Contemporary Relations Research Articles

The Contemporary Relationship Among Performance Appraisal Practices, job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, and Career Advancement in MNCs

Performance appraisal practices are significant policies among other human resource practices implemented in the organization. Hence, it is important for the organizations to focus on the effective appraisal system. Further, it is important in knowing the insights to make changes in the appraisal system. The present study is seeking to understand the influence of appraisal system on the employee variables such as career advancement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The study collects the primary data for analysis through a structured questionnaire distributed among the employees working in multi-national corporations operating in Andhra Pradesh. The study results reveal there is a significant relationship towards appraisal system and career advancement. However, the appraisal system and job satisfaction and organizational commitment are certainly found as insignificant for career advancement in MNCs. Many Indian companies have been borrowing modern appraisal methods from the domestic and foreign organization in order to improve the best performance appraisal climate among selected multinational corporations operating in Sri City at Nellore, Andhra Pradesh.

Affinity tourism and exotic tourism in Bali. The Chinese and Indian tourist gaze in the Garuda Wisnu Kencana Park

ABSTRACT The island of Bali and its cultural heritage have been inseparably entwined with the global tourism industry. In recent years, outbound tourism from India and China to Bali has skyrocketed, but very few studies examine this important development. This article uses the concepts of ‘affinity tourism’ and ‘exotic tourism’ to discuss and analyse the contemporary relationship between the large Chinese and Indian tourism influx and the different historical and cultural layers that constitute the Asian tourist gaze towards Balinese cultural hotspots. In particular, the article concentrates on Bali's newest tourist attraction, the recently unveiled Garuda Wisnu Statue in the Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park in south Bali, to examine the cultural touristic experiences for Indian and Chinese tourists visiting this site. It shows that Bali’s cultural heritage and its representations have many different historical and religious roots, and do not necessarily generate the same enthusiasm or feelings of cultural similarity and affinity for all Asian tourists.

Environmental Law & Feminism

Environmental degradation and gender-based discrimination date back millennia. The modern legal movements to curb these two forms of human behavior, however, are still young and emergent. Environmentalism and feminism both respond to harms brought about by systemic failures that enable or even advance patterns of subordination. For environmentalism, the focus is on constraining unbridled ecosystem destruction. For feminism, the focus is on discovering and unraveling the systems and hierarchies that subordinate women. Although pervasive connections between feminism and environmental law have been recognized since the emergence of modern environmental law, little was done during the first few decades of legal development to cultivate or respond to these linkages. The onset of climate change and the maturing of climate law, however, is bringing renewed attention to the under-explored relationship between environmental law and feminism. This chapter explores the important, but poorly understood, historic and contemporary relationship between environmental law and legal feminism. It shows how, until recently, these two areas remained largely fragmented even as understanding of the convergences between the fields grew. It then traces how the evolution of ecofeminism, the environmental justice movement, and the climate justice movement are advancing thinking at the intersection of environmental law and feminism and the law. In particular, it suggests that as both environmental law and feminist legal theory increasingly seek to situate ongoing challenges within larger structures of power and inequality, they draw closer together creating opportunities for intellectual exchange and coalition building.

