Sorting People Research Articles

Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries

Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of countries. Here, using recent linked employer–employee data from 15 countries, we show that the processes sorting people into different jobs account for substantially less of the gender pay differences than was previously believed and that within-job pay differences remain consequential.

Liberal Nationalism in Substantive and Performative Perspectives

Abstract This paper sketches some developments in the discussion of liberal nationalism since the early 1990s and proposes a generic understanding of nationalism according to which its main feature is the act of sorting people into members and non-members of the nation with a view to regulating access to political goods linked to the state. One discussion of liberal nationalism that has recently received renewed attention is the relation between nationalism and multiculturalism. Liberal nationalism sees nationalism as a response to increased diversity and involves normative demands on nationalism for accommodating this diversity. In light of the proposed generic understanding of nationalism, the question arises whether such a liberal nationalism is coherent. This question requires us to distinguish between a substantive and a performative perspective on nationalism, raising the possibility that liberal nationalism can be substantively coherent but performatively incoherent.

Improving on Defaults: Helping Pension Participants Manage Financial Market Risk in Target Date Funds

The central issue of this paper is analysis and resulting proposals to help unsophisticated pension participants achieve pension portfolios that match their level of risk aversion when there is a large amount of unexplained heterogeneity in risk aversion. Target date funds are commonly used as the default investment in defined contribution plans in the U.S., UK and other countries. These funds recognize that individuals usually should hold less risky investment portfolios as their expected retirement date approaches because their ability to bear financial market risk declines as the time horizon decreases. However, these funds do not account for differences in risk aversion among people with the same target date. Empirical studies find large amounts of unexplained heterogeneity in risk aversion. Target date funds cannot deal with this issue simply by sorting people into demographic groupings, other than age, that are known to affect risk aversion, such as gender. Financial education can help people do a better job of managing financial market risk in their pension portfolios, but we argue that it is unreasonable to expect millions of pension participants to attain advanced levels of financial literacy. This paper considers three innovations in target date funds that can help individual pension participants do a better job of managing financial market risk. The analysis can be applied to other situations where defaults are used for investing pension participants’ portfolios. The paper suggests new lines of research relating to individual differences in risk aversion.

Rehearsing for Reconstruction: The Archipelagic Afterlives of the Port Royal Experiment

Abstract This essay traces the cultural legacy of the Port Royal Experiment, the Civil War–era social experiment in free labor conducted by Union forces on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Whereas literary and cultural historians typically focus on the “discovery” of slave spirituals by Northern missionaries and educators at Port Royal, this essay tracks how later writers, performers, and sociologists returned to the Sea Islands to reimagine the promise of free labor. The archive thus assembled includes Civil War–era ethnographies, memoirs, and reports; the scholarly monographs in UNC Press’s Social Study Series; and DuBose Heyward’s popular “Negro novel” Porgy (1925). Across this interdisciplinary tradition, writers of various stripes seek by turns to celebrate and contain the threat of the free but noncapitalist black body. The latter figure, recalling the disability category’s historical role in sorting people into work-based or need-based systems of social distribution, is commonly represented as disabled. Ultimately, the essay documents a dual development in US political economy as the marginalization of contraband slaves as capitalist laborers on the Sea Islands—the “failure” of the Port Royal Experiment—gives way to the consolidation of “black culture,” a success of a different kind.

Algorithmic Decision-Making, Spectrogenic Profiling, and Hyper-Facticity in the Age of Post-Truth

This paper investigates algorithmic decision-making and data-driven profiling as particular ways of producing truth by which (wo)men govern themselves and others. It starts with problematizing some of the fundamental assumptions on which algorithmic decision-making relies. It then conceptualizes profiling as a spectrogenic process in which abstractions are produced that haunt the world, thereby generating material effects of sorting people in/out from a distance. In the final section, the paper discusses emerging forms of governance and the modes of subjectification associated with the current condition of multiple profiling machines. Paradoxically, in the context of post-truth, these forms produce a hyper-facticity that governs by circumventing reflexivity, grounding government in computational truth, and substituting ethico-political decisions by calculations.

