This study examines the influence of cultural identity on pragmatic competence among Punjabi and Pashto speakers learning English in Pakistan. It explores how learners perform speech acts such as requests, refusals, and apologies, focusing on how sociocultural norms shape their communicative strategies. Grounded in the framework of Interlanguage Pragmatics and constructivist epistemology, the study employs both Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) and semi-structured interviews to collect data from students and instructors. Through thematic analysis, distinctive pragmatic tendencies were observed. Punjabi learners exhibited a preference for directness and pragmatic efficiency, which sometimes compromised relational politeness. In contrast, Pashto learners demonstrated a tendency toward indirectness, elaborate politeness expressions, and a higher concern for maintaining social harmony and respect. These differences reflect how deeply cultural identity and social hierarchy influence communicative behavior in English as a second language context. The findings reveal that pragmatic transfer—both positive and negative—occurs frequently and is strongly rooted in learners’ cultural frameworks. The study highlights that effective English language teaching should integrate elements of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy to address such variations. It further emphasizes the need for cross-cultural awareness, pragmatic flexibility, and role-based communicative training in ELT classrooms. By bridging culture and language learning, this research contributes to a more inclusive understanding of how local identities shape global communication practices.

Earlier studies have yielded significant insights into the difference in conditional mean of subjective social status (SSS) by objective social status (OSS), or the stratification in the level of SSS. We extend the literature by incorporating the difference in conditional variance of SSS by OSS. This dimension of social stratification of SSS highlights different levels of consensus that vary between OSS groups. Applying variance function regression to the Chinese General Social Survey data from 2006 to 2021, we analyzed the two-dimensional stratification of SSS. First and consistent with earlier studies, higher–socioeconomic status groups consistently perceive themselves to have higher SSS. Second and extending previous studies, this paper finds that consensus over SSS is also stronger within higher-class groups. Third and against earlier findings on the urban disadvantages in SSS, we find that the SSS gap between urban and rural residents diminishes by year. This research offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between OSS and SSS, highlights the role of consensus, and provides a multifaceted framework that guides further investigations into social stratification in China.

For centuries, human self-perception has been trapped in a profound schizophrenia: on one side, a scientific, materialist worldview that precisely explains “how the world works” but fails to provide life with meaning; on the other, a religious and philosophical, idealist worldview that attempts to imbue life with a “purpose for existence” but often contradicts physical reality. These two coexisting systems have created an eternal conflict within the human psyche, forming a chasm that seems insurmountable.This study asserts that this chasm is not insurmountable. Its existence is due to our loss of the two most critical “bridges” connecting both shores. This paper aims to rediscover and argue for the existence of these two bridges, thereby constructing a new “human narrative” capable of unifying science and the humanities and ending this spiritual schizophrenia—”Before Being Human.”The first bridge, transitioning from Biology to Anthropology, is Language Genesis. This paper will argue that language is not merely a tool for communication but the fundamental mechanism that directly generates human subjective consciousness through “naming” and “narrative.”The second bridge, transitioning from Anthropology to Sociology, is the Occupational Genetic Predisposition. This paper will hypothesize that through long-term social division of labor, humanity has encoded specific social functions into our genes in the form of “predispositions.”When these two bridges are reconnected, a complete system of human evolution emerges. Within this system, a unique, living “system manual” naturally arises—the extremely rare Enlightened’s Genetic Predisposition. This manual, stored in biological genes, not only carries the complete memory from biology to civilization, empowering its holder with the unique ability of Civilizational Stripping, but this ability also allows for a vertical retrospection of the course of species evolution and civilizational development, as well as a horizontal empathy for the values and preferences of people across all social strata and ethnic regions. It enables the correction and summation of the design flaws of contemporary civilization, compelling the revision and upgrading of civilizational systems by colliding with contemporary society with an almost stubborn attitude. Its final and most core function is the emergence, after thorough understanding, of the most inclusive emotion sufficient to connect the entire species—not a love born from pity, religious and moral dogma, or the affection between family and friends, but the Extreme Love obtained from traversing evolution and feeling the suffering of all sentient beings.