GÖÇEBELER VE DAĞLILAR: TÜRK/TÜRKMEN – KÜRT İLİŞKİLERİNİN KİMLİK TEMELLİ TARİHSEL BİR İNCELEMESİ

Following Turkey’s recent military operation in Syria (Operation Peace Spring) against the YPG forces, the ‘Turks’ and the ‘Kurds’ have widely and discursively been dichotomized by the Western media outlets and political circles. The US President Donald Trump even claimed that the ‘Turks’ and the ‘Kurds’ have been fighting for hundreds of years, and that they are ‘natural enemies’. However, the complex historical relationship of the ‘Turks’ and the ‘Kurds’, as loosely connected social totalities before the age of nationalism, refutes such sloppy and feeble contentions. This work presents an identity-driven historical survey of Turkish/Turkmen societies’ and polities’ interrelations with Kurdish collectivities until the emergence of modern nationhood and nationalism. In doing so, this article provides an ideational and narrational context feeding the Turkish government’s contemporary relationship with the Kurds inside and outside of Turkey. The major complication in journalistic and academic literature is the lack or omission of historical background knowledge informing current policy choices influenced by how relevant actors historically perceive each other. Today’s incidents and facts such as ‘solution process’, ‘village guard system’ or different Kurdish collectivities’ positioning between Iran and Turkey are sometimes akin to precedent events in history. This work aims to be a holistic contribution to fill this gap and to provide a succinct historical overview of interrelations.

How macroeconomic variables affect admission and dismissal in the Brazilian electro-electronic sector: A VAR-based model and cluster analysis

Brazilian industries in the electro-electronic sector impact other areas of the economy, as they contribute to the generation of employment and income. The objective of this research is to analyze the short-term dynamic behavior vector autoregressive (VAR) models of admission and dismissal, using cluster analysis as a pretreatment to classify variable endogeneity and observe the macroeconomic variables that most impact unemployment. Cluster analysis will be used to determine if the macroeconomic variables related to the Brazilian electro-electronic sector can be classified and selected based on their exogeneity. The VAR model will be used to show the contemporary relationship among the variables and, through the use of the impulse response function and the variance decomposition, help explain their dynamics. The shock imputed by the macroeconomic variables causes employment rate instability that takes two months to return to normal. There is a significant relationship (p ≤ 0.01) between the macroeconomic variables and the number of people admitted and dismissed in the sector, indicating that abrupt changes in the macroeconomic variables will result in fluctuations in the number of employees in the Brazilian electro-electronic industry. The cluster analysis was able to classify the variables as endogenous or exogenous variables, but it was not able to order them based on exogeneity.

Agriculture's ‘other’ contingent labour source. Agricultural contractors and relationships of interdependence at the farmer-contractor interface

The decline in traditional farm labour since the advent of industrialisation is undeniable. Despite this, the increasing contribution of agricultural contractors to labour on British farms has been almost entirely ignored by the research agenda. Neither employed as ‘traditional’ farm workers, nor as seasonal workers generally considered to possess minimal agency in farmer-worker interactions, the agricultural contractor has become a principal actor in the supply of contingent labour in agriculture. Using qualitative data from 28 semi-structured interviews with farmers and contractors in Devon, this paper examines contemporary relationships of interdependence between farmers and contractors from a relational perspective. It contributes to theories of organisational behaviour in the agricultural workplace by reassessing the idea that labour flexibility in agriculture always adheres to the needs of the firm, revealing instead a new conceptual model of interdependence between the agricultural contractor and the farmer. • The agricultural labour market has continued to move to one of increased flexibility. • Agricultural contractors are crucial to the efficiency of the industry. • Relationships of attached and detached interdependence are revealed between farmers and contractors. • Various agents impact upon detached and attached interdependent relationships making them susceptible to change.

The Staged Reality of Documentary Films: Manifestations and Meanings

The aim of the study is to examine the staged reality that is being formed in documentary films. The research methodology is based on the implementation of the search method, which allows us to study the basic theoretical aspects of the reflection of reality in cinema. A comparative analysis of existing concepts related to the mechanisms of reality manifestation in documentary cinema. Also, the study used a descriptive method to detail existing modern mechanisms of reality in documentary cinema in the 21st century. The scientific novelty is that the presented materials not only systematize but also deepen the existing ideas about documentary cinematography from the standpoint of informative realistic dominant, which specifies the vector of the 21st-century industry from the standpoint of constructing a staged reality. The conclusions highlight the ongoing structuring of leading concepts; a theoretical review of the scientific literature was carried out, which helped to identify the problematic areas of documentary reality as a factor in forming not only a cultural unit but also a manipulative one. This allowed us to define a strategy for studying the mechanisms of manifestations and meanings of staged reality in contemporary cinema, which are based on reflecting the different trends of contemporary relationships between cinema and the viewer.