Sculpting digital voids: The politics of forgetting on Facebook

In an age where modes of storing and retaining data have become a ubiquitous presence in society, the issue of forgetting is becoming increasingly problematic. This piece figures as a theoretical contribution to the issue of forgetting in relation to social media platforms by looking at the Facebook memory app, Year in Review. Drawing on Terry Eagleton’s notion of ‘sculpting voids’, it explores the conceptual implications of digital archiving on memory, forgetting and, ultimately, the self. I argue that there is an emerging politics of forgetting and invisibility on Facebook, exploring the Eric Meyer incident on Year in Review in 2014. This incident resulted in Facebook seeking to automatically and algorithmically prevent media traces that might evoke painful memories of deceased family members and ex-partners from resurfacing on users’ yearly Year in Review videos. This practice of sculpting digital voids is conceptualized as an algorithmic mode of classification, a way of sorting people’s media objects such as photos on Facebook depending on the inferred emotional response these memory traces will elicit. Because of their ‘imagined’ nature and generative force, these practices need to be understood in relation to power. Sculpting digital voids, therefore, figures as a critical and conceptual framework for better understanding of how (in)visibilities and power relations are shaped on social media platforms.

Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings. By Martina Tazzioli

This book addresses the political and spatial consequences of migration in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, with a focus on North Africa, particularly Tunisia, and southern Europe. Its approach is densely theoretical, drawing frequently on Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’ and on a ‘counter-mapping’ strategy, a method of radical cartography that aims to reveal ‘the struggle over (in)visibility upon which migration governmentality is predicated’ (p.xiii). This analytical framework is deployed to show migration as ‘an object of knowledge and government’ and a ‘contested strugglefield’ (p.xii). Tazzioli’s claim is that individual practices of cross-Mediterranean movement can be seen both as a freedom won by revolutionary uprisings and as a challenge to the European migration regime’s techniques and technologies of control. Chapter 1 establishes the book’s Foucauldian lens, offering an exploration of migration governmentality and ‘an investigation of the politics of truth at stake in the government of migrations’ (p.2). It argues that the power relations and resistances that characterise the migration strugglefield extend beyond physical borders and into the realm of discourse. Tazzioli describes ‘a discursive order which traces a moral geography by sorting people into exclusionary channels of mobility and corridors of layered protection’ (p.20, emphasis in original), and offers an eloquent though familiar critique of the politics of refugee status determination as a form of ‘governing through truth’ (p.29). Juridical categories, she suggests, are formed by an interpretative grid that is overlaid onto the speech and movements of people seeking asylum and designates the ‘truth’ and value of their claims. It is this same critical approach to governmental processes of legitimation and partition that leads Tazzioli largely to avoid reproducing such categories. Instead, she tends to write about migration as a whole while acknowledging that a wide range of subjective conditions motivate departures from Tunisia to Europe, with the Syrian and Libyan conflicts as important context. An explanatory note to this effect appears on the book’s penultimate page, but would have been better placed in the introduction.

Optimizing agent-based transmission models for infectious diseases.

BackgroundInfectious disease modeling and computational power have evolved such that large-scale agent-based models (ABMs) have become feasible. However, the increasing hardware complexity requires adapted software designs to achieve the full potential of current high-performance workstations.ResultsWe have found large performance differences with a discrete-time ABM for close-contact disease transmission due to data locality. Sorting the population according to the social contact clusters reduced simulation time by a factor of two. Data locality and model performance can also be improved by storing person attributes separately instead of using person objects. Next, decreasing the number of operations by sorting people by health status before processing disease transmission has also a large impact on model performance. Depending of the clinical attack rate, target population and computer hardware, the introduction of the sort phase decreased the run time from 26 % up to more than 70 %. We have investigated the application of parallel programming techniques and found that the speedup is significant but it drops quickly with the number of cores. We observed that the effect of scheduling and workload chunk size is model specific and can make a large difference.ConclusionsInvestment in performance optimization of ABM simulator code can lead to significant run time reductions. The key steps are straightforward: the data structure for the population and sorting people on health status before effecting disease propagation. We believe these conclusions to be valid for a wide range of infectious disease ABMs. We recommend that future studies evaluate the impact of data management, algorithmic procedures and parallelization on model performance.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-015-0612-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Coalitional psychology on the playground: Reasoning about indirect social consequences in preschoolers and adults

