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Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences: Mobilizing Poor Voters

by Mariela Szwarcberg

Democracy has provided opportunities for political representation and accountability, but it has also created incentives for creating and maintaining clientelistic networks. Why has clientelism consolidated with the introduction of democracy? Drawing on network analysis, Mobilizing Poor Voters answers this question by describing and explaining the emergence, maintenance, and disappearance of political, partisan, and social networks in Argentina. Combining qualitative and quantitative data gathered during twenty-four months of field research in eight municipalities in Argentina, Mobilizing Poor Voters shows that when party leaders distribute political promotions to party candidates based only on the number of voters they mobilize, party leaders incentivize the use of clientelistic strategies among candidates competing to mobilize voters in poor neighborhoods. The logic of perverse incentives examined in this book explains why candidates who use clientelism succeed in getting elected and re-elected over time, contributing to the consolidation of political machines at the local level.

Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences: Social Sequence Analysis

by Benjamin Cornwell

Social sequence analysis includes a diverse and rapidly growing body of methods that social scientists have developed to help study complex ordered social processes, including chains of transitions, trajectories and other ordered phenomena. Social sequence analysis is not limited by content or time scale and can be used in many different fields, including sociology, communication, information science and psychology. Social Sequence Analysis aims to bring together both foundational and recent theoretical and methodological work on social sequences from the last thirty years. A unique reference book for a new generation of social scientists, this book will aid demographers who study life-course trajectories and family histories, sociologists who study career paths or work/family schedules, communication scholars and micro-sociologists who study conversation, interaction structures and small-group dynamics, as well as social epidemiologists.

Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions: SAHC 2023 - Volume 1 (RILEM Bookseries #47)

by Yohei Endo Toshikazu Hanazato

This book gathers the peer-reviewed papers presented at the 13th International Conference on Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions (SAHC), held in Kyoto, Japan, on September 12-15, 2023. It highlights the latest advances and innovations in the field of conservation and restoration of historical and heritage structures. The conference topics encompass history of construction and building technology, theory and practice of conservation, inspection methods, non-destructive techniques and laboratory testing, numerical modeling and structural analysis, management of heritage structures and conservation strategies, structural health monitoring, repair and strengthening strategies and techniques, vernacular constructions, seismic analysis and retrofit, vulnerability and risk analysis, resilience of historic areas to climate change and hazard events, durability, and sustainability. As such the book represents an invaluable, up-to-the-minute tool, providing an essential overview of conservation of historical constructions, and offers an important platform to engineers, architects, archeologists, and geophysicists.Chapter Guidelines for Seismic Retrofitting of Earthen Historic Buildings in Peru and Latin America is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions: SAHC 2023 - Volume 2 (RILEM Bookseries #46)

by Yohei Endo Toshikazu Hanazato

This book gathers the peer-reviewed papers presented at the 13th International Conference on Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions (SAHC), held in Kyoto, Japan, on September 12-15, 2023. It highlights the latest advances and innovations in the field of conservation and restoration of historical and heritage structures. The conference topics encompass history of construction and building technology, theory and practice of conservation, inspection methods, non-destructive techniques and laboratory testing, numerical modeling and structural analysis, management of heritage structures and conservation strategies, structural health monitoring, repair and strengthening strategies and techniques, vernacular constructions, seismic analysis and retrofit, vulnerability and risk analysis, resilience of historic areas to climate change and hazard events, durability, and sustainability. As such the book represents an invaluable, up-to-the-minute tool, providing an essential overview of conservation of historical constructions, and offers an important platform to engineers, architects, archeologists, and geophysicists.Chapter The Challenges of the Conservation of Earthen Sites in Seismic Areas, Chapter Performance Evaluation of Patch Repairs on Historic Concrete Structures (PEPS): Preliminary Results from Two English Case Studies are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Structural Anthropology

by Claude Levi-Strauss

The "structural method," first set forth in this epoch-making book, changed the very face of social anthropology. This reissue of a classic will reintroduce readers to Lévi-Strauss's understanding of man and society in terms of individuals--kinship, social organization, religion, mythology, and art.

