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SocArXiv papers

• Your Voice Matters: Using Participatory Film to Engage People with Chronic Pain in Public Involvement and Research
  Background People living with chronic pain (pain >= 3-months) often struggle to participate in valued activity (for example, family life, work and in their community) and are under-represented in public involvement and research. We aimed to broaden awareness and encourage engagement in public involvement and research among people living with chronic pain. We outline how we co-produced a film to capture experiences of chronic pain and the potential benefits of engaging in public involvement and research. Methods We undertook a participatory filmmaking project guided by UK Standards for Public Involvement, convening a co-production team of public contributors (n=4) with lived experience of chronic pain, expertise in community outreach and advocacy, a filmmaker, and a physiotherapist-researcher. We worked through five phases, pre-funding, design and production planning, story capture and filming, editing and dissemination in a series of online meetings. Members of the co-production team led outreach through trusted networks to involve an additional group of contributors (n=7) including people with no prior research involvement and non-English speakers (n=2). Reflective discussions were embedded throughout, and impact was documented using the Public Involvement in Research Impact Toolkit (PIRIT). Findings Co-production featured to shape the funding application, the vision for the film, outreach, flexible approaches to story capture, and jointly reviewed edits and supported dissemination. Public contributors within the co-production team were highly involved, shaping priorities, and key decisions about narrative focus, inclusion, and representation. They provided accounts of their experiences of living with pain and their views on public involvement and research, which formed the substantive content of the film. Outreach contributors exercised choice over how their experiences were shared, and their reflections incorporated through iterative team discussion. First-person reflections from the co-production team illustrated how individuals experienced the project, including increased confidence, connection, and validation. Conclusions These insights illustrate how participatory filmmaking can move involvement beyond consultation toward shared power and meaningful partnership. The co-produced film which is publicly available, Your Voice Matters: Living with Chronic Pain, Shaping the Future of Research, was a tangible output of this process and a resource to help people make sense of chronic pain and research involvement, and to encourage future engagement.
• Whose Money Dilutes Whose Wealth?
  Monetary expansion is a sovereign prerogative whose costs and benefits are structurally asymmetric. When a central bank expands the money supply, all holders of nominal claims bear the inflation cost, while asset holders capture a seigniorage premium--a windfall appreciation attributable to monetary policy rather than productive activity. This paper argues that this asymmetry constitutes a distributive injustice under the proportionality principle, and derives this conclusion independently from three ethical traditions: Aristotelian distributive justice, contractarian rationality, and left-libertarian common ownership. The argument proceeds in six steps. First, I establish the institutional mechanics of seigniorage--how central banks create base money at near-zero cost to acquire interest-bearing assets--and introduce a dual-parameter framework that separates the asset appreciation rate (pa) from the cash depreciation rate (pc), capturing the empirically documented divergence under quantitative easing. Second, I develop the proportionality principle through three independent ethical derivations, each yielding the conclusion that costs and benefits of sovereign monetary action must be allocated proportionally. Third, I defend the choice of proportionality against competing distributive principles--maximin, sufficientarianism, and luck egalitarianism--and establish its priority over Pareto efficiency as a criterion of distributive justice. Fourth, I address the strongest objections: the transfer problem, the Pareto defense, the general equilibrium objection, the voluntariness objection, the agency problem (whether structural injustice is possible without individual wrongdoing), and the scope problem (why monetary policy warrants correction when other policies with distributive consequences do not). Fifth, I propose the seigniorage dividend as a Pigouvian correction with a rule-based institutional design compatible with central bank independence, and demonstrate that it functions as an automatic demand stabilizer--transferring purchasing power from low-MPC asset holders to high-MPC cash-dependent households--providing an independent consequentialist justification that does not depend on the proportionality principle. Sixth, I articulate the structural conditions that distinguish monetary policy from other sovereign actions with distributive consequences, providing a principled stopping rule for the proportionality claim.
• Can We Bridge Divides? Discourse on X During 2019 and 2024 European Elections in Slovenia - Preprint
  As digital platforms increasingly mediate public discourse, many believe that ideological fragmentation threatens democratic debate and contributes to divided society. Yet, such discussions often remain on a normative level, while most empirical research examines single time points in large countries, limiting understanding of how fragmentation trajectories evolve over time, especially in smaller European democracies. This study explores how the communication landscape on X evolved between the 2019 and 2024 European elections in Slovenia, and what these structural patterns reveal about the possibilities and barriers for dialogue in digital public spheres. Using social network analysis, the study analysed over 100,000 tweets. I examined community structure, information flows, and temporal changes in network fragmentation during a period marked by platform transformation (Twitter to X) and global crises (COVID-19, war in Ukraine). Results reveal deep ideological clustering with minimal cross-group interaction in both periods. Fragmentation intensified remarkably: the right-wing cluster nearly doubled (+95%), while the left-wing cluster contracted (-18%). Network topology suggests a shift from isolated echo chambers to >>echo platform
• The AIR Framework for Research Transparency: A Critical Analysis of Stage-Specific AI Disclosure in the Context of Accessibility and Research Integrity--Article Type: Review
  As generative AI tools integrate rapidly into research workflows, the absence of shared disclosure vocabulary creates a transparency crisis: researchers wish to use AI responsibly but lack consistent language for describing how these tools contribute to their work. The AIR (AI in Research) framework addresses this gap through a two-dimensional matrix mapping AI involvement across seven research stages and five engagement bands, from no use to substantial use. This critical review examines AIR's theoretical foundations, empirical viability, and ethical limitations, with particular attention to accessibility and neurodiversity. Drawing on virtue epistemology, I argue that transparency must be understood as a constitutive epistemic virtue rather than a procedural requirement, and assess how AIR operationalizes this commitment. An inter-rater reliability pilot study (n=15 raters, nine scenarios, Cohen's k=0.72) demonstrates that trained evaluators can apply AIR with substantial agreement while revealing systematic boundary ambiguities. Critical analysis identifies five major limitations: false precision in ambiguous practices, inadequate treatment of accessibility-related AI use, stigmatization of legitimate high-band practices, vulnerability to adversarial compliance, and insufficient edge case guidance. I propose evidence-informed refinements including boundary case designations, a protected A1-Access sub-band for disability accommodations, separation of verification burden from appropriateness judgment, spot-check validation studies, and community-maintained edge case repositories. These refinements aim to preserve AIR's descriptive precision while protecting vulnerable researchers and mitigating exclusion risks. The analysis concludes that AIR, with refinements, represents valuable transparency infrastructure, but that implementation requires sustained dialogue among researchers, integrity officers, editors, accessibility advocates, and policymakers to ensure research integrity and inclusion remain interdependent rather than competing aspirations.
• Concepts of social stratification-- static and dynamic perspectives
  Going beyond the stylised description of a small number of distinct social classes, social stratification has become a broad and diversified field of research. This chapter gives an overview over various analytical perspectives and measures of social stratification as they are used in empirical research. Starting from simple cross-sectional descriptions of central dimensions of social inequality, it discusses a number of important conceptual distinctions, which have provided the basis for specific developments in stratification research such as: units of analysis; temporal dimensions; inter-generational social mobility and reproduction; and intra-generational mobility. A life-course perspective helps to overcome systematic limitations of conventional approaches.