Nonlinear and time-varying risk premia

Facing the puzzling risk-return trade-off, this paper proposes a new model for risk premia to capture nonlinear and time-varying features under the influence of trading volume. Using high-frequency data for the US stock market in Wharton Research Data Services' Trade and Quote database, our empirical findings suggest a significant nonlinear and time-varying contemporary relationship between return and realized volatility, ranging from positive to negative with an up-down-up pattern, summarized as follows. First, the contemporary relationship is positive on inactive trading days when the trading volume is smaller than usual, in which case traders may face no new information or event uncertainty. Second, the relationship is significantly negative when the trading volume is large on active trading days, in which case traders may be overconfident and behave in a risk-seeking fashion. Third, the risk premium tends toward zero during extremely abnormal trading days. Finally, low and high levels of trading volume have asymmetrical influences on risk premia, with a larger absolute value of risk premia for high levels of trading volume. Furthermore, the nonlinear changing autocorrelation of returns is insignificant from zero on normal trading days and most likely different from zero on abnormal trading days. These results provide explanations for the conflicts between financial theoretic and empirical studies.

Self-Medication and the Pharmaceutical System in Cambodia

ABSTRACT Based on an ethnographic study of the Cambodian pharmaceutical system conducted in an urban and a rural setting between January 2015 and June 2016, we report on the complex dynamics surrounding the issue of self-medication in that country. We describe the history of the circulation of pharmaceuticals in Cambodia, and we discuss the contemporary relationship individuals have with these medicines and with those who distribute them. We illustrate the specific dynamics of the pharmaceuticalization of Cambodian society, where private drug vendors are playing a key role.

Racist attitudes, out‐groups and the Australian experience

AbstractAustralia today is a culturally diverse nation with people from over 190 different countries claiming 300 different ancestries. But despite an official commitment to diversity, contemporary Australian society continues to experience tensions between multicultural policies and a legacy of Anglo privilege and cultural dominance. To assess this, the Challenging Racism Project conducted a national survey, commissioned by the Special Broadcasting Service, to gauge the nature and extent of racist attitudes and experience of racism across Australia during July–August 2015 and November 2015. Results show that sociodemographic characteristics show little contemporary relationship to racist attitudes. Age, once associated with “old” racist attitudes, is no longer significant. On the other hand, Anglo privilege is empirically linked to racism through notions of social dominance. We conclude that it is to the media, and to public discourse generally, to which future research attention, using critical discourse analysis, should turn in efforts to make Australia a fairer, more tolerant, multicultural society.

Inadvertent critical awareness and Māori language learning in Aotearoa New Zealand: Pākehā learner perspectives

ABSTRACTDeveloping a well-rounded understanding of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s bicultural history and its implications for contemporary relationships can be difficult to achieve, particularly for Pākehā (New Zealand Europeans) who have limited historical awareness and/or interpersonal relationships with Māori. This qualitative study explores responses from 13 Pākehā who are learners of te reo Māori (the Māori language). Results were clustered into two main themes titled: the relationship between learning te reo Māori and the learning of New Zealand history; and being Pākehā in a Māori-dominant environment. Some Pākehā participants in the study began to acknowledge the colonial harm inflicted by their cultural group during their Māori language studies. Participants who had more exposure to Māori culture and language demonstrated greater depths of complex thinking about the historical impacts of colonization on contemporary bicultural relationships.

