Books on the topic 'Opportunity belief'

This article examines ideologies and beliefs about poverty. In 1981, Kluegel and Smith provided the first comprehensive summary and critique of scholarly research on beliefs about social stratification. Focusing primarily on the United States and Great Britain, they reviewed research on public beliefs in three primary areas: opportunity, the distributive process, and social class. In so doing, they identified four key questions that continue to define research in this area: What is believed about social inequality? What principles organize thought around social inequality? What determines what is believed? What are the consequences of these beliefs? This article considers what Americans (and to a lesser extent, the British) perceive and believe about social inequality; the nature of ideologies and other social psychological processes governing the intrapersonal organization of beliefs; selected factors that shape patterns of belief; and selected consequences that stratification beliefs hold for the person and for politics.

This chapter takes a biographical approach to Lincoln Kirstein’s creation of a modernist theory of ballet to situate its development in the 1930s cultural wing of the Popular Front and explore its evolution through and after World War II. Fueled by the cultural front’s belief in the role of the arts in social revolution, Kirstein seized the opportunity to decouple ballet from existing biases about its elitism and triviality, and formulate new ideas about its social relevance in the Depression period. After exploring the development of Kirstein’s social modernism in the cultural front, chapter 2 then turns to the challenges posed to the 1930s belief that art could be productively combined with politics through two major turning points in Kirstein’s life. These are his experiences in World War II, and the erosion of his own artistic role in the ballet company after the formation of the New York City Ballet and the ascendance of George Balanchine’s dance-for-dance-sake aesthetic in the late 1940s. The chapter illustrates Kirstein’s attempts to negotiate the social modernist aesthetic he crafted under the wing of the cultural front within the volatile political, economic, and artistic circumstances of World War II, anticommunism, and the Cold War.

This epilogue examines the breakdown (but not the disappearance) of the struggle for equal rights after the Civil War. Reform-minded New Englanders dispersed in various directions. Some focused on the newly liberated freedmen to the south and on reconstructing that region. Others concentrated on such causes as women's rights, temperance, and labor. No one denied that forms of racism persisted in New England, but many shared Garrison's belief that the basic work for equal rights had been accomplished or soon would be and welcomed the opportunity to invest in their own lives. And some of the black leaders died far too soon. The book concludes with a brief examination of why New England was in advance of the rest of the nation in providing equal rights but far from an equal society.

To perform any skilled activity to expert level requires committed and intensely motivated learning. This chapter explores how musical development, particularly as it applies to learning an instrument, depends crucially on inventive and productive opportunities that coalesce in configurations unique to each learner. It reveals how an obsession with gifts and talents on the parts of researchers, teachers, parents and musicians alike has led to confusion over the nature and acquisition of the skills required for high-level music performance. It traces key theories on family scripts and self-determination to illustrate the ways in which psychological constructs shape belief and thus motivate learning. Environmental catalysts such as practice support and opportunity for creative expression offer additional significant influences. These factors are shown to align with intrapersonal characteristics and are described as syzygies, or inventive configurations, that provide pathways to committed music learning.

Chapter 8 asks what properties a market economy must have if it is to be psychologically stable—that is, if it is to reproduce a general belief that its governing principles are fair. I argue that, because of the division of knowledge and because the opportunities open to each person depend on how other people choose to use their opportunities, full equality of opportunity is not compatible with a market economy. Psychological stability has to rest on continuing expectations of mutual benefit, defined relative to a baseline that evolves over time and that cannot be justified in terms of abstract principles of fairness. However, if the market is to be recommended to each individual separately, each individual must be able to expect to share in the benefits that markets create. Maintaining such expectations typically requires redistributive mechanisms.

Angels present an opportunity to explore the theme of male flight, in that all angels were originally male, and sometimes said to be androgynous, which is much the same thing. Once female angels became popular, the belief in angels was trivialized and domesticated. Fairies are mostly women, sometimes winged, who can be captured and who then bring their captors great wealth and happiness. Usually in these tales, the men who captured them fail to observe a taboo laid out by the fairy, thus allowing her to escape. All fairies are time- benders, so often in these tales, the men awake to discover that centuries have gone by in a few days. This is the case in both Western and Asian tales. In the West, fairies frequently appear in Arthurian legends, especially in the figure of the troublesome Morgan le Fay, half-sister to King Arthur.