• Social and epistemic differences in local and international scientific publishing: a case study of Tanzanian forest governance research
  Scientific knowledge circulates through multiple publishing spaces. They play a key role in structuring scholarly communication by assigning differential visibility to authors and their research. In this exploratory study, we approach publications as products through which social and epistemic differences between local and international scientific spaces can be examined. Drawing on Bourdieusian theory, we understand science as a social field in which actor positions and epistemic choices are co-constitutive and related to capital. The study investigates this relation by combining a qualitative content analysis of Tanzanian-authored forest governance articles in local and international outlets with a quantitative analysis of their bibliometric metadata. The articles were coded for selected epistemic choices (choice of topics, methods, purpose, framing of forests), and then comparatively analysed for social aspects of authorship (gender, first authorship, institutional affiliation, single/co-authorship, collaboration, funding). Our findings show patterns of similarity and difference between the local and international datasets examined. They suggest that the field of forest governance is homogeneous in terms of the researchers' choice of methods and their study purpose; also, men dominate as authors both in Tanzanian and international journals. However, they display differences in topics, geographical research focus, and framing of forests, which correspond to contrasting trends in funding opportunity and collaborations. The latter provide insight into differentiated access to cycles of social and scientific capital accumulation. The implication is that the current focus on 'international' research - as represented by international, digital science databases - reproduces a cycle of scientific and social capital accumulation for those who already have it, as well as a high barrier to entry for Tanzania-affiliated authors whose local journals are not as integrated and visible.
• Documentation Gap Analysis: Independent Audit of TGA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Monitoring Plan
  This independent audit systematically evaluates the TGA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Monitoring Plan (February 2021) -- a National Cabinet-endorsed framework implementing enhanced pharmacovigilance under provisional approvals covering 68.4 million doses (91.2% of Australia's rollout). Findings reveal systematic documentation failures. Only 3 of 19 outputs (16%) are fully documented; 16 (84%) are partially or not documented -- despite TGA classifying 2,218+ pages for OAIC review. TGA reports 148 signals investigated and 57 actions taken, yet no audit trails link signals to actions or account for 91 unresolved signals. Senior TGA officials testified (Senate, 9 October 2025) that monitoring occurred through "day-to-day processes" without systematic Plan tracking, confirmed by OAIC Decision [2025] AICmr 54. Methodology applies ISO 19011:2018, ANAO guidance, and OSINT principles to public and FOI records. Open-source, falsifiable, CC BY 4.0. Full evidence base and methodology: https://github.com/paulrekaris/TGA-COVID19-Vaccine-Safety-Monitoring-Audit Also available on SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6333058 Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17731054
• The Impact of Pre Entry Orientation on Continuation for Disabled Students: A Mixed Methods Study
  Disabled students represent a growing proportion of the UK higher education population, yet continue to experience structural disadvantages in transition, progression, and continuation. This study evaluates the Relaxed Induction programme, a two-day, face-to-face pre-orientation intervention designed to support disabled student entrants during the transition into university. Using a convergent mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design, the study examined whether participation was associated with improved continuation and explored participants' perceived transition experiences and underlying mechanisms. Quantitative analyses compared 25 participants with 417 matched nonparticipants in the region of common support using doubly robust, cross-fitted augmented inverse probability weighting. Participation was associated with a statistically significant increase in continuation of 2.29 percentage points (95% CI [0.35, 4.24], SE = 0.99). Complementary qualitative findings from six semi-structured interviews suggested that the programme reduced adjustment anxiety, strengthened confidence and belonging, improved awareness of support services, and enhanced readiness for academic engagement. Overall, the findings indicate that a brief pre-entry intervention can support transition and modestly improve continuation. Future research should replicate these results in larger, multi-cohort or multi-institution samples and test differential effects across student subgroups.
• Homeschooling as Racial Retreat: The Impact of School District and Leadership Diversity
  What explains the decision to homeschool? This study examines whether local racial context influences families' decisions to homeschool their children. I argue that many white parents exit public school systems due to concerns about the distribution of school resources to racial out-groups, particularly in racially diverse and resource-constrained districts. I conduct a state-representative survey of over 30,000 respondents to describe the homeschooling population in the United States. Then, using data from Virginia that link student and district leadership demographics (school board members and superintendents) to district-level homeschooling rates, I examine how racial composition and leadership diversity shape educational exit. I find that higher levels of non-white students and certain kinds of leadership diversity are positively associated with increased homeschooling, especially where resources are limited. By showing that homeschooling is often motivated by perceived racial threat, this study informs debates about the regulation and public subsidization of homeschooling.
• Alem da Linearidade: Uma Taxonomia das Configuracoes de Ciclo de Vida em Micro e Pequenas Empresas Brasileiras
  Os modelos classicos de ciclo de vida organizacional (Greiner, 1972; Churchill & Lewis, 1983; Adizes, 1990) pressupoem trajetorias lineares e sequenciais que, argumentamos, sao empiricamente inadequadas para descrever o desenvolvimento das micro e pequenas empresas (MPEs) brasileiras. Este estudo, em andamento, propoe uma taxonomia configuracional das trajetorias de desenvolvimento de MPEs brasileiras, construida a partir de um desenho metodologico misto sequencial exploratorio composto por quatro fases: (1) 30 entrevistas qualitativas semiestruturadas com gestores-fundadores; (2) Painel Delphi para validacao das condicoes causais; (3) survey nacional com 350 MPEs (escala Likert 7 pontos); e (4) analise por Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). Reportamos os resultados parciais das primeiras 12 entrevistas realizadas, distribuidas em quatro estados brasileiros e 12 setores distintos. A analise tematica indutiva revela tres categorias analiticas emergentes -- o Efeito Sanfona, o Teto da Tranquilidade e o Ciclo de Vida Fragmentado -- que desafiam os pressupostos de linearidade, progressao universal e orientacao homogenea para o crescimento dos modelos classicos. Achados inesperados incluem o uso de Inteligencia Artificial como protese de gestao e o hibridismo de subsistencia como mecanismo de financiamento interno. O estudo ancora-se teoricamente na perspectiva configuracional (Fiss, 2011), na critica aos modelos de estagios (Levie & Lichtenstein, 2010) e na teoria institucional (North, 1990; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 2008). Palavras-chave: ciclo de vida organizacional; micro
• Ma-Meme: The Cultural Reproduction of Anger in Organizations
  This study theoretically examines how anger behaviors become culturally reproduced within organizations. Previous organizational research has largely explained anger as an individual emotional reaction, a failure of emotional regulation, or a leadership behavior. However, these perspectives do not sufficiently account for the phenomenon in which anger behaviors are imitated and reproduced as cultural practices within organizations. This paper conceptualizes anger as a culturally transmissible behavior embedded in social interaction and proposes an integrative framework explaining the persistence and diffusion of anger behaviors. First, the study introduces the Anger-as-Indulgence Model (AIM), which explains the repeated use of anger as a behavior associated with short-term psychological rewards, such as silencing others, gaining situational dominance, and enabling self-justification. Second, the rhetorical process through which anger behaviors are justified within organizational discourse is conceptualized as the Rage Authorization Reproduction Loop (RAR-Loop). RAR represents a self-reinforcing cycle in which anger is followed by organizational justification, exemption from responsibility, and the repeated use of anger. Third, the diffusion of anger behaviors through observation and imitation is described as Rage Pattern Reproduction (RPR). RPR reflects social learning processes in which individuals replicate behavioral patterns observed in authority figures or successful actors. By integrating these three mechanisms, the study theorizes the cumulative cultural reproduction of anger behaviors within organizations as the Ma-Meme. The Ma-Meme refers to a cultural phenomenon in which anger behaviors are reproduced through the interaction of psychological reinforcement (AIM), rhetorical justification (RAR), and social imitation (RPR). By reframing anger not merely as an individual emotional problem but as a culturally evolving behavioral pattern, this study provides a new theoretical framework for understanding the formation and reproduction of emotional cultures in organizations.