The creative process or product design is impulsive, unpredictable and influenced by a series of factors. Factors that due to the influence of society are shaped by: the action of the characters who constituted the artistic message for generations formed by the folk costume; the capacity for acceptance by social strata of novelties in design, politics, technology, etc.; the capacity for coagulation of an artistic character guided and promoted by society with the imposition of product design demand at the current time. The popular shirt with rolled sleeves as a source is analyzed by: shape with original characteristics, embroidery, cutting method, assembly, outline of the details. The popular product remains that link that contributes to the formation of new ideas in industrial design, textile design, typographic design, etc. For the study or used three basic types of rolled sleeve shirt and ten modeled shirts which were simulated using CLO 3D software. The article will present the constructive parameters of the rolled sleeve shape, a model of a shirt, blouse with a rolled sleeve adapted to the requirements of contemporary clothing, as well as possibility of assembling the rolled sleeve with pave.

ABSTRACT Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith (2002) and Park Chan-wook’s transnational adaptation The Handmaiden (2016) explore how lesbian protagonists navigate, resist, and reconfigure oppressive historical environments. By relocating the narrative from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, Park retains the novel’s central conflict between restrictive societal norms and queer desire while complicating it through additional layers of ethnic, national, cultural, and class divisions. Employing a tripartite narrative structure, The Handmaiden traces the intertwined journeys of Hideko and Sook-hee as they confront and ultimately transcend these divides in pursuit of a shared queer future. In translating the novel’s intricate portrayal of lesbian romance and its attendant historical pressures from page to screen, the film demonstrates cinema’s capacity to animate latent narrative elements and envision desires that have remained unrepresented. This article examines how the film’s reconfiguration of queer love within a colonial context, shaped by patriarchal violence and capitalist greed, embodies José Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity. I argue that by integrating South Korean cultural and historical elements with its Western literary source, The Handmaiden contributes to an ongoing project of reimagining queerness and reveals its transformative potential as an excess that unfolds between history and future possibility.

ABSTRACT Respect in interaction is a common issue, but is linguistically actualised in different cultures. In this paper, the expression of respect in English, Russian, and Japanese is compared and contrasted, since they are three languages whose social values and communicative patterns differ. Whereas English prefers indirectness and negativity in modal auxiliaries and mitigation, Russian marks respect by addressing the person formally, using different pronouns, and elevated hierarchy in names and titles. Japanese, on its part, codifies respect into a strongly grammaticalized system of honorific (keigo) which explicitly indicates social roles and hierarchies. The paper utilises corpus data of workplace, institutional, and interpersonal interactions to analyse greetings, requests, apologies, and junior-senior exchanges. This result shows that common pragmatic objectives and culturally specific strategies dispel the presupposition of universal politeness models. The tri-lingual comparison and cultural perspective merge to make the study relevant to sociolinguistics and pragmatics and have implications for intercultural communication, pedagogy, and translation.

This study aims to evaluate the implementation of social justice values in the context of social stratification in Indonesian society using a qualitative approach through literature review. This study begins with the phenomenon of increasing social, economic, and educational inequality, which indicates a gap between the ideal values of Pancasila and the social realities faced by society. Through an analysis of various scientific sources, this study identifies that the stratification structure formed by the dominance of power, access to resources, and the distribution of opportunities has hampered the realization of equitable social justice. The results show that although Pancasila normatively emphasizes the principles of equality and solidarity, its implementation is still limited by a hierarchical social system and policies that do not favor marginalized groups. Reactualizing Pancasila values as an ideology of social justice in the era of globalization is a major urgency to address inequality and strengthen social solidarity. This effort requires synergy between character education, inclusive policies, and community empowerment so that social justice can become a substantive reality, not just an ideological symbol. Thus, this study emphasizes the need to revitalize Pancasila values in building a more just, civilized, and nationally distinctive society.