Leadership is usually a mandatory component of business education. Here we used the model of transformational leadership, and operationalized leadership consistently with the Values in Action Leadership scale. Social dominance orientation is a hierarchical belief-system that attributes social rank, ranging from high to low. Business students have been found to have higher levels of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO. Accordingly, 371 working business students were sampled to establish the relationship between SDO and transformational leadership capacity. The mediational impact of compassion was assessed. This study found high levels of competitive and hierarchical world conceptualization was significantly and sometimes strongly negatively linked to these constructs (Martin et al., 2014). We also discuss preliminary results of an interpersonal compassion-based intervention. The research suggests the opportunity to broaden psychological well-being of employees with impactful interventions, since negative behaviors within an institution can raise healthcare costs and lower job performance.

The Power of Race in Cuba analyzes racial ideologies that negate the existence of racism and their effect on racial progress and activism through the lens of Cuba. Since 1959, Fidel Castro and the Cuban government have married socialism and the ideal of racial harmony to create a formidable ideology that is an integral part of Cubans’ sense of identity and their perceptions of race and racism in their country. While the combination of socialism and a colorblind racial ideology is particular to Cuba, strategies that paint a picture of equality of opportunity and deflect the importance of race are not particular to the island’s ideology and can be found throughout the world and in the Americas in particular. By promoting an anti-discrimination ethos, diminishing class differences at the onset of the revolution, and declaring the end of racism, Castro was able to unite belief in the revolution to belief in the erasure of racism. The ideology is bolstered by rhetoric that discourages racial affirmation. The second part of the book examines public opinion on race in Cuba, particularly among black Cubans. It examines how black Cubans have indeed embraced the dominant nationalist ideology that eschews racial affirmation, but also continue to create spaces for black consciousness that challenge this ideology. This work gives a nuanced portrait of black identity in Cuba and through survey data, interviews with formal organizers, and hip-hop artists draws from the many black spaces, both formal and informal, to highlight what black consciousness looks like in Cuba.

Major powers have immense resources at their disposal, while minor powers are assumed to avoid wars and power politics due to structural and material constraints. This provokes the question why do some minor powers nonetheless decide to militarily engage their vastly stronger opponents, particularly major powers? Inspired by several theoretical insights, this book proposes a more complex framework of minor powers in interstate asymmetric conflict. It analyses five conditions highlighted by previous studies: domestic crisis, foreign support, window of opportunity, anomalous beliefs, and regime stability. The theoretical framework works well with a mixed-methods approach, a medium-N research design (Qualitative Comparative Analysis), and three case studies: Iraq (1990), Moldova (1992), and Serbia (1999). The book finds that by looking through the lenses of multiple theories, one can observe a more nuanced relationship how different conditions interact in impacting minor powers’ decisions. Ultimately, minor powers militarily engage major powers when facing a more important domestic crisis and when they also believe that they have a window of opportunity or support from another major power in order to constrain major powers’ capability and resolve. Looking at the current conflict in Syria, there are important policy implications given the observation that minor powers do and will continue to challenge major powers in the future.

Holocaust accounts typically cast Jewish victims as meek, going “like sheep to the slaughter.” Given such portrayals, people ask, “Why didn’t Jews resist?” But Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This book’s goal is not to dispel the myth of Jewish passivity; however, it instead argues that Jewish resistance deserves explanation. Research on social movements shows that protest occurs when protesters have an opportunity for action and both the material resources and belief in themselves to get their protest off the ground, but members of Jewish resistance movements lacked these factors. So why did they fight back? Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, the book answers this question by comparing three Jewish ghettos during World War II: Warsaw (site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943), Vilna (where activists planned for armed resistance in the ghetto but could not achieve that goal), and Łódź (where no plans for armed resistance emerged). It finds that resistance rested on Jews’ assessments of the threats facing them, and especially on their hope for survival. Somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival and saw such resistance as the best response to their situation. These findings have implications for other examples of resistance under extreme conditions, such as prison riots and rebellions of enslaved people.