• From Xs To Boxes: Toward a More Radical Graphical Metaphor for Progressives
  The Edgeworth Box provides progressives with a graphical language that can be used to make a powerful case for radical and efficient redistribution of wealth via taxation and law reform. The box also makes it easy to show that price regulation and antitrust are of much more limited use in redistributing wealth. Progressives should embrace the graphical language of the box and give up partial equilibrium scissors graphs, which provide an incomplete picture of policy options for redistribution of wealth.
• What Predicts Support for Political Violence? Results from a Machine Learning Meta-Reanalysis
  There is significant research on support for political violence (SPV), its correlates, and interventions to reduce it. However, there is no framework for understanding who supports political violence. This article leverages the exploratory power of (causal) machine learning to conduct a registered meta-reanalysis of both the observational and experimental literature on SPV from 1995-2025 to synthesize and summarize previous research. First, we identify three categories of individual-level predictors: politically salient identities, psychological characteristics, and attitudes toward one's political system. Second, we find that young adults are the most likely to support political violence across many recent surveys, particularly in the U.S. Additionally, in two experiments in the U.S. and India we find that young people are by far the most affected by treatments aimed at both decreasing and increasing support, respectively. Third, and in contrast to research on the perpetration of violence, we find scant evidence of a relationship between gender identity and SPV.
• Household classification, family diversity and poverty risks in Europe: addressing a North-Western bias
  European statistics and policies commonly rely on household typologies that classify households based on the number of adults and children living together. However, these typologies overlook family relationships and classify any non-standard arrangement into a broad residual category of 'other'. This approach fails to capture increasing family diversity across Europe and introduces a persistent North-Western bias into data and policymaking. As a result, families that do not fit conventional models may be misclassified or entirely overlooked in poverty assessments and policy targeting. This is problematic since family structures vary substantially across European countries and became more diverse over time. This article introduces the Families in Households Typology (FHT), a classification system that uses relationship identifiers in EU-SILC microdata to reconstruct family structures within households. The FHT reduces the share of individuals placed in the residual 'other' category from over 20% to around 5%, particularly improving identification in Southern, Central, and Eastern European countries where multigenerational living arrangements are common. The results also show that nearly half of all single parents in Europe live with another adult and are not captured as single parents under conventional typologies. This has important implications for policy design: many single-parent households may be excluded from targeted support due to misclassification. Reclassifying households using the FHT also reshapes our understanding of living standards. The poverty risk of single parents is often overestimated when the Eurostat household typology is adopted. When single parents co-residing with kin or unrelated adults are correctly identified, their average poverty risk tends to be much lower. These findings highlight the importance of moving away from basic household counts towards relational classifications that more accurately reflect the diversity of family life across Europe, rather than using typologies that reflect the dominant family reality in Northern and Western Europe.
• From Public Cord Blood to Public iPSCs: Ethical Design for Universal Neonatal Cell Banking
  Umbilical cord blood banking has established clinical value in hematopoietic transplantation, but the strongest ethical case for universal neonatal collection is not that every child should receive a form of private biological insurance. The better case is narrower: neonatal cells can be preserved as public biomedical infrastructure, while genomic sequencing, induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derivation, and downstream clinical use are governed as later, distinct, and higher-stakes decisions. This article defends that model. The empirical record supports a disciplined middle position. Professional guidance favors public over routine private banking; long-term cryostorage can preserve clinically usable material across decades, even if cryopreservation is not functionally neutral; cord blood is a plausible source for iPSC derivation; and pluripotent-cell translation has entered early clinical use. Specific use cases make the policy argument concrete, including cardiotoxicity modeling before anthracycline therapy, phenotype testing in inherited arrhythmia syndromes, and selective autologous cell-replacement strategies in ophthalmology. These examples do not justify universal autologous manufacturing, but they do show that preserved neonatal cells may carry meaningful future clinical option value. Review-level evidence also sets important limits: support for public banking exceeds support for private banking and open-ended research use, regenerative signals remain heterogeneous and condition-specific, and support for newborn genomic sequencing is constrained by concerns about privacy, discrimination, and long-term governance. The most defensible policy endpoint is therefore universal public collection and long-term stewardship of neonatal cells, selective sequencing, indication-based or coverage-based iPSC activation, data minimization, adult recontact where feasible, and explicit limits on commercialization. Overall, the more defensible policy goal is universal cell banking capacity, selective genomic use, and governed iPSC activation rather than universal genomic archiving or the creation of a personal iPSC line for every newborn.
• Managing Requirement Drift and Governance Complexity in Enterprise Fit-Gap Analysis: A Procure-to-Pay ERP Transformation Case Study
  Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) transformations frequently encounter requirement volatility and governance complexity during fit-gap analysis. This study examines requirement drift during the Procure-to-Pay (P2P) module implementation of the Integrated Education Management System (IEMS) at Independent University Bangladesh. Using version comparison of fit-gap artefacts, governance workshop records, and change logs, the research identifies governance escalation as a primary driver of requirement reclassification and traceability degradation. The findings indicate that requirement drift in institutional ERP environments is often governance-mediated rather than purely technical. The study proposes a layered conceptual model linking stakeholder negotiation, governance escalation, architectural constraints, and AI-supported decision mediation. This model reframes fit-gap analysis as a governance-mediated adaptive process rather than a static requirement validation phase. The work contributes to research in requirements engineering, enterprise systems governance, and digital transformation, and provides a foundation for future studies on AI-enabled requirement traceability and governance decision support in large-scale enterprise software delivery contexts.
• Habermas and the City: The Unacknowledged Urban Life of his Theory
  This short paper argues that Jurgen Habermas is one of the most consequential, and least acknowledged, thinkers in the history of urban studies. His influence has operated largely underground: through the communicative planning tradition of Forester, Healey, and Innes; through the vocabulary of deliberation and legitimacy that now pervades urban theory; and through the concept of the "colonization of the lifeworld," which gives researchers the language to name what happens when markets and bureaucracies dismantle the communicative fabric of neighborhoods. Against the prevailing reception, which treats Habermas as an abstract philosopher in need of translation into urban language, this article contends that he was, at his roots, an empirical and historical thinker of the city. His first major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), is a meticulous historical sociology of how European cities (their cafes, salons, reading clubs, and press) created the institutional conditions for democratic deliberation. The Theory of Communicative Action (1981-84) diagnoses the pathologies of urban modernity with a precision that urban theorists are still catching up to. And Between Facts and Norms (1992) offers, in substance, a constitutional theory of urban governance, asking what it means for any planning or land-use decision to be democratically legitimate. The article traces Habermas's influence across communicative planning theory, the public-space debates, and legal philosophy of urban governance, and concludes by examining his 2022 return to the question of the public sphere in the age of digital platforms: a transformation as consequential for urban democracy as the one he analyzed sixty years earlier.
