahrhundert. By Daniel Ortuño-Stühring. (Weimarer Liszt-Studien, im Auftrag der Deutsche Liszt-Gesellschaft, ed. Detlef Altenburg, Band 6). Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2011. [399 p. ISBN 9783890073439. €64.] Music examples, tables, bibliography, list of abbreviations. Richard Wagner's putdown of the sacred oratorio ("an obvious misconstrual of the present"), cited more than once in the book under review, is a good indication of how low the genre had fallen in general esteem by the 1830s. In Wagner's view, the primary defect was the extreme conservatism of subject matter and musical style. By an ironic twist, the subsequent reawakening of interest in the oratorio as a viable genre was closely tied to the baroque revival lead by Felix Mendelssohn, and crowned by Mendelssohn's own superlative contributions to the genre, St. Paul and Elijah. These works, along with the eighteenth-century masterpieces of Bach and Handel championed by Mendelssohn, cemented the association between large-scale sacred [End Page 573] drama and the employment of eighteenth-century models for form and texture. But other views were also expressed; Robert Schumann, though observing that the "bloom" of the oratorio had faded long ago, praised Ferdinand Hiller's Die Zerstörung Jerusalems (1840) for more closely approaching "the future," and Franz Liszt wondered how a genre in which the best-known works belonged to the past could be made to live again in the present. The ways in which these issues played out in sacred oratorios of the latter half of the nineteenth century make for a fascinating and complex history, but one too large to be encompassed in a single volume. Daniel Ortuño-Stühring has chosen to focus on a subset within a subset of this history. First, as regards subject matter, he concentrates exclusively on the "Christ-oratorio," a term used to denote a work which presents the life of Jesus as a whole, or at least an extended stretch of it, as opposed to a single episode such as the Nativity, the raising of Lazarus, or the Last Supper. Ortuño-Stühring's interest, moreover, falls principally on Germany, where by far the greater number of these works were conceived and performed, and in particular on the last four German works in the genre completed in the nineteenth century. The first three of these works, remarkably, share the identical title, Christus: Liszt's composition of 1872, Friedrich Kiel's of the same year, and Anton Rubinstein's "sacred opera," completed in 1893. Felix Draeseke's Christus-Mysterium, completed in 1899, is the fourth work. Why a whole book on these four compositions? As the author explains in his introduction, they have notable commonalities which strongly suggest the need to be examined as a group. The table printed on pages 13-14, an annotated list of all the German "Christ-oratorios" between 1827 and World War I, clarifies that the four works in question form a consecutive sequence within the list overall. All four are further united by the evident centrality of Liszt, since, in addition to his own oratorio, we have three works by composers with close personal and professional ties to him. Each of the four works was considered the crowning achievement by the composer in question, as little as posterity may have concurred in the assessment. In all four works the composer was creatively involved in the text as well as the music, whether writing the libretto (Liszt, Kiel, and Draeseke) or closely supervising it (Rubinstein). The works, finally, are also linked by a reception history which focused largely on the artistic manifestations of their composers' religious identities or convictions (Liszt's Catholicism, Kiel's Protestantism, Rubinstein's Jewishness) during the contentious period of the Kulturkampf and its immediate aftermath. The excellent introduction, which focuses on the vexed history of the oratorio genre against the background of contemporary developments in religion and theology, lays the groundwork for an important theme of the book: that the late-nineteenth-century works under consideration, far from being neobaroque or neoclassical attempts to recapture the styles and approaches...