In the UK, belief, and faith are protected under the legal frame of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) and the Equality Act 2010 (Perfect 2016, 11), in which a person is given the right to hold a religion or belief and the right to change their religion or belief. It also gives them a right to show that belief as long as the display or expression does not interfere with public safety, public order, health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others (Equality Act 2010). The Equality Act 2010 protects employees from discrimination, harassment and victimisation because of religion or belief. Religion or belief are mainly divided into religion and religious belief, and philosophical belief (Equality Act 2010, chap. 1). The Dialogue Society supports the Equality Act 2010 (Perfect 2016, 11). Consequently, The Dialogue Society believes we have a duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations within our organisation and society. The Dialogue Society aims to promote equality and human rights by empowering people and bringing social issues to light. To this end, we have organised many projects, research, courses, scriptural reasoning readings/gatherings, and panel discussions specifically on interfaith dialogue, having open conversations around belief and religion. To encourage dialogue, interaction and cooperation between people working on interreligious dialogue and to demonstrate good interfaith relations and dialogue are integral and essential for peace and social cohesion in our society, the Dialogue Society has been a medium, facilitating a platform to all from faith and non-faith backgrounds. The Dialogue Society thrives on being more inclusive to those who might be overlooked in society as a group. Although women seem to be in the core of society as an essential element, the women who contravene the monotype identity tend to remain in the shadows. The media is not just used to get information but also used as a way of having a sense of belonging by the audience. The media creates collective imaginary identities for public opinion. It gathers the audience under one consensus and creates an identity for the people who share this consensus. Hence, a form of media functions as a medium for identity creation and representation. Therefore, the production and reproduction of stereotypes and a monotype representation of women and women of faith in media content are the primary sources of the public's general attitudes towards women of faith. In the context of this report, the media limits not only women's gender but also their religious identity. The monotype identity of women opposes the plurality of the concept of women. Notably, media outlets are criticised for not recognising the differences in women's identities. Women of faith are susceptible to the lack of representation or misrepresentation and get stuck between the roles constructed for their gender and religion. Women who do not fit in these policies' stereotypes get misrepresented or disregarded by the media. Moreover, policymakers also limit their scope to a single monotype of women's identity when policies are made, creating a public consensus around women of faith. As both these mediums lack representation or have very symbolic and distorted representations of women of faith, we strive to provide a platform for all women from faith and non-faith backgrounds. The Dialogue Society has organised women-only community events for women of faith to have a bottom-up approach, including interfaith knitting, reading, and cooking clubs. Several women-only courses have informed women of the importance of interfaith dialogue, promoting current best practices, and identifying and promoting promising future possibilities. We have hosted panel discussions and held women-only interfaith circles where women from different faith backgrounds came together to discuss boundaries within religion and what they believed to transgress their boundaries. Consequently, we organised a panel series to focus on the roles of women of faith within different areas of society, aiming to highlight their unique individual and shared experiences and bring to light issues of inequality that impact women of faith. Although women of faith exist within all areas of society, we chose to explore women's experiences within three different settings to give a breadth of understanding about women of faith's interactions within society. Therefore, we held a panel series titled 'Women of Faith', including three panels, each focusing on a particular area: Women of Faith in Community, Women of Faith in Public Service, and Women of Faith in Media. In this report, following the content analysis method to systematically sort the information gathered by the panel series, we have written a series of recommendations to address these issues in media and policymaking. This paper has a section on specific policy recommendations for those in decision-making positions in the community, public service, and media, according to the content and findings gathered. This report aims to initiate and provide interactive and transferable advice and guidance to those in a position. The policy paper gives insight to social workers, teachers, council members, liaison officers, academics and relevant stakeholders, policymakers, and people who wish to understand more about empowering women of faith and hearing their experiences. It also aims to inspire ongoing efforts and further action to accelerate the achievement of complete freedom of faith, gender equality in promoting, recommending, and implementing direct top-level policies for faith and gender equality, and ensuring that existing policies are gender-sensitive and practices are safe from gender-based and faith-based discrimination for women of faith. Finally, this report is to engage and illustrate the importance of allyship, the outstanding achievement through dialogue based on real-life experience, and facilitate resilient relationships among people of different religious positions. We call upon every reader of this report to join the efforts of the Dialogue Society in promoting an equal society for women of faith.

For more than a century, scholars have believed that Italian humanism was predominantly ‘civic’ in outlook. Often serving in communal government, fourteenth-century humanists like Albertino Mussato and Coluccio Salutati are said to have derived from their reading of the Latin classics a rhetoric of republican liberty that was opposed to the ‘tyranny’ of neighbouring signori and of the German emperors. In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Lee challenges this long-held belief. From the death of Frederick II in 1250 to the failure of Rupert of the Palatinate’s ill-fated expedition in 1402, Lee argues, the humanists nurtured a consistent and powerful affection for the Holy Roman Empire. Though this was articulated in a variety of different ways, it was nevertheless driven more by political conviction than by cultural concerns. Surrounded by endless conflict—both within and between city states—the humanists eagerly embraced the Empire as the surest guarantee of peace and liberty, and lost no opportunity to invoke its protection. Indeed, as Lee shows, the most ardent appeals to imperial authority were made not by ‘signorial’ humanists, but by humanists in the service of communal regimes. The first comprehensive, synoptic study of humanistic ideas of Empire in the period c.1250–1402, this volume offers a radically new interpretation of fourteenth-century political thought, and raises wide-ranging questions about the foundations of modern constitutional ideas. As such, it is essential reading not just for students of Renaissance Italy and the history of political thought, but for all those interested in understanding the origins of liberty.