Structural Anthropology

by Kitty Wheater Jeffrey A. Becker

Claude Lévi-Strauss is probably the most complex anthropological theorist of all time. His work continues to influence present-day thinkers in his field, but he is perhaps even more influential beyond it. As one of the key figures in the development of what is known today as ‘French theory,’ Lévi-Strauss was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th-century. His theories of interpretation, meaning and culture have helped shape the ideas and methodologies of a range of disciplines, above all literature and philosophy. At the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s work are the questions of meaning and where meaning comes from. As an anthropologist, he was primarily interested in what completely different and separate cultures might have in common. Crucially, he saw how common ground resides not on the surface of cultures (i.e., in similar customs), but deep inside invisible background structures of thought. His quest was to peel away the surface of different cultures through careful interpretation, advancing from one layer to another until he discovered the structures that lay behind all of the exterior practices and meanings. Infamously challenging, his work shows interpretative skills working at the highest, most abstract level possible.

Structural Anthropology Zero

by Claude Levi-Strauss

This volume of Lévi-Strauss's writings from 1941 to 1947 bears witness to a period of his work which is often overlooked but which was the crucible for the structural anthropology that he would go on to develop in the years that followed. Like many European Jewish intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss had sought refuge in New York while the Nazis overran and occupied much of Europe. He had already been introduced to Jakobson and structural linguistics but he had not yet laid out an agenda for structuralism, which he would do in the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, these American years were the time when Lévi-Strauss would learn of some of the world's most devastating historical catastrophes - the genocide of the indigenous American peoples and of European Jews. From the beginning of the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology tacitly bears the heavy weight of the memory and possibility of the Shoah. To speak of 'structural anthropology zero' is therefore to refer to the source of a way of thinking which turned our conception of the human on its head. But this prequel to Structural Anthropology also underlines the sense of a tabula rasa which animated its author at the end of the war as well as the project – shared with others – of a civilizational rebirth on novel grounds. Published here in English for the first time, this volume of Lévi-Strauss’s texts from the 1940s will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally.

Structural Approaches in Public Health

by Marni Sommer and Richard Parker

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! That health has many social determinants is well established and a myriad range of structural factors – social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental – are now known to impact on population well-being. Public health practice has started exploring and responding to a range of health-related challenges from a structural paradigm, including individual and population vulnerability to infection with HIV and AIDS, injury-prevention, obesity, and smoking cessation. Recognising the inadequacy of public health responses that focus solely on individual behaviour change to improve population health outcomes, this text promotes a more holistic approach. Discussing the structural factors related to health and well-being that are both within and outside of an individual’s control, it explores what form structural approaches can take, the underlying theory of structure as a risk factor and the local realities, environments, and priorities that public health practitioners need to take into consideration. Anchored in empirical evidence, the book provides case studies of innovative and influential interventions – from the 100% condom program, to urban planning, injury prevention, and the provision of adequate clean drinking water and sanitation systems – and concludes with a section on implementing and evaluating structural public health programs. This comprehensive text brings together a selection of internationally-recognised authors to provide an overview for students and practitioners working in or concerned with public health around the globe.

Structural Change and Evolution of China’s Internet Society (China Perspectives)

by Liu Shaojie

This title investigates China’s network society, both its online cyber society and offline real world society, by analyzing the trends and social foundations of society as network and the social challenges it poses, as well as structural changes in social space and social interaction.The first part of the book examines how network society in China forms and develops, analyzing the challenges and structural changes it poses. The author studies network power and uncertainties that lies in the supply, flow, and reception of a massive amount of information, revealing how this influences the government's administrative power as well as governance measures to stabilize social cohesion. The second part first discusses the social restructuring and characteristics of network social space in China. Based on case studies of several momentous social events, the spatial change characterized by an integration of absence and presence space and its influence on social interaction and experience is elucidated, including active absence interaction, mediated experience, spatial representation, and social identities of network aggregation.The book will be a crucial reference for scholars and students studying sociology, network sociology, and contemporary Chinese society.

