In spite of a long literature on online communities and electronic networks, little theoretical work has been done on understanding a recent online phenomenon: "user-generated content" (UGC) platforms. This paper proposes an analytical lens for the study of social dynamics on UGC platforms. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of field and capital, we introduce the notion of online cultural field and...

This presentation analyses explores the interconnecting themes of knowledge, culture and change by examining the impact of the knowledge economy on the organization of welfare. It adopts as its specific focus the role of the welfare ‘expert’ in the social services. This is contextualised within the New Labour government’s social exclusion policies, the global knowledge economy and concepts of c...

During the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, income differences across social classes were compressed. Formal education was not an important determinant of personal income. In this study, there was no difference in income between white-collar and blue-collar families, although white-collar parents had more education than blue-collar parents. In urban China, where population...

Success in college is not simply a matter of students demonstrating academic ability. In addition, students must master the ‘‘college student’’ role in order to understand instructors’ expectations and apply their academic skills effectively to those expectations. This article uses data from focus groups to examine the fit between university faculty members’ expectations and students’ understan...

This article explores the responses of 38 older people to contemporary visual art through the results of a 28-month study entitled, Contemporary Visual Art and Identity Construction: Wellbeing amongst Older People. A framework for the analysis is provided by previous work on the consumption of art and by Bourdieu's constructs of cultural capital, habitus and field. Five groups of older people, ...

We collect data on trust and trustworthy behavior from eighty-four iterations of the Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe Investment game (the “trust” game). We perform a meta-analysis of these games in order to identify the effect of experimental protocols and cross-country cultural differences on trust and trustworthiness. We find that approximately 40% of the variance in trust and 30% of the variance ...

This presentation analyses explores the interconnecting themes of knowledge, culture and change by examining the impact of the knowledge economy on the organization of welfare. It adopts as its specific focus the role of the welfare ‘expert’ in the social services. This is contextualised within the New Labour government’s social exclusion policies, the global knowledge economy and concepts of c...

This paper examines the relationship between witchcraft beliefs, a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon, and various elements of social capital. Using novel survey data from nineteen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa we establish a robust negative association between the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs and multiple measures of trust which holds after accounting for country fixed effects and potential...

While correlations between maternal education and child health have been observed in diverse parts of the world, the causal pathways explaining how maternal education improves child health remain far from clear. Using data from the nationally representative India Human Development Survey of 2004-5, this analysis examines four possible pathways that may mediate the influence of maternal educatio...