This chapter begins with a review of a simple theory of cooperative behavior. Employing familiar arguments from Adam Smith, it explains why large-scale cooperation is the key to producing general prosperity. Large-scale cooperation invites forms of opportunism that our small-group trust genes are ill equipped to combat. Economic development therefore quickly stalls if another basis for large-group trust is not found. Certain kinds of moral beliefs can provide that basis (the precise nature of those beliefs is developed in the next chapter). The distinction between cultural beliefs and cultural practices is discussed and the role that storytelling plays in conveying moral beliefs is analyzed. Culturally transmitted moral beliefs that can sustain large-group trust are shown to constitute a commonly owned asset by members of society. Culture is therefore viewed as a kind of commons that, like commons generally, is subject to problems of abuse and neglect.

This chapter discusses the central questions about the content and distribution of education debated by philosophers in recent years. How should educational opportunity be distributed between individuals? Should society aim to achieve equal opportunity, or should it allow departures from equality provided the least advantaged are thereby helped or everyone enjoys an adequate education? Should society seek to eliminate or temper only inequalities that are caused by class differences, or also those caused by individuals’ genetic endowments? Education is not merely a good to be distributed; it is also a vehicle for shaping individuals’ beliefs and desires. Is it permissible for the political community to raise children to have a sense of justice, and for the community or parents to get children to adopt a particular conception of the good life, such as particular religious convictions? Finally, may parents determine the kind of education that their child receives?

In this book, the authors focus their attention on the role that culture, that collection of values, beliefs, attitudes, and preferences responsible for creating national identities, has played and continues to play on individuals’ decisions when they are in or about to enter the labor market. At a time when millennials face many employment challenges and Generation Z can be expected to encounter even more, a clearer understanding of the ways cultural transmission could facilitate or hinder productive and rewarding work would appear to be both useful and well-timed. The book’s title—Caught in the Cultural Preference Net: Three Generations of Employment Choices in Six Capitalist Democracies—conveys the authors’ aim to determine if work-related beliefs, attitudes, and preferences have remained stable across generations or if they have become pliant under changing economic conditions. And while millennials serve as the anchoring point for much of our discussion, they do not neglect the significance that their parents from Generation X (b. 1965–1982) and their baby boomer parents (b. 1945–1964) may have had on their socialization into the world of work. The book is organized around three lines of inquiry: (a) Do some national cultures possess value orientations that are more successful than others in promoting economic opportunity? (b) Does the transmission of these value orientations demonstrate persistence irrespective of economic conditions or are they simply the result of these conditions? (c) If a nation’s beliefs and attitudes do indeed impact opportunity, do they do so by influencing an individual’s preferences and behavioral intentions? The authors’ principal method for isolating the employment effects of cultural transmission is what is referred to as a stated preference experiment. They replicate this experiment in six countries—Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, India, and the United States—countries that have historically adopted significantly different forms of capitalism. They not only find some strong evidence for cultural stability across countries but also observe an erosion in this stability among millennials.

This chapter details the vicissitudes of race and poverty shaped J. W. Green’s upbringing in the Deep South as well as his adjustment to urban living as an adult. His lack of education, employment opportunity, and personal empowerment led to a “life on the streets.” Stoic faith saw him through a life and death in poverty. Mr. Green teaches us that everyone comes to this phase of life with strengths to cull from their cultural and spiritual beliefs. Mr. Green also teaches us that dignified dying does not require the unfettered exercise of personal autonomy, although a deep and abiding respect for the self-worth of the individual is necessary.