Surprisingly little is known about how relationship information is used predict others’ behavior. We examine a key element of this ability—how relationship information is used to anticipate how others will react to events in which they are not directly involved. This requires both using relationship information to modify expected reactions (e.g., friends may be more responsive than acquaintances) and also inference rules for restricting the class of reactions that may be felt or experienced on behalf of others (e.g., uninvolved friends may become angry but cannot become dizzy). These capacities were examined in both preschoolers and adults. Two different events were presented; one that would elicit anger from those who were involved and one that would elicit dizziness. For both sets of participants, cues to relationship status had a strong impact on anger expectations (uninvolved friends were expected to be more angry than uninvolved classmates), but had no effect dizziness expectations (neither uninvolved friends nor classmates were expected to be dizzy). Follow-up analyses also revealed a developmental difference. Adults made distinctions within the uninvolved friends category—expecting friends to be less angry at their own friend, and that levels of anger would vary according to their friend’s role within the social conflict—whereas preschoolers did not. These results demonstrate that by the early preschool years sophisticated inference rules already govern the expected reactions of uninvolved others, but that important developmental differences also remain. These results also indicate that relationship representations are inference engines for anticipating others’ behavior and reactions, not simply static containers for sorting people into categories.

Race classification at the University of KwaZulu-Natal: purposes, sites and practices

Classification into race groups did not end when the Population Registration Act, the foundation of apartheid policy, was abolished in 1991. Formal requirements for allocation of the South African population into ‘races’ continue in a democratic society, and individuals employed in institutions ranging from schools to businesses are tasked with such processes of sorting people out. We present the results of a study done at a university on the sites of, reasons for, and practices employed in race classification to illustrate decisions that confront classifiers when ensuring race categorisation.

Sorting people out: The uses of one-dimensional classificatory schemes in a multi-dimensional world

This paper examines how people are classified as part of a labour market project aimed at establishing a process for recognizing prior learning among immigrants to Sweden in order to integrate them more quickly with the labour market and society. The paper suggests that, in Sweden, this work prioritizes procedural effectiveness over a more comprehensive understanding of the competence and qualifications of the immigrant worker. By exploring the process of classification in which cognitive structuring of the perceived world results in organizational, administrative and structural enactment, the study provides further insights into how practices of classification are a central part of organizational life. The concept of intersectionality contributes by showing how individuals are situated at the intersection of a variety of classificatory schemes, and together with classification, intersectionality points to how organizational categories are never given, but a result of bureaucratic power procedures strengthening, weakening and/or negotiating away categories used to sort people out.