• Clarifying The Relationship Between Trust And Participation In Smart Cities: A Literature Review & Practical Typology
  Smart city systems aim to improve quality of life for urban residents, but many projects have suffered from public backlash and mistrust, leading to implementation delays and failures. Many researchers have proposed greater levels of public involvement in the smart city projects to encourage their acceptance. Other authors have begun to investigate the role of trust in the acceptance of new urban sensing technologies, but there remains a need to clarify how participatory modalities might generate greater levels of trust in smart cities. In this paper, I first review the literature on trust in smart city projects and parallel calls for greater community participation in their development and operation. Drawing on the sociological literature on the topic, I go on to center the relational dimensions of trust, a move which I argue can aid in understanding how participatory approaches can function as opportunities for trust to emerge from below as city residents actively engage with smart city system experts, public administrators, and new technologies themselves. I go on to establish a practical typology of the competing conceptualizations of participation that appear in the smart city literature, identify opportunities for trust building unique to each, and highlight illustrative case studies. Lastly, I review challenges to the renewed emphasis on participation in the smart city, and I suggest lessons and new directions for smart city researchers and practitioners.
• Doing urban citizenship with (broken) digital data from an air pollution sensor
  Digital technologies are increasingly enfolded in citizenship projects - from apps that contribute to the enactment of individual health maintenance for neoliberal citizens, through to more activist engagements using citizen-generated data for environmental justice. We use Sarah Pink and colleagues' metaphor of 'broken data' to explore how one device - a commercially available pollution sensor - was anticipated and used in practice for such citizenship practices by volunteers in one city. The device, at one level, failed in many ways. It produced unreliable data doubles: digital representations of air that failed to correlate with users' own embodied experiences or tacit knowledge. The data generated by the device failed to afford mitigating actions for personal citizenship responsibilities. The data generated could not be directly accessed, nor easily shared with others in ways conducive to collective action. The disconnects between haptic and digital data highlighted the instability of the sensor, as a hybrid of personal device and political tool. However, in grappling with their 'broken' air pollution data, participants mobilized different sensing capacities that afforded (with varying degrees of success) citizenship projects by enacting 'responsible' engagements with the city and other citizens, and with more activist imaginaries. Data practices, we suggest, happen alongside citizenship projects, but do not necessarily enable those projects.
• Applying strategic leadership principles to diminish antisemitism and moderate activism on university campuses
  University leaders must balance freedom of expression and activism with student safety and campus cohesion. This tension has intensified amid pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstrations. A significant gap in the literature lies in applying strategic leadership theory to mitigate antisemitism and polarised activism in higher education. This study used a critical literature review approach on the intersection of antisemitism in universities, campus activism, and strategic leadership. Approximately 50 relevant sources were selected, including peer-reviewed articles, books, journalistic pieces, opinion works, and seminal texts on antisemitism. Publicly documented case studies of leadership failures in education, journalism, and politics was used to illustrate broader patterns. The theoretical framework is strategic leadership theory, adopted within a pragmatic paradigm that prioritises practical solutions. Qualitative and quantitative data confirm rising antisemitism on university campuses, primarily driven by left-leaning theoretical frameworks. Strategic leadership failures contribute to institutional rigidity, ideological monocultures, and persistent antisemitism. Key competencies such as cognitive complexity, social intelligence, managerial wisdom, metacognition, transformational influence, and double-loop learning enable leaders to respond proactively, fostering pluralism, ethical resilience, and institutional legitimacy. Although the literature documents antisemitism on campuses extensively, it has largely neglected the preventive and remedial value of strategic leadership and its competencies. This article addresses that gap by showing how these frameworks equip leaders to halt organisational drift toward antisemitism, and deploy proactive strategies, preventing patterns seen in universities, media organisations (e.g., BBC), and political institutions. It offers guidance for shifting from compliance to capability-focused, foresight-driven leadership that protects inclusive environments.
• THE RIGID ECONOMIC LADDER OF NEW YORK CITY: THE FACTORS THAT HAVE LED TO ITS EXACERBATION AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
  A lack of government regulation over institutional interests has contributed to New York City's rising economic inequality by depleting the assets of low-income residents and oftentimes indirectly transferring those assets to the rich, who oversee these institutional interests. Since 1980, economic disparities have widened across the U.S., while the gap in New York City has cratered into a ravine. The predominant reason for this growing wealth polarization is the city's heavy concentration in the finance sector alongside loose financial regulation from the government. Previous research has primarily focused on economic divides in New York City relating to wage inequality and has thus been unable to uncover the impacts of this wage divide on the average New York City resident. This study uses a difference-in-differences analysis to focus on the city's wealth divide, the government-sponsored factors that have led to its exacerbation, and the impacts it has had on the city's real estate and healthcare landscape. Contrary to what is often assumed, economic inequality's modern rise in the U.S. is not solely attributable to globalization and technologization. New York City's rigid economic structure stems in part from a lack of monitoring from both federal and local government in housing, healthcare, and the transfer of wealth.
• When our physiology becomes our psychology
  This article presents the Domain Loop Model, a framework developed through clinical work with elite athletes, proposing that anxiety arises from misalignment between three interconnected domains of consciousness: interoceptive (internal body signals), exteroceptive (external sensory input), and narrator (meaning-making). The model is integrated and multi-directional: actions in any domain can impact across the whole system. Drawing on research linking joint hypermobility to anxiety disorders, we demonstrate how physiological conditions--particularly excessive gut permeability and resulting inflammatory responses--can create persistent fight-or-flight states independent of environmental threats. When interoceptive and exteroceptive domains become discordant, the narrator constructs narratives to reconcile the mismatch, potentially leading to catastrophic thinking and a self-reinforcing "locked-in loop." While hypermobility serves as an illustrative case (affecting over 20% of the population and showing up to 16 times higher anxiety rates), the model applies broadly: any source of domain discordance--physiological, environmental, or narrative-driven--can generate persistent anxiety. The framework suggests effective intervention requires addressing all three domains, enabling interdisciplinary collaboration. Beyond clinical applications, the model offers insights into polarised thinking and fear-based decision-making in contemporary society, where media-driven narratives can activate threat responses independent of real environmental danger.