This book examines the personal and political factors behind soldiers' choices to stay in their unit or abandon their cause. The book explores what might spur widespread desertion in a given group, how some armed groups manage to keep their soldiers fighting over long periods, and how committed soldiers are to their causes and their comrades. To answer these questions, the book focuses on combatants in military units during the Spanish Civil War. The book pushes against the preconception that individual soldiers' motivations are either personal or political, either selfish or ideological. Instead, it draws together the personal and the political, showing how soldiers come to trust each other — or not. In doing so, it demonstrates how the armed groups that hold together and survive are those that foster interpersonal connections, allowing soldiers the opportunity to prove their commitment to the fight. It argues that trust keeps soldiers in the fray, mistrust pushes them to leave, and political beliefs and military practices shape both. The book brings the reader into the world of soldiers and rigorously tests the factors underlying desertion. It asks, honestly and without judgment, what would you do in an army in a civil war? Would you stand and fight? Would you try to run away? And what if you found yourself fighting for a cause you no longer believe in or never did in the first place?

This chapter examines how ideas about class, community, and individualism figured in the modernization of the Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the development, under Kinnock and Blair, of a new imagined constituency for Labour—a ‘new working class’ or, as Blair put it, ‘new middle class’. The sources of this vision lay partly in academic theorizing, but also in the backgrounds of key modernizers, and in new polling and focus group techniques for researching social attitudes. Modernizers understood the new majoritarian constituency in society as united by aspirations, and reoriented socialism to emphasize the use of community action—through the state—to secure a wide distribution of opportunity and security throughout society, in order to enable individuals to achieve those aspirations. The chapter concludes by examining the impact of these beliefs on policy relating to poverty, inequality, trade unionism, and community.

Recovery was often experienced as a narrow escape from death. ‘I was snatch’d out of the very Jaws of Death!’, exclaimed Thomas Steward from Suffolk in 1699. While historians have examined emotional responses to the prospect of death, little has been said about reactions to not dying; this new angle sheds fresh light on attitudes to both life and death. Patients usually expressed great joy, and gave three reasons for doing so: the relief of the body and soul not to have to part; the desire to remain in the ‘land of the living’; and the opportunity to ‘improve’ one’s salvation. Occasionally, however, owing to beliefs in the superiority of heaven over earth, patients felt disappointed not to die! This chapter also discusses families’ reactions, showing that their feelings varied according to their relationship with the patient, and the timing and means through which they heard of the survival.

When A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, the discussion that ensued centered mainly on questions about distribution. More recently, however, many influential theorists have come to believe that this emphasis on distribution is neither faithful to Rawls’s thinking nor defensible on its own terms. They argue that what justice primarily demands is not that resources or welfare or opportunity be distributed in any particular way, but rather that relations of domination and subordination among persons be eliminated. In their view, what matters is not that goods be distributed equally (or in accordance with any other pattern), but only that individuals relate to one another as equals. Despite the prominence this approach to justice has achieved, the chapter argues that it is seriously mistaken.

Chapter 8 explores the Austere and Hybrid Responses to the problem of error. The two types of response are described in both ideal and non-ideal versions. Both are found wanting, but the Austere Response emerges as best. Codes endorsed by the Austere approach cannot be shown to meet the “goal-oriented” desiderata of maximizing social welfare, facilitating social cooperation and long-range planning, or guaranteeing the occurrence of the ideal pattern of actions. But Austere-endorsed codes do satisfy the conceptual desiderata for “usable” moral theories in the core (but not the extended) sense of “usability.” They are usable despite the agent’s false beliefs, and they provide agents with the opportunity to live a successful moral life according to the modest conception of this life. This chapter concludes that the only remedy for the problem of error is an Austere code containing a derivative duty for agents to gather information before acting.

This chapter focuses on how the development of volunteerism among young adults in Asia has grown in the past decade. A boom in the development of volunteer work in some Asian countries has been observed since the beginning of the 21st century. We compare the prevalence and characteristics of volunteerism among young adults in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. The participation in general is sporadic rather than marking a long-term commitment among volunteers. We argue that to develop young adults’ volunteering in Asian context, the participation should be matched with young adults’ developmental issues. The volunteering opportunity should be job-related. More young adults would be interested in volunteering if it can contribute to an enhanced worldview formation and the generation of friendship or even romantic relationships. We also argue that the Asian cultural beliefs of family-centered collectivism may be a hindrance for helping nonfamily out-groups. Methods of enhancing participation are discussed.

