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This paper explores the juristic discussions about women’s access to their financial rights during late Ottoman Egypt. Taking fatwa collections as a source of social history, one can recognize that women sometimes gave up their financial entitlements to their male relatives voluntarily. This concession is thought to have occurred due to the influence of deeply ingrained social customs in some tribes. While various historical and anthropological studies have explored this social practice, this paper focuses instead on the Islamic law ruling concerning this phenomenon. I discuss in this paper how some ostensibly conservative ulama in nineteenth-century Egypt, in pursuit of upholding women’s financial rights against patriarchal oppression, recognized an important principle of social coercion. By considering fear of social stigma as a constraint on women’s free will and thus as a form of legal duress, those ulama enabled women to reclaim their rights when possible— likely following the death of their male relatives. This paper urges us to rethink the position of the ulama in nineteenth-century Egypt regarding women’s rights. Furthermore, it illuminates an overarching concept of coercion in Islamic law, which holds relevance to various modern debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical framework to think about employees' effort choices, and applies this framework to assess the ability of existing experimental designs to identify the effect of pay inequality on worker effort. The analysis shows that failure to control for a number of confounds—such as reciprocity towards the employer in multi-lateral gift-exchange games (vertical fairness), or the incentive to increase effort when feeling underpaid under piece rates (income targeting)—may lead to inaccurate interpretation of evidence of treatment effects. In light of these findings, the paper provides a set of recommendations on how to improve identification in the design of controlled experiments in the future. • We develop a model to study employees' effort choices in experiments. • We formally assess the design of experiments on the effect of pay inequality on effort. • We find a number of confounds that may impair identification of treatment effects. • Confounds include vertical fairness, income targeting, repeated interactions, procedural fairness. • A set of recommendations to improve identification in experiments is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role of accounting in disaster mitigation and the importance of transparency to avoid corruption. During the Ukrainian war, accounting has allowed the redistribution of war material, the quantification of economic aid, or the efficient management of humanitarian aid. This paper aims to set a research agenda on transparency and corruption in foreign aid to a fragile and conflict‐affected country. In order to analyze the situation of corruption in Ukraine during the war, first a review of the latest corrupt events is carried out and its position in the Corruption Perception Indicator is analyzed. Subsequently, we analyze the aid that Ukraine has received from other countries and institutions, and whether it is transparent. The possible dependence of the Corruption Perception Indicator on the transparency index of each country in the management of aid to Ukraine is studied. This article links corruption, transparency and accounting in the context of the Ukrainian war, highlighting the important role of auditing and financial controls, and presents proposals for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The funeral rite, locally called oshwue-aji, is a funeral condolence outing among the Nsukka Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria. It features performances, enlivened with art objects and costumes. It is imbued with remarkable social significance. This paper examines varying performances and costumes associated with the oshwue-aji rite. The condolence trip displays exquisitely crafted bracelets, pendants, clothing, and other fashion accessories worn by the bereaved – children, daughters, sons, as well as daughters' and sons’ in-laws with their spouses. Relying on Paul Horwich's use theory of meaning, this paper discusses the distinctive nature of these visual art objects to understand their symbolic and social functions. It equally presents the phenomenon of oshwue-aji, directed towards understanding the nature of sociality these incorporated artistic dimensions generate within the social space per time. Interviews and personal observations were relied on for data collection from people performing the oshwue-aji rite because they are bereaved. Being a qualitative study, the art forms and related objects that constitute the data were analyzed descriptively. Beyond serving to epitomize vivacity and gaiety, these artistic creations remain an orchestration to appreciate, publicize, and promote. The paper finds that people's engagements in funerals with creative elements and donations and/or exchange of gifts build social solidarity in traditional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the donors' register of the Zurich Bürgerbibliothek ('citizens' library') to explore how the collection of the city's first public library developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The donors' register records over 3,000 gifts from some 900 local and foreign benefactors between 1629, the year of the library's founding, and 1769. Unlike a standard library or auction catalogue, the donors' register allows us to observe engagement with the Bürgerbibliothek over time and reveals that, while a remarkable influx of patrons in the first decade of the library's existence secured its position in the cultural and intellectual fabric of Zurich society, international interest in the institution dropped significantly by the end