Raphael and Spanish Popular Song: A Master Entertainer and/or Music for Maids

Raphael and Spanish Popular Song: A Master Entertainer and/or Music for Maids1 Duncan Wheeler (bio) Raphael, a global multimedia superstar, began his professional singing career in 1960 and has subsequently taken the lead role in numerous cinematic star vehicles, hosted his own television shows and starred in the Spanish version of the Jekyll and Hyde stage musical. His initial rise to fame was inextricably linked with his ability to simultaneously embody tradition and modernity in his public persona, music and performance style. He remains a household name in Spain and his television specials on Christmas Eve have become as traditional and commented upon as the King’s address to the nation. Although Raphael is undeniably an institution at home, he is too contested a figure to acquire the status of a national treasure. In the words of Luz Sánchez-Mellado: Pruebe a decir estas frases en público. Yo soy aquél. Qué sabe nadie. En carne viva. Escándalo. Seguro que alguien las completa con una estrofa sepultada en su inconsciente. Como la magdalena de Proust. Como el perro de Pavlov. Cada una de las 300 canciones del repertorio de Raphael desencadena una respuesta automática en el imaginario de tres generaciones de españoles. Con su nombre pasa igual. ¿Raphael? “Un artistazo.” “Un histrión.” “Un facha.” “El precursor del glam.” “Una estrella.” “Amanerado.” “Único.” La reacción espontánea de un puñado de encuestados lo constata. Todos tienen una opinión sobre él. (52) [End Page 11] My intention in this article is to contextuy intention in this article is to contextualise and explain these complex and often contradictory responses which, I will argue, stem largely from the fact that Raphael embodies a form of commoditised mass culture which came to the fore in Spain during the 1960s when, in Tatjana Pavlović’s memorable phrase, the Franco “regime’s self-justification ceased to be metaphysical and became more frankly material” (1). It is designed to be read as a socio-historical companion piece to the first academic study dedicated to Raphael in which I locate him, both culturally and aesthetically, within the nascent field of Spanish popular music studies (Wheeler). Especially following his marriage to aristocrat Natalia Figueroa in 1972, Raphael had close personal and political ties with the Francoist elite and he provides a particularly blatant example of how celebrities courted and were courted by the dictatorial regime. In interviews as in his lyrics, he sought to avoid political commentary but, when pushed, he made his sentiments if not his words clear: ¿Si creo que existen aquí problemas políticos? ¡Ahí, sí que me has dado en la médula: de eso sí que no entiendo nada! Y no es pose: soy apolítico por completo, por completo. No sé qué es socialismo, no sé qué es . . . ¿qué más cosas hay? . . . pues comunismo . . . ¿qué más cosas hay?, hay más cosas . . . democracia y rinosincracia, ¡ja, ja, ja! Te juro que no entiendo nada. Ni siquiera sé lo que quieren decir estas palabras . . . Yo admiro y adoro con locura al Generalísimo Franco, le quiero muchísimo, con amor profundo. Me produjo un respeto imponente . . . Ahora, si de pronto, viene el rey Juan Carlos o . . . y viene él y se porta tal como Franco, para mí merecerá los mismos respetos, igual como se merecía mis respetos por lo bien que se ha portado con el pueblo americano Kennedy, ¿me entiendes? (Raphael cited in Porcel, “Raphael” 23) During the 1960s and early 1970s, this led many to assume that he was an opportunist whose fame would be transitory. Raphael is a fascinating case-study in that he helps contextualise the distrust of popular culture in the Spanish academy, an unsatisfactory state of affairs of which he is both a victim and perpetrator. An (in)conspicuous absence of scholarly attention is, I will suggest, symptomatic of a broader tendency characterised by Jo Labanyi in the following terms: “critical writing on modern Spanish culture, by largely limiting itself to the study of ‘high culture’ (even when the texts studied are non-canonical), has systematically made invisible—ghostly—whole areas of culture which are...

Mobile communication and strong network ties: Shrinking or expanding spheres of public discourse?

This study tests theoretical propositions that intensive mobile communication in small networks of like-minded strong ties hinders open dialogue with others. Using multi-wave panel data from a representative sample of adults in the US, the study found that reported levels of open dialogue decreased slightly with mobile-mediated political discussion in small and like-minded strong-tie networks. Interestingly, a more pronounced positive effect was found for mobile-mediated discussion in larger networks of like-minded close ties. In this case, open dialogue was facilitated by mobile-mediated discussion, revealing potential for mobile communication among close personal ties to expand spheres of public discourse and deliberation. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are offered in the discussion.

The Impact of Social Ties on Coalition Strength and Effectiveness: The Case of the Battered Women's Movement in St Louis

Although a number of researchers have studied social movement coalitions, we still need to develop better ways to analyze why some initiatives succeed and others fail. In this study, I compare three different coalitions in which battered women's movement activists participated to determine the factors that made some coalitions stronger and more effective than others. Using qualitative data from a 16-year longitudinal study, I found that an important variable affecting a coalition's strength is the quality of the social relationships among its members. In particular, close personal ties encourage a degree of trust, the sharing of detailed knowledge, and collective problem-solving mechanisms that enable coalition members to anticipate one another's preferences and behavior and overcome conflicts as they arise. The greater coordination capacity that results can make it possible for a social movement to exert increased political power and position it to take advantage of new political opportunities when they arise.