When distributing resources, people often experience a conflict between two fundamental moral principles: The equality principle prescribes that all recipients receive the same, while the proportionality principle prescribes that allocations should be in proportion to the contribution of each recipient. We propose that if people consider recipient units of distributions in hierarchies as categories, rather than individuals, seeking categorical equality leads to individual inequality, because in most hierarchical groups there are fewer higher ranked (e.g., management) than lower ranked members (e.g., workers). Ten preregistered experiments conducted in the United States and China (N = 4,902) confirm this idea and show that participants who focus on categorical (vs. individual) recipients perceive unequal distributions as fairer (Experiment 1) and create more unequal distributions (Experiments 2a-2d), even when this reduces their own payoffs (Experiment 3). This effect occurs because when construing recipient units as categories (vs. individuals), people seek equality at a categorical level, without sufficiently correcting for differences in group size. Supporting this theoretical explanation, this effect is eliminated when thinking of individual-level equality (Experiments 4a-4b). Furthermore, this effect exists only when the higher ranked group is smaller sized, as is often the case in hierarchies (Experiment 5), and only when inequality is consistent with proportionality (Experiment 6). Combined, our results show that when people perceive a hierarchy in categorical (rather than individual) terms, this increases distributive inequality between its higher and lower ranked members. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Introduction Goats are gregarious animals with a social organization differentiated by their stratification into defined social ranks. Relatively little is known about whether these social relationships affect the behavioral activity of mothers and offspring during lactation. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of social hierarchy in primiparous and multiparous goats on nursing behavior during lactation. Methods Forty-seven multiparous and 25 primiparous French Alpine and Toggenburg goats were used. They were weighed, their body condition was evaluated during the second half of pregnancy and lactation, and the weights of their kids were measured during two months of age. To evaluate the hierarchy, a success index was calculated by recording the antagonistic interactions between animals in the second and last weeks of lactation. Furthermore nursing activities were recorded approximately 14 days postpartum and weekly until day 55 of lactation. The following behaviors were recorded: frequency of nursing episodes, episodes in which the mother accepted or rejected, and the duration of each nursing episode. Results Both primiparous and multiparous goats had the highest percentage at the medium dominance level (65%). This was significantly higher than those at the low dominance level (20%) and the high dominance level (15%, P< 0.001). Body weight and body condition scores were higher in goats with a high dominance than in those with a medium or low social hierarchy (P< 0.05). The body weights of the kids were not affected by the dominance of their mothers (P > 0.05). There were no differences among the three dominance levels in the duration of episodes, episodes accepted or rejected, or the number of total nursing episodes observed during lactation (P > 0.5). Conclusion Regardless of parity, the maternal hierarchy level significantly affected productive parameters in goats, but not offspring growth or nursing behavior during lactation.

The presented review of the textbook by Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Candidate of Political Sciences N.S. Kozyakova, published by INFRA-M publishing house in 2024, provides a general description and justifies the need for its publication for higher education in terms of an interdisciplinary approach of both political science and sociological disciplines. The key area of scientific interests of the textbook's author is the study of social aspects of politics and political science and the latest political history of Russia and foreign countries. The presented textbook "Political Sociology", recommended for undergraduates, undergraduates and postgraduates studying both political science and sociology, as well as other specialties, provides an assessment of the conceptual and categorical apparatus of political sociology, examines various types, roles and statuses of social institutions, social groups, their place and role in political life, personality typology. and the classification of human rights and freedoms, issues related to social mobility and stratification, the causes of, the course and resolution of socio-political conflicts (conflict strategies and tactics), as well as the problems of the development of society and power structures in the era of informatization, globalization and globalism. The author offers his vision of new trends and trends in political sociology affecting the sociology of imagination and postmodernity, characterized by alternative and multi-variant development of power structures and society caused by the emergence of a virtual environment characterized by simulations and simulacra. Kozyakova has published over 80 scientific papers on various issues of modern political and historical science over a period of more than twenty years of research and teaching.

Despite the significant efforts of the Communists to build a classless society, a new historical community of people, the "Soviet people", has not emerged in Russia. Radical economic reform destroyed the main social groups and the middle class that began to form on their basis. The purpose of this study is to formulate the main theses of the author's concept of the formation of new societies in Russia at the present stage. Among the tasks, we note the identification of the specifics of the new links; description of the specific estates that are being formed in Russia - the intelligentsia, workers, farmers, military, merchants, and clergy; formulation of the author's proposals for the implementation of state socio-demographic policy concerning the estates. The research uses the methodology of moral and religious neo-institutionalism, the basic principles of which are balance, morality, consistency and the anthropological principle. The author chose a systematic approach, historical, cultural and institutional analysis by methods. The research reflects the principles of geographical and economic determinism, the cybernetic principle of feedback. The theoretical significance of the article is justified by the introduction into scientific use and justification of the term "new estates", the use of anthropological and other methodological principles of moral and religious neo-institutionalism to the problems of social stratification in Russia. The practical significance of the article lies in the formulation and specification of the targeting of the main directions of state social policy in the fields of education and demography.