Leptospirosis in the context of One Health and vaccination guidelines

The One Health concept is based above all on the interrelationship in the human health, animal health and environment trinomics. From the contemporary relationship between humans and animals in the environment surrounding them we have the emergence of diseases, including zoonoses, transmitted from animals to humans. Taking into account leptospirosis, an acute or chronic febrile infectious zoonotic disease of bacterial etiology whose propagation is associated with the factors mentioned above, our intended is to discuss, contextualize and criticize, besides the need to adapt the infrastructure of the cities in the support of the full relationship between humans and animals in the context of the One Health, prophylactic measures such as canine vaccination against leptospirosis, taking into account the current guidelines.

Conflict and Complementarity: Medicalization, Criminalization, and the Question of Human Agency

ABSTRACT The social processes of criminalization and medicalization share important similarities, often complementing each other. Beginning from an analysis of their differences with regard to human agency, this essay provides a preliminary conversation for understanding the historical and contemporary relationship between criminalization and medicalization in Western society. This analysis encompasses three major aims: (1) we establish the difference between criminalization and medicalization with respect to the question of human agency; (2) we examine key legal concepts that elucidate how medicalized approaches to the question of agency influence the direction of criminal adjudication; and (3) we illustrate the ways in which criminalization encounters significant challenges to its institutional practices and thereby appropriates medicalized forms of social control. We conclude by positing that criminalization and medicalization operate as a social control matrix. As the analysis of the relationship between medicalization and criminalization is necessary at the discursive and institutional levels, we utilize multiple theoretical concepts, drawing from the work of Anthony Giddens. Emile Durkheim, Slavoj Žižek, and Michel Foucault.

On the enduring relationship between masculinity and homophobia

Recent research in the social sciences suggests a methodological paradox as scholars work to make sense of the contemporary relationship between masculinity and homophobia. Representative surveys consistently find dramatically decreasing levels of sexual prejudice among all groups, among men and young men in particular. Qualitative scholarship, however, continues to find that enactments of homophobia remain integral components of contemporary masculine identities. In this article, we make sense of this shift and apparent methodological inconsistency. We do not question which measure is best. Instead, we argue for a need to understand the ways that gendered sexual prejudice transforms in ways that allow the relationship between masculinity and homophobia to endure—sometimes even when it appears to be in decline.

Indigenous/state relations and the “Making” of surplus populations in the mixed economy of Northern Canada

Grounded in an analysis of the mixed economy of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, this article examines the contemporary relationship between surplus populations and colonial capitalist accumulation of new spaces. The functioning of the reserve surplus population requires that the unwaged, or under-waged, want, or need, wage labour. Thus, like all capitalist relations, a reserve surplus population is predicated on the separation of workers from their means of subsistence: what Marx calls “primitive” accumulation. Traditionally the home of the Dene and Inuit, and now home to approximately equal parts Indigenous (primarily Dene, Inuit and Métis) and non-Indigenous residents, the NWT mixed economy is a set of social relations that combine subsistence and social reproduction, wherein labour is oriented toward the daily and intergenerational wellbeing of the collective rather than the profit of the individual, with capitalist production. With a focus on the diamond industry, this article traces the shifting Canadian State approach to Indigenous labour in this space across time and the state policies and extractive projects that have both “made” Indigenous labour surplus and rhetorically justified their existence through evocations of regional unemployment and imagined dependency. In so doing, the paper identifies a move from the welfare-state era, wherein the state structured northern Indigenous “dependency”, to the neoliberal era, wherein dependency became a problem to be solved through increased Indigenous incorporation into capitalist wage labour. The northern diamond mining industry, responding to both Indigenous demands for land recognition and neoliberal imperatives for lean operations, exemplifies this latter approach.