Trust, Diversity, and Segregation in the United States and the United Kingdom1

AbstractGeneralized trust is a value that leads to many positive outcomes for a society. Many analysts argue that trust is lower when we are surrounded by people who are different from ourselves. Residential segregation, not diversity is the culprit in lower levels of trust. Segregation is one of the key reasons why contact with people who are different from ourselves does not lead to greater trust. Diversity is a proxy for the minority share in a community and that: (1) segregation, especially in diverse communities, drives down trust more than diversity does; but (2) close personal ties in integrated diverse communities builds trust, but more so in the United States than in the United Kingdom, and more for majority white communities than for minorities.

The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project: An Introduction

The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project: An Introduction

'Art and Labour's Cause Is One': Walter Crane and Manchester, 1880-1915 * From Toy Books to Bloody Sunday: Tales from The Walter Crane Archive

In 1989, the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester, as part of its centenary celebrations, mounted a major Walter Crane (1845–1915) exhibition aiming to cover all his multifarious activities. In this journal, the review by Hazel Clark of the accompanying publication—Walter Crane 1845–1915: Artist, Designer and Socialist (eds., Greg Smyth and Sara Hyde)—commented that although it was both a commendable exhibition and publication, Crane awaited a truly comprehensive retrospective and nothing yet had superseded Isobel Spencer's earlier monograph on Crane (Studio Vista, 1975), which remains today the standard source on the artist.1 Remarkably, in the intervening twenty years or so since then very little has been published on Walter Crane. This makes the appearance of Morna O’Neill's ‘Art and Labour's Cause is One’: Water Crane and Manchester, 1880–1915 all the more significant. Like Smith and Hyde's 1989 Crane catalogue, O’Neill's publication accompanies an exhibition at the Whitworth (16 August 2008 to September 2009). This time the aim is not, however, to produce an overview of Crane's entire oeuvre but rather to illuminate one aspect, his relationship with Manchester, a city with which he had close personal and professional ties and whose history and culture he celebrated whilst refusing to valorize its industrial entrepreneurship and capitalist spirit. Crane's relationship with Manchester was complex and long drawn out and has never really been assessed before. For such reconsideration as this the Whitworth is uniquely placed as, with the John Rylands Library, also part of the University of Manchester, they acquired the Walter Crane Archive (WCA), containing the contents of his studio and including some 4800 sheets of paper, in May 2002. The Whitworth Gallery and the Rylands Library already hold an important collection of Crane material but this new acquisition will make the WCA the international centre for Crane research. The cost of the archive, somewhere around £300,000, was met with support by the Heritage Lottery Fund after the Minister of State Affairs, Tessa Blackstone, placed a temporary bar on the export of the archive in February 2002.

What drives scientists to start their own company?: An empirical investigation of Max Planck Society scientists

Studies on academic spin-off companies have shown that the researchers’ scientific potential, experience and established networks with other scientists or companies affect entrepreneurial activity. Most studies investigate official data such as patents and citations or qualitatively study a research group or spin-off formation. Only a few studies focus on the individual scientist. Our study fills this gap by analyzing survey interviews of 2604 scientists working for the Max Planck Society in Germany. Our empirical results indicate that the entrepreneurial activities of scientists heavily depend on patenting activity, entrepreneurial experience, and personal opinions about the benefits of commercializing research and close personal ties to industry.

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited1

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited¹

Social support: Mapping the construct

Social support is a construct with multiple dimensions that can be approached at multiple levels. Findings from a variety of disciplines and recognition of its bidirectional nature can help map the construct. Bidirectionality is a process that requires attention to moderators, such as, gender, cultural change, and personal development, together with the relationship between the receiver and the provider of support. Both close personal ties and weaker ones that often are part of community involvement need to be taken into account in order to map the construct comprehensively.

G. Ledyard Stebbins. The ladyslipper and I

G. Ledyard Stebbins. The ladyslipper and I