of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the Bürgerbibliothek's consistent growth across the period attests to the popularity of the library and its accessible collection at a local level as well as its benefactors' belief in the reciprocal value of patronising this new type of civic institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted labor markets around the world. Workers and corporations scrambled to adjust their workstyles to a new normal, by avoiding the commute and working remotely from their homes or elsewhere. Japan is a country that stood out for its inability to adjust to the remote work imperative. Comparative statistics show that Japan reported the lowest number of people engaged in remote work among the OECD countries, as well as the lowest percentage of corporations that offered remote work policies. In this article, I investigate why telework in Japan is difficult. The lack of telework in Japan may seem paradoxical, given the country's reputation for being technologically advanced. I argue that it is not the technological infrastructure that is lacking in the Japanese workplace, but distinct features of work embedded in Japanese culture and its collectivist roots that prevent the effective implementation of telework. I rely on recently published data from various sources, and apply key sociological theories such as implicit contracts, gift exchange, dramaturgy, and impression management to substantiate my main arguments. The paper concludes by drawing on implications for the future of work in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of gift-giving in human relationships, with a particular focus on traditional Korea. It discusses how gift exchanges create value and satisfaction for both parties involved, and examines the principles of gift exchange as outlined by anthropologists Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi. The article also explores the practical and symbolic functions of diplomatic gifts in establishing and fortifying international relationships and political order. It provides examples of diplomatic gift exchanges between China and neighboring countries, as well as between European countries and China. The article concludes by mentioning three papers that will further examine the practice of diplomatic gifts in East Asia, with a focus on Korea. [Extracted from the article]

Close-kin ownership, to own one's kin, has been researched from the perspective of emancipatory strategies or economic exploitation, hereby overlooking the complexity of kinship bonds in slave societies. This paper addresses the complexities of slavery and kinship and analyses close-kin ownership from the perspective of kinship. In the process of manumission, relationships of obligation were created that continued in life after slavery. When former-owner and enslaved were kin, a layering of obligations took place that extended beyond the widely accepted dichotomy of viewing close-kin ownership as either an emancipatory strategy or economic exploitation. To analyse these concepts and relationships 44 examples of close-kin ownership were selected from a database of 392 manumission petitions from Suriname. In these 44 examples, kin owned enslaved kin. From this sample, five cases of presumed close-kin slavery were identified, kin not only owned enslaved kin, the enslaved were treated as any other slaves and kinship was no extenuating circumstance. By analysing these cases, we have found that close-kin ownership and slavery were interconnected practices that should be studied in unison to grasp the tension between emancipatory strategies and economic gain. Furthermore, the variety in circumstances shows that additional research is needed to continue the creation of a broader framework of kinship and slavery, so that this can be applied to slave societies around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many jobs serve a social purpose beyond profit maximization, contributing positively to society. This paper uses a modified principal-agent gift-exchange game with positive externality (prosocial treatment) to study how workers' prosocial motivation interacts with the use of efficiency wages in stimulating effort. We find that prosocial motivation and efficiency wages are independent in stimulating effort: compared to a standard gift-exchange game (GE treatment), the presence of the externality shifts the agents' effort choice function upwards without affecting its slope. Thus, if principals were profit-maximizers, wage offers should be the same in both treatments. However, principals offer higher wages in the prosocial treatment. We show that this is due to principals in the GE treatment highly underestimating agents' reciprocity and thereby offering wages below the profit-maximizing level. Results from robustness-checks further suggest that our findings are unlikely to be driven by a simple efficiency effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that our moral concern for future well-being should reduce over time due to important practical considerations about how humans interact with spacetime. After surveying several of these considerations (around equality, special duties, existential contingency, and overlapping moral concern) we develop a set of core principles that can both explain their moral significance and highlight why this is inherently bound up with our relationship with spacetime. These relate to the equitable distribution of (1) moral concern in a universe that we can only causally affect in one temporal direction; (2) access to the benefits from using spacetime as a resource; and (3) the burdens of care given (1) and (2). We conclude by considering the practical implications of our argument and find that, while it is often assumed that a preference for present over future well-being weakens the case for existential risk mitigation, this likely is not