1,720,966 research outputs found
Living law, normative pluralism, and "fare dodging” on public transport in Budapest
No full textThis paper explores a situation regulated by plural normative orders, which every-day public transport users and ticket inspectors experience and practice in the urban realm of the Hungarian capital city, Budapest. The paper analyses everyday interactions between members of the public and public transport staff (typically ticket inspectors) in ways which are not only regulated by formal rules, but which manifest in a non-state regulated normative order. By doing this, the paper theoretically engages with the interplay between multiple normative orders and the urban dynamics in which they operate. The norms which regulate these practices can exist because of how the public transport system operates in Budapest. The paper is based on twenty-five in-depth interviews conducted between February 2017 and March 2019 with long-term Hungarian residents and British migrants living in Budapest. A synthesis of Ehrlich’s “living law” theory and Moore’s concepts of “semi-autonomous social fields” provide the underlying theoretical framework to examine these informal interactions
Exploring the reasons behind persistent low-level corruption in Hungary by looking into (the absence of) formally reported wrongdoings: “The less said, the better”.
Get PDFThis master thesis in Sociology of Law explored the persistency of low-level corruption in post-communist Hungary. By adopting an anthropological approach 20 unstructured in-depth interviews were conducted in Hungarian language. The main focus of the research was on how law actually works. The collected material suggested that inadequate legislation supports informal economic transactions (“bad regulation generates necessary corruption”). Therefore Ehrlich’s ‘living law’ and legal pluralism provided a theoretical framework. The results supported the idea that the phenomenon of petty corruption persisted and proliferated during the transition process, and kept growing despite the EU accession. Four main reasons were indentified for individuals taking part in informal transactions which fit into the 'survival tactic' literature of post-communist societies: ‘not enough salary’, ‘I have no choice, because the regulations are wrong’, 'I am pressured by my superior or the institute’, ‘just go with the flow’. The reasons behind the low frequency of formally reported wrong-doing were considered and it was suggested that citizens try to control corruption in informal ways. The lack of political will to implement adequate laws, and the civil social organisations never-ending fight to introduce legislation were presented. The research intends to contribute to the categorisation of petty corruption in Hungary, by establishing living law imperatives
The unheard ‘scandal’: Covid‐19 vaccine‐injured people's perceptions of the national redress scheme and trust in the government in the United Kingdom
Get PDFThis article examines 218 Covid‐19 vaccine‐injured people's experiences of the process of seeking redress from the UK Government's Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS). Moreover, it engages with the wider topic of how we can understand the government(s)’ role in dealing with an ‘emergency’ (the Covid‐19 pandemic) and the consequent (global) health crisis. Vaccine‐injured individuals and communities perceive suffering health problems after Covid‐19 vaccination as a ‘tragedy’, which requires an adequate response. However, the VDPS often does not meet their expectations, which fuels the vaccine‐injured community's narratives around an emerging ‘scandal’ over inadequate redress provision for those who suffered adverse effects following Covid‐19 vaccines. These perceptions and meaning‐making are in stark contrast to the fact that the wider population is unaffected by these issues and are generally not aware of the harms suffered or of the VDPS
Exploring the socio-legal aspects of low-level corruption: a study on the perceptions of informal practices of long-term local residents and migrants in Scotland and Hungary
Get PDFThis thesis aims to provide a nuanced insight into people’s understanding of everyday corruption practices, by exploring the practices themselves, as well as the norms surrounding them, through people’s participation in them and perceptions of them. I examine everyday corruption, which I understand as a socially constructed phenomenon, through a nonjudgemental approach to the lived experiences of long-term residents and migrants in two differing research contexts of Budapest and Glasgow. This investigation includes the examination of the norms of carrying out everyday corruption practices as well as the processes that help people to develop a sense of acceptance of these informal practices that are divergent from, and contrary to, formal norms. I use Ehrlich’s ‘living law’ theory as the underlying theoretical framework, which advises my overall conceptual framework, having made some modifications that enable me to apply this theory to an empirical analysis of the everyday corruption practices and their norms.
The thesis is based on fifty-one in-depth interviews and five focus groups conducted between February 2017 and March 2019 in Budapest and Glasgow with four groups of participants: long-term Hungarian residents and British migrants in Budapest, and long-term Scottish (British) residents and Hungarian migrants in Glasgow. This thesis is an investigation within and between contexts, as my study takes place in two research locations. The migrants’ perspective has a particular importance because migrants move between social settings, which means that their lived experience can provide a more nuanced insight into learning the norms of, and participating in, everyday corruption in their new context. The study reveals that although it is important to consider and situate people’s understanding of everyday corruption in their local context, there are other more generalisable factors and processes (rationalisation, learning, and routinising) that contribute to construct this understanding. Moreover, these processes, combined with the factors that enable people to take part in informal practices according to their norms (procedural acceptability), on occasions lead to people perceiving these practices as being right (moral acceptability). The generalisable factors that people consider when constructing their understanding of informal practices are the external pressures in the context and internal pressures within social associations, and the perceived harmfulness of the informal practices. I argue that considering these factors, which I call the ‘matrix of acceptability’ can be applied more universally, which can challenge simplified, cultural explanations of everyday corruption and people’s participation in and perceptions of those
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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