• L'utilisation du glyphosate dans la gestion des forets au Nouveau-Brunswick : cadre reglementaire, sante socio-environnementale et discours de l'industrie
  La foresterie est un secteur economique de premiere importance au Nouveau-Brunswick. Au cours des 15 dernieres annees, le recours a l'epandage aerien de glyphosate par l'industrie forestiere est devenu sujet de controverse dans la province. Ce chapitre presente une analyse du discours construit par l'industrie forestiere pour appuyer son utilisation du glyphosate. Nous demontrons que le bilan politique de Higgs est conforme au discours de l'industrie, qui mobilise une vision mythique de >, ici incarnee sous la forme du glyphosate, afin de reconcilier l'opposition symbolique courante entre environnement et economie. La premiere section du texte resume l'utilisation historique et actuelle du glyphosate par l'industrie forestiere du Nouveau-Brunswick. Dans la deuxieme section, nous presentons le cadre provincial et federal regissant l'utilisation du glyphosate dans la province. Les troisieme et quatrieme sections developpent une analyse structurale d'un petit corpus representatif du discours de l'industrie, centre sur la presentation de l'entreprise J. D. Irving lors des audiences publiques du Comite permanent des changements climatiques et de l'intendance de l'environnement tenues en 2021. En conclusion, l'analyse permet d'eclairer la (non-)reponse du gouvernement Higgs aux audiences publiques, et suggere un lien direct entre le discours de l'industrie et la position gouvernementale.
• Beyond the Map: How the Coherence of Daily Decisions Determines the Fate of Strategic Plans--A Case Study of Tunisia's Education 2026-2030 strategy
  The paper's primary contribution is a theoretical framework that explains why national strategic plans so often fail to translate ambitious objectives into concrete results. It argues that repeated goals and recurring actions across successive planning cycles signal a deeper structural problem: the misalignment between long term strategic intent and the everyday governmental decisions (in many levels) that determine real outcomes. The framework integrates insights from implementation theory, principal-agent dynamics, governance research, and political economy to show how coherence in daily practices--resource allocation, bureaucratic incentives, regulatory enforcement, and crisis management--is the decisive factor shaping implementation success. Tunisia's 2026-2030 Strategic Plan is used solely to illustrate the framework's explanatory power. The plan itself is analytically robust and accurately diagnoses structural challenges in education, regional inequality, and labor market alignment. Yet its implementation difficulties stem from governance constraints--centralized decision making, institutional erosion, and fiscal stress--that systematically undermine decision making coherence. These dynamics exemplify the broader mechanisms identified by the framework rather than constituting the empirical focus of the study. The paper concludes that improving development outcomes requires strengthening the institutional capacity to ensure consistent, aligned, and credible daily decisions. More sophisticated plans cannot compensate for weak implementation systems; only coherent governance can bridge the persistent gap between strategic vision and achieved results. Keywords: Implementation Gap, Principal-Agent Theory, Means-Ends Decoupling, Coherence of Daily Decisions, Vernacular Governance, Institutional Lock-In, Education policy.
• When The River Runs Dry: Political Barriers to Climate Policy Implementation
  Does severe weather lead governments to take action on climate change? Existing research argues that climate shocks can spur policy change. We theorize that shocks create strong short-term incentives for policy adoption, but relatively weak incentives for implementation. We test this argument using an event especially likely to induce policy change: Drought-induced hydropower shortages, or hydrostress. Leveraging fine-grained global hydrological data, we find that hydrostress increases the adoption of energy transition policies. Consistent with our theory however, these policies have, on average, little to no durable effect on implementation outcomes. Using cross-national data, survey experiments in Colombia, and more than one hundred elite interviews across four countries, we show that accountability deficits and state capture constrain follow-through. Mass publics reward governments for policy adoption, but not imple- mentation, even as they perceive implementation to reduce climate risk. Our findings illuminate key political drivers of climate inaction.
• An Intelligent Learning Management System for Identifying Skill Gaps and Supporting Workforce Reskilling in SMEs
  In addition, digital transformation has created a new organizational landscape that requires different workforce structures. This has led to a growing need for new digital skills. Despite these challenges, organizations, especially SMEs, face major challenges in identifying gaps in skills and developing reskilling strategies. This study proposes a data-driven framework that helps identify performance gaps for organizations and competency gaps for the workforce. The proposed methodological framework for identifying gaps in skills for the workforce involves a two-level analytical method. In the macro level, a Composite Performance Gap Index is proposed for measuring the performance of organizations in different economic and organizational dimensions. This index helps classify different industries or geographical locations based on the performance of organizations in a given sector. This index helps identify organizations that are performing poorly in different sectors and requires support for digital transformation. In the micro level, the proposed framework helps identify gaps in skills for the workforce by using CV-based skill extraction techniques involving Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. This helps identify gaps in digital skills for the workforce. It also helps calculate a Skill Gap Indicator that measures the difference between existing skills and skills that are mandated by a digital skills framework for different industries. Based on these gaps in skills for the workforce, the proposed framework helps generate intelligent learning management systems for organizations that are relevant for digital transformation. In order to propose a data-driven framework for identifying gaps in skills for the workforce, a prototype for an Intelligent Learning Management System (LMS) for organizations is proposed. This LMS has different dashboards for firm benchmarking, employee skill gap analysis, and a catalog for training programs that are relevant for digital transformation. The proposed framework has shown significant gaps in skills for the workforce for SMEs based on the proposed methodological framework. This study has also shown that organizations face major challenges in developing skills for the workforce based on different competency gaps that are relevant for digital transformation. The proposed framework helps organizations identify gaps in skills for the workforce that are relevant for digital transformation.
• Bibliometric (In)visibilities in the Global Social Sciences: Revisiting Regional Dynamics across Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex (1980-2023)
  The global structure of the academic social sciences is often theorized as a center-periphery system dominated by a North America-Europe duopoly. In 2014, Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras provided influential bibliometric evidence for this model, analyzing publication, collaboration, and citation patterns from 1980 to 2009 using Web of Science data. Since then, both bibliometric database coverage and research capacity in the Global South have expanded. Drawing on three major bibliometric databases--Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex--I revisit and extend Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras' analysis through 2023. I show that exclusive reliance on the Web of Science Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) has distorted our understanding of global social science publishing, obscuring the scale, centrality, and autonomy of knowledge production outside North America. My findings indicate that the dominance of United States and Canada is increasingly unstable, while the centrality of Europe, the rise of Asia, and the autonomy of Latin America and North Eurasia have been systematically underestimated. These results challenge prevailing accounts of global social science hierarchies and pathways of academic dependency, underscore how bibliometric infrastructures shape perceptions of power, and demonstrate the declining usefulness of categories like North-South and center-periphery for characterizing today's academic landscape.