This chapter discusses how the slight thawing of Cold War tensions included discussion of a permanent test-ban treaty, raising the hopes of many former Progressive Party activists that the conservative political tide was turning. People increasingly came to believe that the easing of political repression created an opportunity to reconstitute Popular Front organizing and fully realize the potential of such organizations as the Progressive Party, Congress of American Women, and Sojourners for Truth and Justice. Toward that end, small covert leftist networks now made their way into larger national organizations that shared their commitment to “peace, freedom, and abundance.” Although they had not achieved their vision of positive peace, Popular Front organizations had provided a training ground for leftist women who later helped shape the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Does the burgeoning Indian Information Technology (IT) sector represent a deviation from the historical arc of caste inequality or has it become yet another site of discrimination? Those who claim that the sector is caste-free believe that IT is an equal opportunity employer, and that the small Dalit footprint is due to the want of merit. But they fail to consider how caste inequality sneaks in by being layered on socially constructed ‘pure merit’, which favours upper castes and other privileged segments, but handicaps Dalits and other disadvantaged groups. In this book, Fernandez describes how the practice of pure and holistic merit are deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and economic privileges of the dominant castes and classes, and how caste filtering has led to the reproduction of caste hierarchies and consequently the small Dalit footprint in Indian IT.

Chapter 5 focuses on settlers, the men and women who spent significant portions of their lives overseas. Many migrated voluntarily; others, like the Australian convicts, involuntarily. Some settled permanently; others gave up and returned home. But time and again, these imperial travelers describe their experiences as dreary and disillusioning. Led to believe that life in the empire would be full of opportunity, many of them instead found only the monotony of daily routine. Life was particularly difficult for women, whether entertaining friends in the Indian hill stations or whiling away the hours in the Australian outback. The former suffered from vapid social rituals and prohibitions on contact with indigenous people; the latter from extreme isolation and loneliness. This chapter demonstrates that from Governors’ wives to governesses, from gold diggers to bushwhackers, boredom was omnipresent, and as a result many settlers were disappointed and depressed by their imperial experience.

This chapter presents Alice Walker's reflections on the America of her youth compared to the promise of the campaign, which reflects the view of many older African Americans who never expected to see the day a Black man would occupy the White House. She says that she is a supporter of Obama because she believes that he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. She expresses deep sadness that many of her feminist white women friends cannot see him and what he stands for. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans—black, white, yellow, red, and brown—choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to her.

What configuration of institutions and policies is most conducive to human flourishing? The historical and comparative evidence suggests that the answer is social democratic capitalism — a democratic political system, a capitalist economy, good elementary and secondary schooling, a big welfare state, pro-employment public services, and moderate regulation of product and labor markets. Lane Kenworthy shows that this system improves living standards for the least well-off, enhances economic security, and boosts equality of opportunity. And it does so without sacrificing other things we want in a good society, from liberty to economic growth to health and happiness. Its chief practitioners have been the Nordic nations. The Nordics have gone farther than other rich democratic countries in coupling a big welfare state with public services that promote high employment and modest product- and labor-market regulations. Many believe this system isn’t transferable beyond Scandinavia, but Kenworthy shows that social democratic capitalism and its successes can be replicated in other affluent nations, including the United States. Today, the U.S. lags behind other countries in economic security, opportunity, and shared prosperity. If the U.S. expanded existing social programs and added some additional ones, many Americans would have better lives. Kenworthy argues that, despite formidable political obstacles, the U.S. is likely to move toward social democratic capitalism in coming decades. As a country gets richer, he explains, it becomes more willing to spend more in order to safeguard against risk and enhance fairness. He lays out a detailed policy agenda that could alleviate many of America’s problems.