The problems of relative deprivation: Why some societies do better than others

In this paper, we present evidence which suggests that key processes of social status differentiation, affecting health and numerous other social outcomes, take place at the societal level. Understanding them seems likely to involve analyses and comparisons of whole societies. Using income inequality as an indicator and determinant of the scale of socioeconomic stratification in a society, we show that many problems associated with relative deprivation are more prevalent in more unequal societies. We summarise previously published evidence suggesting that this may be true of morbidity and mortality, obesity, teenage birth rates, mental illness, homicide, low trust, low social capital, hostility, and racism. To these we add new analyses which suggest that this is also true of poor educational performance among school children, the proportion of the population imprisoned, drug overdose mortality and low social mobility. That ill health and a wide range of other social problems associated with social status within societies are also more common in more unequal societies, may imply that income inequality is central to the creation of the apparently deep-seated social problems associated with poverty, relative deprivation or low social status. We suggest that the degree of material inequality in a society may not only be central to the social forces involved in national patterns of social stratification, but also that many of the problems related to low social status may be amenable to changes in income distribution. If the prevalence of these problems varies so much from society to society according to differences in income distribution, it suggests that the familiar social gradients in health and other outcomes are unlikely to result from social mobility sorting people merely by prior characteristics. Instead, the picture suggests that their frequency in a population is affected by the scale of social stratification that differs substantially from one society to another.

Debate as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

It is 2002, nearly a year after 9/11. A New York City high school receives a package emblazoned with the words ‘‘WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.’’ The police are summoned, the building evacuated, and the sender of the package frantically called. Inside the package, investigators find ... evidence. Debate evidence. The school had received a package of documents for New York Urban Debate League students, who were preparing to debate the national interscholastic debate topic for that year, ‘‘Resolved: That the United States Federal Government should establish a foreign policy significantly limiting the use of weapons of mass destruction.’’ Was the package dangerous? It did not contain a bomb. Yet suspicions about the box’s contents and those involved in the transaction lingered. This episode is a representative anecdote for the ‘‘global war on terror,’’ where lines separating friend and foe are persistently blurred, forcing combatants and bystanders alike to perform their allegiances in word and deed. A hyper-politicization of speech contours contemporary public discourse, policing the line between the sayable and unsayable and sorting people into neat categories such as ‘‘with us or with the terrorists.’’ We have seen this before. In another indefinite war of ideology, debate was similarly suspected of being a weapon of mass destruction capable of jeopardizing homeland security. As the Soviets tested their atom bomb in August of 1949, Americans worried that nuclear secrets had been passed to the USSR from communist sympathizers within the US government. Fear of being ‘‘sold out’’ by ‘‘fifth columnists’’ at home increased penalties for dissent, placing blame at the feet of anyone who dared undermine American security by sowing division.

Education and Social Capital

Education is one of the most important predictors—usually, in fact, the most important predictor—of many forms of political and social engagement—from voting to chairing a local committee to hosting a dinner party to trusting others. Over the last half century (and more) educational levels in the United States have risen sharply. In 1960 only 41 percent of American adults had graduated from high school; in 1998 82 percent had. In 1960 only 8 percent of American adults had a college degree; in 1998 24 percent had. Yet levels of political and social participation have not risen pari passu with this dramatic increase in education, and by some accounts [Putnam, 1995a; 1995b; 2000] have even fallen. For at least two decades, political scientists have mused about this paradoxical “puzzle” [Brody, 1978]. Recently, however, Norman Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry [1996, hereafter NJS-B] have offered an elegant and potentially powerful resolution to this paradox, beginning with a crucial distinction between the “relative” and “absolute” effects of education. If more people now have a college degree, they argue, perhaps the sociological signifi cance of the credential has been devalued. Social status is, for example, associated with education, but we would not assume that just because more Americans are educated than ever before, America has a greater volume of social status than ever before. To the extent that education is merely about sorting people, not about adding to their skills and knowledge and civic values, then no puzzle remains to be explained. In fact, NJS-B conclude, participation is affected primarily by relative educational levels, and thus has not been (and should not have been expected to be) rising with aggregate educational levels. The distinction that NJS-B have introduced is important. Education has external effects, as well as internal ones. In principle, my behavior can be affected not only by my education, but also by that of others around me. The core issue is whether (holding constant my own education), I am more likely or less likely to participate politically and socially if those around me become more educated. Besides its academic inter