Structural Change, Market Concentration, and Inequality: A Multi-sector Analysis

by Yasuyuki Osumi

This book clarifies the mechanism of widening income inequality and declining labor share in macroeconomics, growth, technology, and the labor market, and provides policy implications. The volume covers three research themes: the influence of structural change, the advancement of artificial intelligence, and the phenomena of market concentration on inequalities and labor share dynamics in theory and empirics. The wide array of theoretical topics in this book includes the implications of unbalanced growth, economy-wide elasticity of substitution between capital and labor, relatively rising service sectors, superstar firm phenomena, automation, the heterogeneity of capital, increasing returns to scale, and the information and financial service sectors on inequalities and labor share decline. These analyses are based on multifactor, multisector general equilibrium, the goods market, and the labor market’s imperfectly competitive framework. In addition, the book covers the relevant empirical data analyses that involve top wealth dynamics in the U.S. Forbes 400, the effect of deepening ICT capital on the labor share in major Japanese industries, and the emergence of increasing returns to scale in the Japanese information and financial sectors.

Structural Changes in U.S. Labour Markets: Causes and Consequences

by Randall E. Eberts Erica L. Groshen Lee Hoskins

During much of the 1980s, US wage growth has been unexpectedly slow in the face of relatively low unemployment rates and high capacity utilization rates. This collection of papers resulting from the Wage Structure Conference held by the Federal Research Bank of Cleveland, November 1989, helps explain labour market behaviour in that period. The contributors - academic and research economists in labour economics - provide a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the wage-setting process in the US labour market.

Structural Dividers in the Qur'an (Routledge Studies in the Qur'an)

by Marianna Klar

This volume showcases a wide range of contemporary approaches to the identification of literary structures within Qur’anic surahs. Recent academic studies of the Qur’an have taken an increasing interest in the concept of the surah as a unity and, with it, the division of complete surahs into consecutive sections or parts. Part One presents a series of case studies focussing on individual Qur’anic surahs. Nevin Reda analyzes the structure of Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (Q 3), Holger Zellentin looks at competing structures within Sūrat al-ʿAlaq (Q 96), and A.H. Mathias Zahniser provides an exploration of the ring structures that open Sūrat Maryam (Q 19). Part Two then focusses on three discrete aspects of the text. Nora K. Schmid assesses the changing structural function of oaths, Marianna Klar evaluates how rhythm, rhyme, and morphological parallelisms combine in order to produce texture and cohesion, while Salwa El-Awa considers the structural impact of connectives and other discourse markers with specific reference to Sūrat Ṭāhā (Q 20). The final section of the volume juxtaposes contrasting attitudes to the discernment of diachronic seams Devin Stewart examines surah-medial oracular oaths, Muhammad Abdel Haleem questions a range of instances where suggestions of disjointedness have historically been raised, and Nicolai Sinai. explores the presence of redactional layers within Sūrat al-Nisāʾ (Q 4) and Sūrat al-Māʾidah (Q 5). Bringing a combination of different approaches to Qur’an structure into a single book, written by well-established and emerging voices in Qur’anic studies, the work will be an invaluable resource to academics researching Islam, religious studies, and languages and literatures in general. Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license at

Structural Dynamic Systems Computational Techniques and Optimization: Techniques in Buildings and Bridges

by Cornelius T. Leondes

There are various techniques to optimize either structural parameters, or structural controllers, but there are not many techniques that can simultaneously optimize the structural parameters and controller. The advantage of integrating the structural and controller optimization problems is that structure and controller interaction is taken into account in the design process and a more efficient overall design (lower control force/lighter weight) can be achieved, and also multidisciplinary design optimization can be performed. The down side is that the combined optimization problem is more difficult to formulate and solve, and computations are increased. This volume is a comprehensive treatment of dynamic analysis and control techniques in structural dynamic systems and the wide variety of issues and techniques that fall within this broad area, including the interactions between structural control systems and structural system parameters.

