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The development of a common standard of consumption is one goal of the ongoing harmonization of the EU member states' economies. As a result, the degree to which household deprivation affects people's economic stress should converge. Based on comparison theory, such convergence could be one indicator for Europe growing together ('Europeanization'). The association between deprivation and economic stress is tested across and between 28 EU countries with EU-SILC data. Moreover, it is examined whether this association changed between 2007 and 2015, as the great recession starting in 2008 affected European countries differently. The results show that, given a certain level of household deprivation, people judge their situation differently across Europe. Whereas economic stress levels are higher in relatively poor countries, the deprivation-stress link is stronger in rich countries. Across-time comparisons suggest no decline in the extent to which a country's deprivation level moderated the effect of household deprivation on economic stress. The findings support the persistence of national reference groups against which individuals judge their own economic situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the authors seek to account for possible transitions from temporary to permanent employment in relation to perceived psychosocial work characteristics, i.e. job insecurity, workload, job control and organizational communication. The study compared three groups of Finnish hospital workers utilizing a two-wave design with a two-year time lag: (1) workers who were temporarily employed at Time 1 but permanently employed at Time 2 (temporary-to-permanent workers; n = 25); (2) workers who were temporarily employed at Time 1 and at Time 2 (long-term temporary workers; n = 45); and (3) a reference group of workers who were permanently employed at Time 1 and Time 2 (permanent workers; n = 316). The results showed that temporary-to-permanent workers experienced less job insecurity but more workload at Time 2 than at Time 1. Furthermore, long-term temporary workers experienced higher workload at Time 2 than at Time 1, and they also reported a negative change in organizational communication during the follow-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hailed by advocates as engines of job growth, the export factories in Mexico's maquiladora zone often spur severe criticism in activist circles for worker exploitation and abuses. Yet how do workers themselves perceive their wages and working conditions? In this essay I draw from several years of cross-border advocacy and 130 interviews with maquiladora workers in Reynosa and Juarez, Mexico to describe workers' perceptions. I demonstrate that workers' views are dynamic and ambivalent, bound up with their migratory histories and cross-border reference groups. Specifically, workers tend to express contentment with their working conditions, while sharply condemning their wages. Next, I consider the implications of the growing 'cross-border justice movement' along the Mexico-US border. I argue that a deepening of transnational advocacy networks holds the most strategic promise as a 'counterhegemonic', progressive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we take advantage of the availability of European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data to address both weak and strong versions of the Europeanization of reference groups thesis. The former proposes that common standards of evaluation emerge as a consequence of knowledge of conditions in other societies. The latter argues that people increasingly perceive themselves as part of a larger European stratification system. Our analysis leads us to reject both versions of the thesis. Material deprivation rather than having a uniform effect is highly dependent on national context. If a process of convergence is underway, it is one that as yet has had a limited impact. In circumstances where the Europeanization of inequality is raising issues relating to both national and transnational forms of legitimacy, it is important to understand that there is no necessary relationship between such Europeanization and the Europeanization of reference groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a case study in the treatment of Physics, that concerns the scientist C.G. Barkla and the J Phenomenon. The 'J phenomenon,' a complicated set of experimental claims and preliminary theoretical forays by the British physicist C.G. Barkla. It was a scientific error on the fringes of orthodox physics which lasted long enough to generate over fifty scientific papers. This article is about scientifc orthodoxy, about how truth is developed and defended and demonstrates that scientific belief systems and codes of scientific practice cannot be conclusively disproven, they cannot be discarded for unambiguous rational reasons alone. The authority of scientific knowledge rests upon grounds different from those offered by the model of the rationality of science implicit in those accounts which conceal the existence and influence of such wider factors as appear to have operated in this case. Barkla's theoretical schemes and polemics were seen as rationalizations for his social commitments, built around, for instance, specific expertise, status with respect to particular reference groups, powers and so on.

The article describes culture in the most general sense, as based on the context of the different global systems. Culture is often treated as a code, a paradigm and as a substance that can spread throughout the world. The issue of globalization as related to culture is a product of the kind of conflation that is symptomatic of global elites. In cultural terms, it is generated by a gathering of cosmopolitans in the West. A congregation that has become the source of much of the discourse of globalization as well.