• INSTITUTIONALIZING ELDERLY RIGHTS: REGIONAL NEEDS AND POLICY PATHWAYS IN TURKIC EURASIA
  Abstract: Global population ageing is accelerating in Turkic Eurasia, yet the rights of older persons remain weakly institutionalized and fragmented across legal, social policy, and health systems. Drawing on a multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-instrument framework, this OSF preprint maps national elderly-rights architectures in Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and, more cautiously, Turkmenistan, and subjects them to the empirical "stress test" of the COVID 19 pandemic. Using a mixed-methods design that combines content analysis of national and OTS documents with comparative demographic and social protection indicators, the study identifies common gaps in long-term and community-based care, anti-ageism guarantees, and complaint mechanisms, alongside significant cross-country variation in institutional capacity. Building on this mapping, the article develops medium-term policy pathways that connect national legal reforms, regional cooperation within the Organization of Turkic States--including a proposed Elderly Rights Charter, Regional Observatory on Ageing and Social Policy, and peer-review mechanisms--and proactive engagement with UN, Council of Europe, and EU processes on older persons' rights. The core argument is that institutionalizing elderly rights in Turkic Eurasia requires moving from reactive, programme-based approaches to coherent, rights-based frameworks that translate ancestral respect for elders into enforceable guarantees across national, regional, and international levels. As a work in progress, the preprint concludes by outlining a research agenda on rural ageing, gender and ageing, and migrant elders, and by inviting feedback on data, assumptions, and institutional design options for future SSRN and journal publications. Keywrods: Elderly rights, Population ageing, Social protection, Long-term care, Ageism, Organization of Turkic States, Regional cooperation, Human rights, Norm diffusion, Turkic Eurasia JEL Classification I38, J14, H55, K38, O52
• Cultural assemblage theory: Synthesizing cultural diversity through four processes of community ecology
  Evolutionary approaches have provided a powerful framework for explaining how cultural traits emerge, spread, and persist. However, much cultural evolution research remains centred on trait-frequency change within populations and can understate historical contingency, spatial structure, and interactions among coexisting cultural traits. We propose cultural assemblage theory, a community-ecological perspective that treats culture as assemblages of interacting traits, practices, institutions, and beliefs. Building on Vellend's synthesis in community ecology, we translate four fundamental processes into cultural terms, and argue that their joint action can parsimoniously explain cultural diversity patterns across space and time. Cultural selection captures non-random adoption and retention driven by ecological and social payoffs and learning biases; cultural drift describes stochastic turnover and loss in effectively small cultural populations; cultural dispersal encompasses transmission across boundaries via migration, exchange, and media; and cultural speciation refers to lineage splitting and long-term diversification under isolation, path dependence, and local adaptation. Further, interactions among cultural traits shape assemblage structure and can mediate the four processes. This framework reorganises disparate strands of cultural evolution research into a common process-based language, facilitates comparative inference about the drivers of cultural diversity, and provides a theoretical basis for conserving vulnerable cultural lineages under accelerating global homogenisation.
• The "Normative Structure" of Social Science: Merton's Ideas as a Story of Success and Side Effects
  Based on available literature, this essay looks at trends in scholarly attitudes and academic practices, primarily within the sphere of social sciences, and asks whether they have been in line with Robert K. Merton's institutional principles of science as they were formulated in his famous essay "The Normative Structure of Science." This essay argues that these principles have not been fully implemented but have become increasingly recognised and widely accepted as normative points of reference also in large parts of the social sciences. However, there have been both marked deviations and significant side effects. Given the internal heterogeneity of a discipline like sociology, practices that selectively interpret the Merton principles may add to existing internal cleavages.
• Designing Causal Diagrams for Theoretical Reasoning and Measurement: Visualisations From Life-Course Research
  Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) have become popular as graphical representations of causal relationships. In practice, DAGs have proven to be particularly helpful for selecting appropriate control variables in causally oriented analytical models. While confirming such usefulness, this paper also aims to highlight another, often neglected aspect: the potential for causal diagrams to support the formulation of theories and corresponding hypotheses. This is particularly the case when diagrams have certain graphical properties, and suggestions are offered regarding how this can be achieved. Examples are drawn from the field of life-course research with the intention of better integrating the visual techniques prevalent in life-course research with DAG-style causal diagrams. While standard causal diagrams may not pay sufficient attention to certain relevant aspects, graphically enhanced causal diagrams can be quite productive for theory development and the analysis of existing life-course data. They are also useful for conceptualising new causally oriented studies. This paper illustrates suitable approaches with original and adapted visualisations.
• EMI: Who's studying whom? A critical bibliometric analysis of authorship and citation patterns in English medium instruction research
  Interest in English as a Medium of Instruction has, since 2005, become a huge area of applied linguistics research, but who gets to talk about EMI and who are they talking about? This paper describes a critical bibliometric analysis uncovering geographical and institutional imbalances in EMI research. We map over 1,000 higher education EMI journal articles to describe a research landscape dominated by wealthy nations and former colonial powers, with citations flowing disproportionately toward the Global North. Linear regression analysis shows that geography and the wealth, to a troubling extent, predict how productive that country is in terms of papers and particularly how well cited those papers are. We conclude that these findings reveal an epistemic bias which risks reinforcing academic structural inequities, particularly when it comes to attempts to holistically summarise the findings of EMI research.
• Animosity is for the Audience: How Social Context Shapes Expressions of Political Hostility
  Partisan vitriol has become a defining feature of American politics, evident in survey responses and social media discourse. Conventional wisdom holds that these expressions reflect deeply rooted hostility. Yet they may also function as social signals, reinforcing loyalty and conformity within partisan groups. In this view, animosity is less about entrenched ideological divisions and more about fostering cohesion among co-partisans. We test this proposition in two settings. First, using the 2012 American National Election Studies, which recorded interviewer partisanship, we exploit within-interviewer variation to examine whether respondents adjusted their reported hostility depending on the partisan identity of their interviewer. Respondents expressed significantly more animosity when interviewed by a co-partisan and less when facing an opposing-partisan interviewer. Second, in an online experiment with 1,510 participants, we find that revealing a partner's partisan alignment--when it matched the participant's--encouraged more frequent out-group attacks and in-group promotion. These behaviours were strongly shaped by social norms: participants were substantially more likely to attack when their partner had done so in the previous round. Together, these findings suggest that partisan hostility is contingent on immediate social context, not solely on deeply held animus.
• Microeconomic foundations for the biased interaction game
  The theory of microeconomics is revisited to gain insight into the underlying mechanics of sub-optimal systems in general. It challenges the prevailing view that efficient markets naturally arise from free competition and instead reformulates the market to reveal mechanisms whereby inefficient operation can naturally emerge. In particular, it shows how individual influence or power, and market scarcity inevitably lead to biased markets for emergent system operation that is anything but efficient. The paper concludes by incorporating these insights into a game-theoretic treatment of market interactions and proves this is simply a special case of the biased interaction game.
• The Clock on Compassion: How Settlement Misperceptions Shape Support for Refugee Policy
  Humanitarian responses to refugees are typically framed as temporary, yet protracted conflicts blur the line between short-term protection and permanent settlement. We argue that public support for inclusive refugee policies depends on whether refugees are perceived as temporary guests or long-term residents. Using a survey experiment in Poland during the Ukrainian refugee crisis, we study whether citizens misperceive refugees' intentions to settle permanently and whether correcting such "settlement misperceptions" affects support for inclusive refugee policy. Poles substantially overestimate the share of Ukrainians intending to remain indefinitely. These beliefs are strongly associated with lower support for inclusive refugee policy. Providing factual information about refugees' actual settlement plans leads to meaningful belief updating and shifts in policy preferences. Corrections increase support among overestimators and decrease it among underestimators, with a net positive effect overall. Effects are strongest for welfare-related policies and extend to generalized affect, though not to social distance. Humanitarian attitudes thus hinge partly on temporal expectations.