‘Validation’: Mobilisation and Disciplination

This article presents an empirical example of what a process of mobilisation and disciplination could mean in practice. The example is taken from a ‘validation’ initiative (recognition of prior learning) among a small group of unemployed people in Sweden. An ethnographic approach means that data were collected, mainly through observations and interviews, to provide a detailed description of the process studied. The analysis applies an eclectic perspective, inspired by the Foucauldian concept of genealogy, where the idea of validation is traced in ethnography, the discursive practice of validation. The results show, among other things, how mobilising and disciplining are intertwined: i.e., mobilisation is a prerequisite of disciplination and vice versa. Furthermore, mobilising and disciplining can be seen as a process of sorting people. There was a high dropout rate in the small group, and the question of how the system could be changed to better meet the needs of these persons is asked.

The Construction of ‘Indigenousness’ in Russian Science, Politics and Law

It is already a well-worn truism that there is no commonly accepted definition of 'indigenous people' either in the current literature on international law, or in the contemporary legal regulations on the state level. One of the common explanations for this state of things is the existing diversity of indigenous groups and domestic legal regimes. The report is aimed at an outline of the Russian domestic treatment of the terms 'native', 'indigenous' and 'minority peoples' as they are perceived by jurists, politicians and peoples themselves, as there are some notable deviations from international standards that merit attention, discussion and critique.The concepts of 'indigenous' or 'native' have in Russian several layers of meaning, sometimes melted into one major meaning of being 'rooted' in the land, sometimes, as they appeared in different periods of the Russia's political history, as being non-Russian, non-Orthodox (pagan), a nomad, a newcomer, a migrant etc. This conceptual field of related notions has always been a source of borrowing and active usage by political elites, for it seems to be an inalienable quality of a central state to draw distinctions among various social and cultural groups as to their relationship to land and to the central authorities. Cultural and linguistic 'kin' were treated on average more favourably than barbarophonoi [Homer. Iliad 2.867]. Differentiated sets of societal proximities linking rulers with the ruled have at the same time been operating as a set of effective filters or barriers, sorting people of the country into internal 'ours' and 'others'. The names for 'others', initially less differentiated, were subject to diversification with growing knowledge at expert (scientific or special) levels, remaining less differentiated at the level of the common public. Political jargon remains 'suspended' between these, the expert and lay versions of the interpretation of ethnic reality.Only during the last ten-year period have various ex-Soviet ethnic groups voiced more than 300 territorial claims. At least one-tenth of these claims have been instrumental in ethnic mobilization campaigns and outbreaks of ethnic violence. Legitimation and justification of this violence is rooted in particular conceptual structures of political discourse on ethnic issues, which could be termed as naturalization and territorialization of ethnicity. The relevance of these tropes in political discourse to the current law-making activities in the sphere of indigenous rights protection in Russia is analyzed in the report.