Structural Equation Modeling: Concepts, Issues, and Applications

by Rick H. Hoyle

This largely nontechnical volume reviews some of the major issues facing researchers who wish to use structural equation modeling. Individual chapters present recent developments on specification, estimation and testing, statistical power, software comparisons and analyzing multitrait/multimethod data. Numerous examples of applications are given and attention is paid to the underlying philosophy of structural equation modeling and to writing up results from structural equation modeling analyses.

Structural Equation Modeling: Foundations and Extensions

by David W. Kaplan

Using detailed, empirical examples, Structural Equation Modeling, Second Edition, presents a thorough and sophisticated treatment of the foundations of structural equation modeling (SEM). It also demonstrates how SEM can provide a unique lens on the problems social and behavioral scientists face. Intended Audience While the book assumes some knowledge and background in statistics, it guides readers through the foundations and critical assumptions of SEM in an easy-to-understand manner.

Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts

by Lars Johanson

Turkic languages present particularly rich sources of data for the study of language contact, given the number and diversity of languages with which they have been in contact. Many common, false generalisations are laid bare and the methodology used in evaluating particular instances of language contact can also be used with profit by students of languages other than the Turkic.

Structural Foundations for Regional Financial Integration

by Patricia Brenner

This book was prepared as part of the Central America Financial Sector Regional Project (FSRP). The countries covered in the FSRP comprise the six Spanish-speaking countries of Central America: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Although relatively small, they are large as a group and confront many common policy challenges. With about 40 million people, Central America's population is as large as Spain's or Argentina's. Besides geographic proximity and a common language, the region shares a dependence on raw material exports, close economic ties to the United States, and vulnerabilities to natural disasters and terms-of-trade shocks. Several of the countries have also suffered from long periods of civil strife, which slowed economic growth generally, and hampered the development of legal and judicial systems. The chapters cover: an overview of the principal issues and findings of the project; background on financial development and soundness in the six countries; trends in regional financial integration and supervisory responses; development of the insurance sector; development of payment and securities settlement arrangements; and worker remittances.

Structural Markedness and Syntactic Structure: A Study of Word Order and the Left Periphery in Mexican Spanish

by Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Structural Racism: The Dynamics of Opportunity and Race in America

by Stephen Menendian

This book explains how racial inequality in the United States is produced and perpetuated and what should be done about it. It develops the elusive concept of “structural racism,” presenting a precise definition that is clear and comprehensible, and illustrates how it operates methodically and rigorously.Many other books are long on problems and short on solutions, whereas this book develops the key principles that must ground a structural reform agenda, and then presents a broad-ranging set of interventions organized around ten themes that will reduce racial disparities while expanding opportunity for all.Unlike most books on race which focus on a particular issue or sector, this book is comprehensive in its scope, encompassing the vital systems that shape racial inequality in contemporary American society: from education and public schools to income and wealth disparities to housing and health care to policing and the criminal justice system. As such, this book is the ideal text for readers seeking to learn more about structural racial inequality in society, how it came to be that way, and what we should do about it, while deepening our understanding and challenging many misguided or simplistic prevailing notions.In a time of backlash to racial justice and growing doubts about racial equity initiatives, this book is a timely and necessary entry. A must read for advocates, students, policymakers, and researchers alike.