In an era when medical systems worldwide face crises of trust, rising costs, and growing inequity, Indonesia’s 2024 healthcare reform emerges as a bold and inspiring blueprint for transformation. For decades, the country’s medical education and professional advancement pathways were clouded by opaque governance, entrenched elitism, and systemic exclusion—factors that disproportionately affected qualified candidates from marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds. Yet, these structural flaws did not reflect the moral compass of the nation’s physicians, many of whom tirelessly upheld their professional oath despite institutional obstacles. The 2024 legislative breakthrough—marked by the Indonesian government’s decision to decentralize medical authority, establish independent collegia, and open pathways for merit-based medical training and certification—signals a seismic shift. This reform does not aim to punish, but to heal: it seeks to dismantle long-standing barriers, reaffirm the core values of justice and compassion in medicine, and ensure that every aspiring doctor is evaluated by ability, not privilege. More than a domestic achievement, Indonesia’s reform story challenges global health leaders to reflect: are our systems genuinely meritocratic, or are they silently perpetuating social stratification under the guise of tradition and prestige? This article contends that Indonesia’s movement is not merely administrative—it is moral, ethical, and philosophical. As nations seek models of sustainable and just healthcare, Indonesia may well be the unexpected catalyst of a new global standard—one where merit, ethics, and equity form the proper foundation of medical excellence.

This paper examines the racialized construction of the false bride figure in “The Three Oranges” folktale tradition, tracing its iterations from Giambattista Basile’s “I tre cedri” (1634, “The Three Citrons”) through Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations. Focusing on tale type 408, this study argues that the figure of the dark-skinned, enslaved false bride functions as a strategic narrative device that encodes racial, religious, and social hierarchies. Drawing on Geraldine Heng’s framework of race as a structural mechanism for organizing human difference, this analysis explores how the racialization of the antagonist reinforces the moral legitimacy of the fair-skinned, rightful bride, aligning whiteness with virtue and Blackness with deception and disorder. While Basile’s tale embeds racialized metaphors within early modern Neapolitan society’s Mediterranean context, Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges) partially retains these tropes, reconfiguring the false bride as a Turkish servant within commedia dell’arte conventions. However, Gozzi’s L’augellino belverde (The Green Bird) departs from this racial logic by erasing explicit markers of race, suggesting a shift in thematic priorities rather than a direct engagement with racial discourse. This erasure, however, does not negate the foundational role of racial logic in the folktale’s structure. By comparing these adaptations, this paper demonstrates how racial narratives in European folklore persist, evolve, and, at times, disappear, revealing the fluidity of race as both a literary and ideological construct. Ultimately, this study situates “The Three Oranges” within the broader framework of premodern racial thought, arguing that these narratives actively participate in the historical construction of race and alterity in European storytelling.

ABSTRACT Drawing on positioning theory and language ideologies, this study investigates how two international students enact and negotiate their multilingual identities within an English-taught programme (ETP) at a Japanese university, where domestic and international students study academic content together. Interview transcripts were analysed using thematic and discourse analysis, with attention to social and ideological factors. Findings show that the participants enacted their multilingual identities through interactions with community members, shaped by personal agency, power dynamics, and dominant language ideologies. They strategically used their languages – including English, Japanese, and Chinese – depending on context and perceived legitimacy, demonstrating flexible and purposeful multilingual practices. Their diverse language repertoire also functioned as resources to support peers academically and interpersonally. However, multilingualism alone did not guarantee inclusion or recognition; social hierarchies, peer expectations, and the linguistic dominance of Japanese shaped their sense of belonging and positioning within the academic community. Japan’s internationalisation policy, which promotes EMI as a tool for global competitiveness but simultaneously privileges Japanese norms, may underlie such dynamics. For international students, ambivalent inclusion arose from the group dynamics between domestic and international students and the dominance of Japanese language ideologies.