• Earning more but less secure: Unpaid carers, paid work, and the design of a cash allowance
  Unpaid carers face economic penalties, often despite having paid work. Dubbed a 'new' social risk, related social policies and research have focused on promoting employment and bolstering the public safety net when insufficient or absent. Yet the design of existing benefit programs might also have 'new' perverse effects. Here I ask how large, for how long, among whom, and why, by analysing the UK's Carer's Allowance and its earnings limit. I rely on survey interviews from fifteen waves of Understanding Society (2009-2024). Penalties are investigated in terms of economic insecurity, a comprehensive concept spanning incomes and wealth, and combining material indicators and perceptions. With an event-study design, I compare carers with a history of Carer's Allowance receipt to those without as their earnings progress. Carers with zero earnings report the highest levels of insecurity. When earnings increase, insecurity declines but not homogeneously. Past the earnings limit, carers with a history of Carer's Allowance receipt report relatively more arrears with bills and housing, less regular savings, more dissatisfaction with income, and heightened financial worries. The relative gap in insecurity is large and persistent over time. Insecurity also affects other household members, and it is more pronounced for those in working-class positions and renters. These patterns appear unrelated to variation in caregiving involvement. Rather, differences in incomes, employment, and benefit receipt widen past the limit. By foregrounding the role of policy design, findings speak to studies on social risks and economic insecurity, broadening the case for reform spurred by recent benefit scandals.
• An anatomy of digital technology bans
  Calls to ban digital technologies gained traction across liberal democracies, while similar measures in other contexts are portrayed as hallmarks of authoritarian governance. These bans rarely amount to complete prohibitions, appear in various contexts, and serve different political aims. We argue that, before engaging the normative question of legitimacy, regulatory scholarship must clarify what "technology bans" are. We propose a conceptual framework that understands technology bans primarily as regulatory discourse: narratives, justifications, and disputes that shape regulation. Drawing on discourse theory in public policy, we develop a typology of technology bans discourses, identifying three types: geopolitical measures, protection of vulnerable populations, and public interest bans. Our analysis demonstrates that they function as regulatory frames that communicate authority, sovereignty, and democratic control over technological development. By unpacking their discursive structure, the paper contributes to the understanding of technology bans as a regulatory category and to ongoing debates about technology governance and democratic legitimacy.
• Should Moving to the Middle Win Candidates Votes? It Depends Where Voters Are
  Research finds that moderation only weakly improves candidate vote shares, which some argue indicates voters fail to vote on issues. We argue these findings can instead reflect two features of public opinion: party positions are popular on some issues, and public opinion is multidimensional. We show why, given these features, candidates' electoral returns from moving towards the other party's positions can be small even if all voters vote on issues. We illustrate this using a conjoint experiment (N = 6, 000) with presidential candidates and randomized policy positions. Movement towards the other party improves vote shares when party positions are unpopular, but produces null or negative effects when party positions command majority support. Candidates moving towards the other party win some voters but lose others who preferred their party's position--producing small aggregate effects but consistent with widespread issue-based voting. Small measured effects of moderation may understate how many voters vote on issues.
• Time Pressure in Megaprojects: Origins, Consequences, and Management Strategies
  Purpose: To integrate fragmented literature on time pressure in megaprojects and develop a mechanism-oriented explanation of how pressure emerges, escalates, and affects project outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: A conceptual synthesis draws together research on megaproject governance and performance, psychological theories of stress and decision-making, and studies on team learning and project execution. The article develops a dual-pathway framework that distinguishes planning-origin and execution-origin time pressure. Findings: Time pressure in megaprojects arises both from front-end schedule compression and from execution-stage deviations that trigger recovery action. Under conditions of high interdependence, limited capacity, and elevated success pressure, both pathways can activate a self-reinforcing Vicious Pressure Circle in which acceleration, process bypassing, rework, lower acceptance thresholds, and re-planning intensify subsequent pressure. Expertise, psychological safety, modularization, and reference-class forecasting operate as moderating mechanisms. Research limitations/implications: The framework is conceptual and therefore requires empirical testing across project types, governance regimes, and lifecycle phases. Practical implications: Project organizations should distinguish the origin of pressure, monitor requirement-capacity mismatches, protect reporting climates, and use front-end realism and modular design to interrupt escalation loops. Originality/value: The article offers a unified conceptual vocabulary and explicit propositions that connect megaproject governance, cognitive mechanisms, and organizational learning.
• Hierarchies of Adaptation: Corporate Power in Economic Statecraft
  As states weaponize supply chains, warnings of deglobalization and aggregate welfare losses have proliferated. But neither has materialized: trade volumes remain high and supply chains continue to span the globe. This paper argues that the surprising resilience of aggregate trade obscures a large-scale redistribution creating K-shaped divergence among firms navigating geoeconomic reordering. Who wins and who loses depends on two dimensions of corporate power: the strategic indispensability of what firms produce and their organizational capacity to reconfigure operations around geopolitical constraints. Because strategic designation attaches to specific outputs rather than broad industry categories, these capacities vary sharply among firms nominally facing identical pressures. Drawing on an original dataset of over 21,000 corporate earnings calls annotated using large language models alongside firm-level financial data, I demonstrate that sector membership explains remarkably little outcome variance. Adaptation operates hierarchically within industries, not between them. Firms controlling chokepoints or possessing reconfiguration capacity capture concentrated gains; those lacking strategic position bear recurring adjustment costs. As these costs cluster in regions previously affected by deindustrialization, supply chain restructuring risks intensifying the geographic polarization that fueled political demand for economic statecraft in the first place.
• Schooladviezen in Perspectief
  Een onderzoek ten behoeve van de ontwikkeling van een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde schooladviesprocedure
• Time spent alone or together, household type, and loneliness: Descriptive evidence from Germany
  BACKGROUND: Loneliness is a critical social issue with far-reaching implications for individual well-being and population health. OBJECTIVE: We examined how German women's and men's perceptions of loneliness are associated with time spent alone or, conversely, with joint time use across different household types. METHODS: Using data from the 2022 survey of the German Time Use Study, we employed logistic regression models to examine the association between time use patterns and reported feelings of loneliness among German women (n=2,788) and men (n=2,242) across different household settings. RESULTS: Solitary time was positively associated with feelings of loneliness for both men and women, but with stronger relative associations for men. Household type accounted for a substantially larger share of this association for women. Predicted probabilities of feeling lonely were lowest in partnered households for both men and women. Time spent with people outside the household was negatively associated with loneliness across nearly all groups, and also more strongly so for men. CONCLUSIONS: Time use is a relevant social determinant of loneliness - for men more than for women - and, therefore, an important dimension of population health. CONTRIBUTION: This study is the first to examine the association between time use patterns and feelings of loneliness across different household types in Germany.
• Whose land do they die for?
  National defense is a public good whose costs are universal but whose benefits--capitalized as a security premium Dv = vp into land values--are concentrated among landowners. This paper derives the normative case for land value taxation from a proportionality principle grounded independently in Aristotelian distributive justice, contractarian rationality, and libertarian self-ownership--a route logically independent of the Georgist ontological argument and the Henry George Theorem. A baseline model shows that the inter-group net-gain differential is vp + d, from which the universal survival benefit drops out. An intergenerational extension incorporating conscription reveals a double asymmetry. Three historical cases--Rome, post-WWI Britain, and Korea's land reform--provide consistency checks. The framework extends beyond defense to other public goods, generating a gradation of normative force.