Structural Reforms and Economic Performance in Advanced and Developing Countries

by Alessandro Prati Antonio Spilimbergo Jonathan D. Ostry

Drawing on a new dataset covering reforms of domestic product markets, international trade, the domestic financial sector, and the external capital account, this book examines the impact on economic performance in 91 countries of policies designed to increase the role of market forces and competition. Such policies, known as structural reforms, have been broadly pursued by the country groupings analyzed in this study since 1970, but individual country experiences have differed. Real and financial reforms have, for example, boosted income growth widely. Financial reforms have also raised growth through several channels, including lower domestic credit constraints and larger FDI inflows. The growth effects of financial and real reforms reflect a more favorable assessment of the future profitability and solvency of domestic firms in most countries, as embodied in credit ratings. Growth effects, however, differ significantly across countries depending on the reform sequencing strategy adop

Structural Transformation and Sustainable Development in the Global South: An Integrated Approach (Routledge Explorations in Development Studies)

by Seung Jin Baek

This book investigates the relationship between sustainable development and structural transformation within international development policy. On the one hand, sustainable development is promoted as a multi-dimensional concept for achieving environmentally and socially responsible change. On the other hand, structural transformation refers to a sustained period of growth in living standards and incomes that brings sectoral change. For some, these two objectives seem at odds with each other, but this book argues that incorporating environmental initiatives into structural transformation goals in lower-income countries actually results in better results than strategies prioritising economic growth. Drawing on extensive structural equation modelling and original analysis, the book presents an innovative inclusive sustainable development framework to demonstrate the benefits of a more integrated approach to development planning, aiming for structural transformation in line with inclusive sustainable development principles. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of global development, and to policymakers within government and development organizations.

Structural Transformation as Development: Path Dependence and Geopolitics

by Anis Chowdhury Zulfan Tadjoeddin Yogi Vidyattama

This book evaluates development progress using the lens of structural transformation in four groups of developing countries: Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs), Asia’s LDCs, landlocked Central Asian countries, and Pacific small island states. The analysis presented is contextualized in the diverse economic characteristics and geopolitical landscape of the four categories of countries. In doing so, research on Africa’s LDCs emphasizes the overall picture of missed economic opportunities, while the research on Asia's LDCs focus on policy lessons. The chapter on landlocked Central Asian countries focuses more on the unique transition experience of those countries coming out from USSR hinterlands to independent states in the wake of the third wave of democratisation in the 1990s. Lastly the evaluation of Pacific small island states is very much influenced by the fate of geography for being small in size and remotely located. The diverse coverage offers readers rich varieties of structural transformation experiences and comparative development perspectives. The book is non-technical, with descriptive, narrative, and analytical approaches on comparative development, making it suitable and accessible for non-specialist audiences.

Structural Violence: Hidden Brutality in the Lives of Women

by Joshua M. Price

Gold Medalist, 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Women's Studies categoryStructural Violence seeks to redraw the conventional map of violence against women. In order to understand violence as a fundamentally heterogeneous phenomenon, it is essential to go beyond interpersonal partner violence and analyze the workings of institutional and structural violence. Self-help books, some shelters, the courts, federal and state legislation, empirical studies, therapeutic models, and even some mainstream feminist polemics presume that all women face the same kind of violence. This assumption masks violence that does not conform to the imagined norm, such as violence against women who are sex workers, lesbians, homeless, and/or undocumented. Joshua M. Price's exploration of these issues is based on several years of research involving participant-observation in domestic violence courts and extensive interviews with activists, advocates, incarcerated women, and women who have faced various forms of violence. Both conceptually and methodologically, the book challenges narrow notions of violence against women and demonstrates implications for judicial intervention and other forms of public involvement.

Structural and Typological Variation in the Dialects of Kurdish

by Yaron Matras Geoffrey Haig Ergin Öpengin

This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.

Structure And Function In Primitive Society:Essays and Addresses

by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown

This book shows the development of the thought of a distinguished anthropologist for the last twenty-five years, and at the same time illustrate some of the more important changes in the orientation of social anthropology, with which Professor Radcliffe-Brown was so intimately associated during this period. These essays have also demonstrated their value in the training of graduate students in major centres for social anthropology.

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