Walking with Energy: Challenging energy invisibility and connecting citizens with energy futures through participatory research

Since the shift away from burning solid fuels in the home, energy has become increasingly invisible in our daily lives and our contemporary relationship with energy is characterised by complete dependency and almost complete ignorance. The Walking with Energy project draws together a range of innovative research approaches to form a new research methodology that is social (offers opportunities for social learning), embedded (in the landscape in question), embodied (engages body and mind) and that is sensitive to the past. The resultant approach was tested through a pilot study which sought to better understand how our relationship with energy has evolved to become so distant and assess whether acts of research participation can promote a greater level of interest in and engagement with future energy policies and decisions amongst 'ordinary' citizens by enabling first hand encounters with energy generation. Using a case study of an Energy from Waste facility in the UK, the pilot revealed that such an approach offers significant scope to go beyond a process of data collection and promote a reconnection between people and energy with the possibility of effecting lasting changes in environmental citizenship.

Kinship Reconsidered: Research on a Neglected Topic.

AbstractThis article reviews the recent history of kinship research, noting the relative neglect of the topic in recent decades. The lack of scholarly and empirical work on kinship has been hampered by both the absence of survey and qualitative research on contemporary kinship practices. The author focuses on what is known and not known about how individual put into practice kinship in the standard, nuclear form of the family. There is surprising in attention to the ceremonial family and, little is know about how families draw boundaries and construct kinship on ritual occasions in the literature. The author concludes by suggesting research strategies for examining both how kinship is constructed and practiced in the United States and in other advanced economies.

O Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente e a Política de Assistência Social: Reflexões sobre o direito à proteção social (Statute of Children and Adolescents and Social Assistance policy: thinking about the right to social protection)

The article presents a reflection on the right to social protection. The objective is to present aspects of social protection for children and adolescents based on legal advances and the National Social Assistance Policy. The arguments presented are based on bibliographic data and law No. 8742/93 updated by law No. 12435/2011 - Organic Law on Social Assistance and law No. 8,069, of July 13, 1990 - the Statute of Children and Adolescents. The text is organized in three parts, in the first the concept of citizenship and democracy is presented, followed by the debate on social protection, having as reference Esping-Andersen and Palier (2011), emphasizing the importance of the state function for guaranteeing rights. In the third part of the text, the social assistance policy and its historical and contemporary relationship with the guarantee of the rights of children and adolescents are analyzed. Finally, it points to the conjuncture of investment cuts in social policies and attack on social rights in a context of fiscal adjustments implemented since 2016.

Terno de Reis: entre a tradição e a atualização da identidade na comunidade quilombola Nova Esperança

O presente artigo busca analisar como a festa de Reis, uma expressão cultural presente em diversas comunidades brasileiras, neste caso, na Comunidade Quilombola Nova Esperança, município de Wenceslau Guimarães, Bahia, mantém a tradição perante as diversas influências culturais oriundas das identidades móveis contemporâneas. A partir de narrativas dos participantes do Terno de Reis, o folguedo é importante elemento na reafirmação da identidade local e, sobretudo, dos laços de ancestralidade comum com o fundador da comunidade. Ao discutir a dinâmica que envolve todo o festejo da festa de Reis, torna-se pertinente pesarmos a cultura como algo dinâmico, vivo no tempo e no espaço, se (re)significando e avivando a memória do povo que possui relação contínua entre passado e presente. As narrativas apresentam ainda a preocupação com a permanência da festa diante das eminentes ameaças que o folguedo sofre face à liquidez das relações sociais contemporâneas.

Between 'Greatness' and 'Ignorance'

Focusing on Turkey’s nuclearisation process, which has accelerated over the past decade, this article examines the historical and contemporary relationships that the country’s political decision-makers maintain with risk, the environment and health and ecological disasters. While the transition to nuclear power in the post-Fukushima period is not a dynamic specific to Turkey, it nevertheless operates, in the Turkish case, in a particular geographic, energy and political context. On the one hand, Turkey is a highly seismic country that heavily depends on its neighbours for energy and, on the other, is experiencing a creeping political authoritarianism. This article focuses on the dynamics and specificities of this post-disaster nuclear transition, which will be analysed here as ‘serene nuclearism’, positioned as the polar opposite of ‘reflexive modernisation’, as theorised by Ulrich Beck.