the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatists are interested primarily not in representing a purportedly unchanging Reality but in articulating prophetic future possibilities on the basis of the values most venerated by a culture/society in the present. This makes pragmatism sound a little like 'Conceptual Engineering'. Conceptual engineers too are interested in transforming our ways of talking, which implies some notion of how such improvements are to be evaluated. Nevertheless, this paper argues that accounts of conceptual engineering that regard it as key to the project of elucidating an externalist semantics find it difficult to accommodate on their own terms the problem-phenomena taken to be of shared interest: regions of discourse where the demand for change are at their most pressing culturally. This difficulty takes the form of what I call the Conceptual Engineering Dilemma (CED), an inability to accommodate simultaneously the ethical and ameliorative dimensions of contestation. I argue that acknowledging the formalist commitments that undergird CED should make pragmatism more appealing to the practically-orientated analytic philosopher and conclude with a brief survey of some of the tools that it makes available for the pressing work of changing minds for the better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An instrument of wealth accumulation and racial segregation in housing markets, the intersections between zoning and labor are often overlooked. Extending theories of space, race, and class, and drawing on historical and archival evidence, I elaborate three ways that American land-use zoning emerged to shape labor markets in the early 20th century: (1) zoning constrained households from engaging in subsistence and direct market activity, acting as a regulatory source of labor commodification; (2) zoning first emerged as a xenophobic tool for regulating labor competition; and (3) zoning introduced racialized boundaries distinguishing formal work from a sphere of economic informality. I illustrate these theoretical-historical propositions with a study of the frontier origins of American land-use zoning laws in late-19th -century Los Angeles. This first and influential approach to residential zoning emerged amid racial dynamics of western settlement and the class politics of a national "free" labor market. I demonstrate how efforts to regulate the settlement and labor practices of poor urban households and Chinese immigrants on in Los Angeles became the direct legal basis for the dichotomous categories of "residential" and "industrial" districts that the city first defended before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915. By theorizing the intersections of land-use zoning and labor markets, this paper provides a theoretical framework and historical genealogy for future work to consider entanglements of housing and labor politics amid the concurrent flexibilization of work and land use in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes visible austerity-based infant food exchange as a contemporary food acquisition practice outside of commercial and regulated foodscapes. It presents results from a netnography conducted within two popular online platforms in Canada between April 2017 and February 2018: the Kijiji classified advertising site, and Facebook. Qualitative analysis of over 2000 user generated secondhand exchange ads show practices from selling, trading, sharing, and seeking whereby infant foods works as a form of currency to acquire either economic capital when sold, an alternative food capital when traded, or are gifts in the moral economy of exchange. While infant food exchange is often collaborative in nature, it is austerity-driven involving different forms of capital parents have or seek to accomplish the responsibility of feeding. As excluded consumers, posters are motivated by a complex mixture of desperation, innovation, ecological concerns, and morality to care for others when mainstream food access is out of reach within the current political and economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of one's identity in late modernity is sometimes viewed as a project of the autonomous self in which one's identity may shift or change over the course of one's existence and development. For the Christian, however, one's identity is both a divine gift, and a task of ecclesial formation, and for both the gift and the task, Christian baptism is fundamental. Baptism represents the death of the self and its rebirth in Christ, a decisive breach with the life that has gone before. Baptism establishes a new identity, a new affiliation, a new mode of living, and a new life orientation, direction, and purpose. This paper explores the role of baptism in the formation of Christian identity, finding that Christian identity is both extrinsic to the self and yet also an identity into which we are called and into which we may continually grow. The essay proceeds in three sections. It begins with a survey of recent philosophical reflection on the concept of identity, continues by reflecting on the nature of Christian baptism in dialogue with this reflection, and concludes by considering in practical terms how baptism functions in the process of conversion–initiation toward the formation of mature Christian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museum artifacts are the main way for visitors to experience and learn about cultural heritage. Augmented reality (AR) allows for high interactivity and is increasingly applied in museums to improve tourists' experience and learning. It also supports the extension of museum experience to outside of the physical museum space, contributing to the visiting trajectory and takeaway experience. In this paper, we present our design of two tangible AR interfaces for cultural artifacts: Postcard AR and CubeMuseum AR, followed