• A Comparative Analysis of Urban Destruction and the Political Dimensions of Reconstruction: the Gasa case
  This paper examines the scale of destruction in the Gaza Strip following the 2023-2025 war through the lens of historical urban catastrophes. It argues that the physical devastation is comparable to the most destroyed cities of the 20th century, such as Warsaw and Dresden, but is uniquely severe due to pre-existing conditions of blockade, de-development, and systemic collapse. Through a mixed-methods approach, including historical comparison, and scenario-building, the paper evaluates three dominant models of post-conflict reconstruction and concludes that the feasibility of any reconstruction pattern is not a technical or architectural question, but a direct function of the political settlement. Without a just political resolution, reconstruction efforts risk perpetuating cycles of humanitarian crisis and structural violence. Keywords: Gaza, Urban Destruction, Reconstruction, Domicide, Urbicide, Urban Planning, Political Geography, War and Architecture, Right of Return, Blockade.
• The Switcheroo: Trends in partner switching as a symptom of normative change
  Using full-population Norwegian register data (1967-2020), this study examines whether partner-switching four-cycles have changed across birth cohorts and what this implies for normative regulation of intimate life. Building on Bearman, Moody, and Stovel's argument that four-cycles are socially proscribed, I reconstruct a national bipartite partnership network from reciprocated opposite-sex marital and cohabiting dyads and identify all complete 2x2 four-cycle configurations. The network is large, sparse, and dominated by many small components plus one giant component. Four-cycles are present but rare: after conservative filtering, 320 unique cycles remain. Cohort-level models show a clear positive trend in four-cycle membership across estimation methods. Absolute probabilities remain very low, but relative increases are substantial across cohorts. I interpret this as evidence of gradual weakening of informal sanctions around socially delicate post-dissolution partner choices, consistent with normative reconfiguration in the Second Demographic Transition. The findings show how shifts in normative thresholds can produce detectable macro-level network change.
• Authoritarian resource distribution to civil society and political legitimation in Russia
  How do authoritarian legitimation strategies shape the allocation of state resources to civil society organizations, and what kind of alignment between state and civil society's action do they produce? This article addresses these questions by analyzing Russia's Presidential Grants. By operationalizing the regime's ideology and performance-based legitimation strategies through state grant redistribution, this work reveals a meta-regulated, state-engineered non-profit sector. The government reshapes civil society's behavior primarily through centralized rules and standards rather than corporatism and co-option. In addition, the findings challenge the expectation that performance-based legitimation strategies straightforwardly produce depoliticization and highlight the underexamined role of technocratic governance in sustaining authoritarian resilience. The analysis is based on text analysis of over 150,000 grant applications submitted by civil society for project funding between 2017 and the first half of 2025.
• TOPOLOGICAL ISOMORPHISM OF THE ARCHITECTURAL AND TEXTUAL ORGANIZATION OF THE TEMPLE OF THE INSCRIPTIONS
  The study analyzes the spatial-numerical structure of the Central Panel of the Temple of the Inscriptions (Palenque). Within the framework of the structural empiricism paradigm, the glyphic corpus of 140 elements is considered as an independent structural object. The heuristic basis is the identified possibility of a bijective stratification of the text, isomorphic to the physical parameters of the building. An a priori marker set - a recurring "12 Ahau" cluster (positions 3, 23, 61) - is used as an independent control sample. Mathematical modeling with an increment step of d = 2 reveals classes of consistent 2D and 3D structures. The application of morphological filters selects configurations that parametrically match the facade projection and the internal axial vector of the monument. The presence of an arithmetic progression of markers with a step of 3 is revealed in two two-dimensional stratifications and the induced subset E of the cubic model. The evaluation of conditional probability ( P
• The Cost of Voting Overseas: Five Field Experiments on Expatriate Turnout
  Despite comprising millions of eligible voters in an electorate where their numbers have exceeded victory margins in recent competitive elections, U.S. citizens residing abroad participate at substantially lower rates than their domestic counterparts. While scholars have tested institutional reforms to reduce voting costs for overseas citizens, limited evidence exists on whether targeted mobilization efforts can overcome the motivational and informational barriers inherent to expatriate electoral participation. We report results from five large-scale randomized controlled trials (N > 300,000) conducted among likely overseas citizens during two federal election cycles. We find that informational interventions designed to reduce complexity in the absentee ballot request and return process increase turnout by up to 3.6 percentage points (p < 0.01). Consistent with theories of voting as costly behavior, treatments that simply provided information on how to vote proved most effective. We find suggestive evidence that appeals priming motivation had a smaller effect. These findings extend the voter mobilization literature to an understudied population facing uniquely high participation costs and suggest that informational interventions can partially compensate for institutional barriers to political participation.
• Guide pratique pour un usage equitable et inclusif de l'intelligence artificielle generative en enseignement superieur
  Ce guide pratique examine les differents enjeux lies a l'usage de l'IAg en enseignement superieur en les abordant specifiquement sous l'angle des questions d'equite et d'inclusion. Il vise a fournir des reperes de maniere a appuyer une prise de decision eclairee, dans le but d'eviter que l'integration de l'IAg ne contribue a renforcer des inegalites existantes ou a en creer de nouvelles. Il a pour objectif de servir d'outil de reference pour une integration equitable et inclusive de l'IAg dans les pratiques pedagogiques en mettant l'accent sur les risques et les angles morts lies aux enjeux d'equite et d'inclusion. Ce guide propose donc une lecture critique des principales questions liees a l'equite et l'inclusion dans l'usage de l'IAg dans les pratiques pedagogiques en enseignement superieur. Il presente de maniere systematique les differents risques qui peuvent etre associes a l'integration de l'IAg, tout en illustrant, par le biais d'exemples concrets, comment certaines de ces pratiques peuvent produire des effets differencies ou injustes sur les personnes etudiantes. En ce sens, ce guide vise a outiller les personnes oeuvrant dans le milieu de l'enseignement superieur, afin de pouvoir anticiper les effets sociaux de leurs choix pedagogiques lies aux outils d'IAg, de favoriser des conditions d'apprentissage equitables et inclusives ainsi que de contribuer a un deploiement de l'IAg qui soit coherent avec les valeurs d'accessibilite, de justice et d'integrite academique.
• Selling the Haggle
  Price haggling is widely viewed as a source of friction in retail markets: customers bear bargaining costs, and firms face operational complexity. This logic has motivated some firms to adopt fixed pricing. We show that in markets organized around personal selling, eliminating negotiation can backfire. Using lead and transaction data from a major automaker in China that introduced a one-price policy for one model while retaining negotiation for all others at the same dealerships, we find that the policy reduced sales of the targeted model and shifted demand toward models where negotiation remained available. Notably, although the fixed price was below the prior average negotiated price at most dealerships, the pattern persists within this subgroup. We argue that the \textit{process of negotiation} serves as an effective deal-closing tool for the salesperson. When this instrument is removed for one product, salespeople become less equipped to convert leads into sales and may redirect customers toward products for which negotiation remains available. Consistent with this mechanism, demand switching is larger among salespeople who relied more heavily on price discussion prior to the policy. These findings suggest that, beyond negotiation outcomes external to the firm (such as customer disutility, price dispersion, or surplus extraction), an internal organizational factor also matters when evaluating pricing regimes: the salesforce, whose ability to haggle often serves as the instrument that closes the deal.