This research investigates intra-dialectal hierarchies within Northeastern Mandarin, focusing on the Shenyang and Jinzhou dialects, two closely related varieties in Liaoning province, China. The segmental features of these dialects are largely comparable; however, their suprasegmental characteristics, especially the intonation patterns in interrogatives, demonstrate considerable divergence. This enables us to examine how listeners utilize prosodic cues for both recognition and social assessment. The study, which involved recordings of speech, perception tests, and attitude surveys with ninety individuals from both local and non-local backgrounds, reveals a paradox: individuals struggle to accurately identify dialect origins through suprasegmental features, yet consistently evaluate Shenyang speech more favorably, indicating its status as the regional standard. This "misrecognition paradox" asserts that suprasegmental cues can sustain symbolic hierarchies even in the absence of accurate recognition, thus clarifying the implicit mechanisms that contribute to linguistic inequality. The results enhance sociophonetics and sociolinguistics by demonstrating how prosodic features facilitate intra-dialectal stratification and perpetuate social hierarchies beyond overt language classification.

Abstract Manchester has long been a model for the class divisions characteristic of British Victorian cities, and this segregation has largely been attributed as a spatial phenomenon as informed by qualitative sources from the period. The digitization of historical source material, however, allows for quantitative assessments of residential differentiation. By analysing patterns of residential distribution using nineteenth-century, individual-level census data, it is revealed that early Victorian Manchester was characterized more by residential heterogeneity than segregation. In light of this finding, this article revisits the source base for early Victorian Manchester in order to reconcile the differences in the physical and social dimensions of segregation for a more accurate and holistic understanding of urban dynamics and the mechanisms of class formation. It explains this dissonance by exploring the city’s architectural, occupational, and cultural structures: while rich and poor lived cheek-by-jowl in the industrial city, temporal rhythms of employment, institutionalized cultures of class, and emerging modes of urban maintenance and discipline all produced practices which differentiated and isolated one class from another.

Supplemental Material for A Desire for Equality Produces Inequality in Social Hierarchies When People Focus on Categories of Recipients Rather Than Individuals

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Abortion has been legal without restriction in Turkey since 1983. However, the government’s anti-abortion campaign in 2012 has resulted in significant restrictions on abortion services, particularly in public hospitals. Using six waves of the Turkish Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS), which was administered every five years from 1993 to 2018 (n=32,990), we investigated the trends in abortion, miscarriage, and stillbirth rates among ever-married women. We found that, compared to wave 2008, women in wave 2013 were seven percentage points less likely to report an abortion, while they were three percentage points more likely to report an experience of a miscarriage. This pattern continued largely also in the 2018 wave. This unprecedented decline in abortion was observed across all socioeconomic groups, with the strongest decline among lower educated and poorer women. Moreover, the increase in miscarriages was primarily driven by lower educated women and those outside of the richest wealth quintile. Our findings suggest that the government’s anti-abortion campaign led to reduced access to abortion services, and potential misreporting of abortions as miscarriages by reinforcing stigma towards both abortion seekers and providers. The findings underscore how an anti-abortion political climate can exacerbate existing social inequalities, even when abortion remains legal.

Abstract Board gender diversity has extensively generated interest from both researchers and practitioners, as it is not only driven by an economic logic but also a matter of ethics and social justice. However, in hierarchical business groups (BGs) where headquarters (HQs) effectively control the affiliated firms, the latter’s board diversity practices can be attributed to a cascading effect of the former’s governance practices. By adopting an organizational approach to acyclical social hierarchy and drawing on power dependence theory, we examine a sample of hierarchical BGs with HQs located in European OECD countries. We find that affiliates indeed follow their HQs’ board gender diversity practices, even if they have to defy the ethical expectation to enhance board gender diversity by having a low percentage of women directors. This finding suggests that HQs’ influence over their affiliates is a double-edged sword for board gender diversity practices, thereby raising an ethical concern regarding whether affiliates should follow or not their respective HQs’ practices. Moreover, our findings show that HQ’s control, attention, and organizational proximity to the affiliate intensify the cascading effect. Thus, the cascading effect of BG gender diversity practices depends on the power dependence of the affiliate with respect to the HQ.