by three user studies that evaluate and optimize the design. In Study 1, we conducted a within-subjects study (N = 24) that compares the two AR interfaces with a baseline condition (Leaflet). Our results demonstrate the positive effects of tangible AR interfaces on users' motivation and engagement in learning cultural heritage. In Study 2, we further explored how to optimize CubeMuseum AR by adopting a user-centered design approach. Through the analysis of expert interviews (N = 7) and an online survey (N = 207), the results specify a series of requirements and design guidelines for tangible AR interfaces to be used as a learning tool and a hybrid gift. Based on the findings, the design of the CubeMuseum AR was optimized and evaluated in Study 3. A between-subjects user study was conducted (N = 32) to compare the optimized design with the initial design. The results verified the positive effects of gamified tangible AR interfaces on users' motivation, engagement, and performance in learning cultural heritage. We present our design and evaluation results, and discuss the implications of designing tangible AR interfaces for cultural heritage learning and museum gifting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite intense interest in how social capital can facilitate informal learning, few attempts have been made to synthesize the interface between social capital and informal learning. Social capital is an important factor in the application of informal learning, especially in postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This paper first presents a review of the literature that has explored the relationship between social capital and informal learning in STEM education. We then present two case studies illustrating how social capital plays a pivotal role in enhancing informal learning outcomes in postsecondary STEM education. These cases offer insights on how to promote optimal informal learning in STEM education. Implications for understanding the importance of social capital in informal learning are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that to understand the impact of former U.S. President Donald Trump on the U.S.-Mexico border, his presidential agenda needs to be compared with other presidential administrations from the 1990s to the present. It looks at presidential policy agendas, as seen in executive orders, legislative policies, binational initiatives, deployment of the National Guard and military, presidential visits, and use of the bully pulpit with visits to the border region. These are compared to border operations indicators, highlighting formal and informal crossings of people and movement of goods. Though Mr. Trump has been specifically negative and aggressive toward the border, the securitization of the region has been part of presidential agendas since the 1990s. A key takeaway is to think about and discuss these results to ensure the border is livable, manageable and ready for the challenges of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper presents a framework that integrates 11 forms of voluntary payments as seemingly disparate as bribes and bequests, and gifts and gratuities to show that "voluntary" payments vary in the shades of gray not only in terms of how much like bribes they are but also in terms of how voluntary they actually are. We provocatively suggest that these payment types might be susceptible to becoming entrenched through self‐reinforcing norms because the voluntary payments are not necessarily voluntary and to an extent akin to bribes. Specifically, it provides an overarching framework to showcase the similarities and differences between bribes, lobbying efforts, suggested fees, pay what you want, tips, bequests, legacies, charity, crowdsourcing, dowry, and gifts, identifying gaps in domains that are under‐researched. Starting with the question as to whether a service has been, is being, or will be performed for the voluntary payment, and whether payments are made to an individual or a cause, the framework highlights the following: (1) the differences in the purpose underlying these payments, (2) the different modes of payment used; (3) the economic and social norms governing the payments; and (4) external and internal emotions associated with these payment types. The integrative framework allows for an amalgam of disparate literatures ranging from morality and behavioral pricing to charity and gift giving. The process model suggests a multitude of areas for future research in the domain of consumers' voluntary payment decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gifts are a powerful way to acknowledge and strengthen interpersonal relationships. As with any relational space, gifting plays various roles in forming and maintaining relationships in political contexts, but its contribution to relationship-building has attracted little attention. This paper examines how politicians in Aotearoa New Zealand both engage with gifting and how they navigate the perceptions of others. Four current members of parliament (MPs) and six retired MPs participated in semi-structured interviews with questions on common practices and common understandings about political gifting. Their responses indicate their use of four different processes: formal processes are the guidelines provided by the government on gifting, but when these are insufficient, contextual processes regarding perceptions of the media, constituents or colleagues are used, or, alternatively, MPs rely on personal values or view gifting in terms of transactional processes with both parties receiving benefits. The paper explores perceptions and complexities of a sequence of gifts during events (event gifting). The authors recommend an improved awareness and understanding of the contribution of gifting practices to political relationship building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]