The Dialogue Society supports the Equality Act 2010 (Government Equalities Office 2015). We believe we have a duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations within our organisation. Furthermore, Dialogue Society aims to reflect its values in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 within society. Whether it is direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, harassment or victimisation, any form of discrimination must be condemned in any area of social life. Society will be in its fully developed form when all forms of discrimination are eliminated. The Equality Act 2010 includes legislation against many forms of discrimination. Sex discrimination is one of the areas covered by the Equality Act 2010. Sex discrimination is the unfair treatment of one as a result of their gender identity, i.e., if they are a man or a woman. Although sex discrimination can be towards both genders, women experience it many times more than men do. Additionally, although many countries have achieved significant milestones towards gender parity across education, health, economic and political systems, there remains much to be done. According to The Global Gender Gap Index 2018 report, there is a gender disparity in political empowerment, which today maintains a gap of 77.1%, and an economic participation and opportunity gap, which is the second-largest gender disparity at 41.9% globally (World Economy Forum 2019). The data illustrates that sex discrimination is one of many problems in the contemporary world. It operates negatively on a number of societal and economic levels: it divides the community, causes a lack of opportunity and representation for women, and excludes women from participation in many aspects of social life. Equal contribution opportunities for women and men are critical for our community's economic and societal development. The Dialogue Society aims to build dynamic and inclusive economies and societies that provide a future of opportunities for all. In order to achieve this best form of society, we believe women’s empowerment is a necessity. Women’s empowerment includes promoting professional development for women, implementing practices that empower women in the workplace, and promoting equality through community initiatives. The women’s empowerment process focuses on shaping frameworks for closing economic gender gaps, fostering diversity, and promoting women's inclusion and equality. Furthermore, the Dialogue Society aims to increase women's participation in the workforce, help more women advance into leadership, and close the gender gap. To this end, the Dialogue Society organised many projects, research, and panel discussions on women’s empowerment. This report aims to inspire ongoing efforts and further action to accelerate the achievement of full gender equality via promoting women’s empowerment, recommending and implementing direct top-level policies for gender equality, and ensuring that existing policies are gender-sensitive and practices are safe from gender-based discrimination. Finally, this report is to engage and illustrate the importance of allyship, awareness, and policy implementations that improve the lives of millions of women. We call upon every reader of this report to join the efforts of the Dialogue Society in promoting women’s empowerment for an equal society.

Incarceration is, by design, a stressful and dehumanizing process. Those who become incarcerated are shaped and changed by the experience in many ways. For those of us who work with people who are inmates, it can be difficult to appreciate the range and intensity of their experiences. This chapter gives voice to some of those experiences. Ten individuals currently or recently incarcerated in the Colorado prison system were interviewed. The autobiographical interviews were transcribed and core elements and themes in their own words are presented; their names and some details are changed to protect their identities. Every individual who becomes incarcerated experiences imprisonment through the lens of personal experience. There is fear and humiliation, hope and frustration, isolation and friendship. Some people persist in illegal behavior; others turn their lives around. The opportunity and challenge of correctional psychiatry is to engage people during this vulnerable period: to understand patients as people, to treat illness, reduce suffering, and help them recover their lives. We believe they speak eloquently of human struggle, coping, failure, regret, and hope.

Making Education Work for the Poor identifies wealth inequality as the gravest threat to the endangered American Dream. Though studies have clearly illustrated that education is the primary path to upward mobility, today, educational outcomes are more directly determined by wealth than innate ability and exerted effort. This accounting directly contradicts Americans' understanding of the promise the American Dream is supposed to offer: a level playing field and a path towards a more profitable future. In this book, the authors share their own stories of their journeys through the unequal U.S. education system. One started from relative privilege and had her way to prosperity paved and her individual efforts augmented by institutional and structural support. The other grew up in poverty and had to fight against currents to complete higher education, only to find his ability to profit from that degree compromised by student debt. To directly counter wealth inequality and make education the 'great equalizer' that Americans believe it to be, this book calls for a revolution in financial aid policy, from debt dependence to asset empowerment. The book examines the evidence base supporting Children's Savings Accounts, including CSAs' demonstrated potential to improve children's outcomes all along the 'opportunity pipeline': early education, school achievement, college access and completion, and post-college financial health. It then outlines a policy that builds on CSAs to incorporate a sizable, progressive wealth transfer. This new policy, Opportunity Investment Accounts, is framed as the cornerstone of the wealth-building agenda the nation needs in order to salvage the American Dream. Written by leading CSA researchers, the book includes overviews of the major children's savings legislation proposed in Congress and the key features of prominent CSA programs in operation around the country today, as well as new qualitative and quantitative CSA research. The book ultimately presents a critical development of the theories that, together, explain how universal, progressive, asset-based education financing could make education work equitably for all American children.