Monolingualism of the Other; Or, the Prosthesis of Origin

Reviewed by: Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin Didier Maleuvre Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. On closing Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other, the reader may feel satisfied that the renegade branch of philosophy is alive and well—the tradition which, since Diogenes' time, has gone cheerfully around taking cracks at the plaster idols lining the halls of academia. Derrida's role in the intellectual life of the last three decades has been that of the inspired spoilsport who, when the sailing is good, politely points to the ominous flaws in the hull. This time around, the philosopher sets his sights on exploring and exploding the concept of cultural identity—the latest product of our era's passion for sorting people into as many robustly meaningful categories as possible. This pollster mentality is what, in literature studies, has led to the sort of analysis that imagines the value of a literary artifact is evident once its author and characters are kindly shown the way to their respective cultural, social, colonial, sexual and economical "subjectivities." Part philosophical essay and part memoir, Derrida's book questions identity: "What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and, in general, belonging?" (14). How, in other words, does it make sense to say that I have or own a native language? That I belong to a linguistic group or that such a group grants me an identity? Can one's identity be so simple that it amounts to slotting this individual piece into that collective? And if so, then just how identical will I be to my tribe and to myself? Will I have found myself then, having cleared the philosophical hurdles to selfhood, and placing my self securely before me? Doesn't anything the self may say about its circumstances first have to reckon with the fact that self-identity is necessarily split, hence is yet to be achieved, if it is able to talk about itself at all? These are the well-worn questions to which Derrida asks us to return. Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger or Austin, Derrida sees in language the lens where these questions best come into focus. And, to start with, the cultural mantra of mother tongue. Though one's native language undeniably shapes one's world, down to the minutest detail, Derrida is interested in bringing to light the network of faults whereby, in fact, acquiring and speaking a language is possible. "The language called maternal," he [End Page 170] contends, "is never purely natural, nor proper, nor inhabitable… There is no possible habitat without the difference of this exile and this nostalgia," (58). Derrida is inclined to take seriously the observation that a person does not create her original language but learns or obtains it from others; that language therefore emerges under the sign of what does not belong to me, nor to other people, who also merely share in it by using it. Expropriation and expatriation are the experiences of the linguistic agent who graduates into language by speaking the other's tongue—leaving out what he wanted to say, might have wanted to say, or could have said, had there been a speaking consciousness there before he even learned language. "'Alienation,'" Derrida therefore writes, "institutes every language as a language of the other: the impossible property of a language," (63). Indeed, the fact that I do not own the language I speak does not mean anyone else does. "Language of the other" points not to a putative other person, an originary interlocutor credited with possessing language as such; rather it describes a reality in which my speaking involves being understood or misunderstood, but in any case heard by others. So any language is a "language of the other," a transaction that cannot logically be mine (unless I inhabit a solipsistic bubble) or yours either: as Wittgenstein reminds us, there can be no such thing as a private language. Any speaker speaks in a language that bursts open the confines of the...

暗黙の性格理論と人物のカテゴリー化について 概念研究と対人認知研究との融合

In a theory-based concept model, the theory is often treated as implicit. In order to specify the conditions under which people prefer to construct categories of family resemblance, thereby explicating such an implicit theory, two experiments of people-sorting tasks were conducted. The first experiment was based on the paradigm of defining family resemblance in terms of independent sets of matching and mismatching values of personality traits. The second explored the idea that inter-property relationships rather than independent personality traits served to organize categories of people. In both studies, participants with low cognitive complexity persisted in sorting people on the basis of family resemblance, while those with high cognitive complexity continued to sort them along a single dimension. The results indicated that choice of sorting strategies, such as family resemblance or dimension, was related to an aspect of the person's implicit personality theory, namely cognitive complexity. Therefore, it was argued, a theory-based concept model and implicit personality theory were closely related.

Communication—Algorithms for Car-Pools

An invitation to readers of Management Science to contribute algorithms for sorting people in car-pools.

DIMENSIONS OF STUDY BEHAVIOUR: ANOTHER LOOK AT ATI

Summary. This paper reports a series of studies in the development of a Study Behaviour Questionnaire (SBQ), for use with university students. The major problem in the present research was to determine optimal ways of combining SBQ item scores: by sorting people's responses to items (R‐analysis), or by sorting items on the basis of how they discriminate between people (Q‐analysis).464 Arts and Science first‐year students completed the SBQ. The responses were analysed in both R and Q designs, and the resulting scale scores for each student were merged with his high school and university performance data. In the R‐analysis, 102 items were selected to sample 10 domains of study behaviour, and responses to these items were subjected to an oblique multiple group method of factor analysis. The 10 domains of study behaviour were confirmed although there was some significant intercorrelation between domains. In the Q‐analysis, four students were chosen at random from the Ability (high, medium, low) × Faculty (Arts, Science) × Sex matrix, replicated once. These categories were called ‘tests,’ and the items ‘people.’ Using an oblique Procrustes method of factoring, three Q‐scales were obtained. Factor scores on each of the 10 R and three Q scales were obtained for each student, and relationships with sex, faculty and performance were investigated.