What explains war? The so-called bargaining approach has evolved quickly in the past two decades, opening up important new possibilities and raising fundamental challenges to previous conventional thinking about the origins of political violence. Bargaining is intended to explain the causes of conflict on many levels, from interpersonal to international. War is not the product of any of a number of variables creating opportunity or willingness, but instead is caused by whatever factors prevent competitors from negotiating the settlements that result from fighting. Conflict is thus a bargaining failure, a socially inferior outcome, but also a determined choice.Embraced by a growing number of scholars, the bargaining perspective rapidly created a new consensus in some circles. Bargaining theory is radical in relocating at least some of the causes of conflict away from material, cultural, political, or psychological factors and replacing them with states of knowledge about these same material or ideational factors. Approaching conflict as a bargaining failure—produced by uncertainty and incentives to misrepresent, credible commitment problems, or issue indivisibility—is the “state of the art” in the study of conflict.At the same time, bargaining theories remain largely untested in any systematic sense: theory has moved far ahead of empirics. The bargaining perspective has been favored largely because of compelling logic rather than empirical validity. Despite the bargaining analogy’s wide-ranging influence (or perhaps because of this influence), scholars have largely failed to subject the key causal mechanisms of bargaining theory to systematic empirical investigation. Further progress for bargaining theory, both among adherents and in the larger research community, depends on empirical tests of both core claims and new theoretical implications of the bargaining approach.The limited amount of systematic empirical research on bargaining theories of conflict is by no means entirely accident or the product of lethargy on the part of the scholarly community. Tests of theories that involve intangible factors like states of belief or perception are difficult to pursue. How does one measure uncertainty? What does learning look like in the midst of a war? When is indivisibility or commitment a problem, and when can it be resolved through other measures, such as ancillary bargains? The challenge before researchers, however, is to surmount these obstacles. To the degree that progress in science is empirical, bargaining theory needs testing.As should be clear, the dearth of empirical tests of bargaining approaches to the study of conflict leaves important questions unanswered. Is it true, for example, as bargaining theory suggests, that uncertainty leads to the possibility of war? If so, how much uncertainty is required and in what contexts? Which types of uncertainty are most pernicious (and which are perhaps relatively benign)? Under what circumstances are the effects of uncertainty greatest and where are they least critical? Empirical investigation of the bargaining model can provide essential guidance to theoretical work on conflict by identifying insights that can offer intellectual purchase and by highlighting areas of inquiry that are likely to be empirical dead ends. More broadly, the impact of bargaining theory on the study and practice of international relations rests to a substantial degree on the success of efforts to substantiate the perspective empirically.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States extended its empire into the Philippines while subjugating Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, one of the most popular musical acts was a band of “little brown men,” Filipino musicians led by an African American conductor playing European and American music. The Philippine Constabulary Band and Lt. Walter H. Loving entertained thousands in concert halls and world’s fairs, held a place of honor in William Howard Taft’s presidential parade, and garnered praise by bandmaster John Philip Sousa—all the while facing beliefs and policies that Filipinos and African Americans were “uncivilized.” Author Mary Talusan draws on hundreds of newspaper accounts and exclusive interviews with band members and their descendants to compose the story from the band’s own voices. She sounds out the meanings of Americans’ responses to the band and identifies a desire to mitigate racial and cultural anxieties during an era of overseas expansion and increasing immigration of nonwhites, and the growing “threat” of ragtime with its roots in Black culture. The spectacle of the band, its performance and promotion, emphasized a racial stereotype of Filipinos as “natural musicians” and the beneficiaries of benevolent assimilation and colonial tutelage. Unable to fit Loving’s leadership of the band into this narrative, newspapers dodged and erased his identity as a Black American officer. The untold story of the Philippine Constabulary Band offers a unique opportunity to examine the limits and porousness of America’s racial ideologies, exploring musical pleasure at the intersection of Euro-American cultural hegemony, racialization, and US colonization of the Philippines.

Islamic religious education (IRE) in Europe has become a subject of intense debate during the past decade. There is concern that states are doing too little or too much to shape the spiritual beliefs of private citizens. State response to the concern ranges from sponsoring religious education in public schools to forgoing it entirely and policies vary according to national political culture. In some countries public schools teach Islam to Muslims as a subject within a broader religious curriculum that gives parents the right to choose their children’s religious education. In the other countries public schools teach Islam to all pupils as a subject with a close relation to the academic study of religions. There are also countries where public schools do not teach religion at all, although there is an opportunity to teach about Islam in school subjects such as art, history, or literature. IRE taught outside publicly funded institutions, is of course also taught as a confessional subject in private Muslim schools, mosques and by Muslim organisations. Often students who attend these classes also attend a publicly funded “main stream school”. This volume brings together a number of researchers for the first time to explore the interconnections between Islamic educations and public schooling in Europe. The relation between Islamic education and public schooling is analysed within the publicly and privately funded sectors. How is publicly funded education organised, why is it organised in this way, what is the history and what are the controversial issues? What are the similarities and differences between privately run Islamic education and “main stream” schooling? What are the experiences of teachers, parents and pupils? The volume will be of interest to scholars of Islam in Europe, policy makers of education and integration and teachers of religious education.