News

A public intellectual with an uncommon breadth of influence, the late Sir Roger Scruton’s absence will surely be widely felt. This great friend to the Social Trends Institute died January 12 at the age of 75, just six months after having been diagnosed with cancer.

Andrew Cherlin weighs in on the chicken and egg question as applied to the question of economic and familial stability in the following excerpt from his essay, “How Inequality Drives Family Formation: The Prima Facie Case.”

Culture and business have become increasingly intertwined, and cultural institutions need to be aware of their place in the market. Karin M. Ekström, editor of the just released volume Museum Marketization – Cultural Institutions in the Neoliberal Era, summarizes the work for STI.

Professor Shelley Wilcox, in her chapter ”Who Pays for Gender De-institutionalization?” within the edited volume Gender Identities in a Globalized World, points out how some women step out of traditional gender roles and expectations precisely by  locking less fortunate women into them. 

Effective family-oriented policies and programs are critical for poverty reduction, the promotion of gender equality, the advancement of work-family balance and the prevention of family homelessness, states a UN report.

Heterogeneous and diverse ownership have implications on how companies are governed in the 21^st century. Differing shareholder goals should be taken into account when making recommendations or setting policy.

Engaged fathers boost fertility rates in various ways. Laurie DeRose explains how.

As firms are communities of people with a shared purpose, they require cooperation to yield not only economic results but also the development of people’s knowledge, abilities, values and virtues.

Given increasing life expectancy and shifting social networks, proper care for the elderly is becoming ever more difficult to arrange. A network of Europe’s leading demographic research centers, Population Europe, has produced a policy brief addressing the need to secure such care, supporting both those in care and their caregivers.

Spanish employees find the firms they work for wanting in important indicators of values and excellence, and report low levels of satisfaction and identification with their places of business.

Oxford professor of philosophy and ethics of information Luciano Floridi describes the new, hybrid existence where the barriers between online and offline have blurred to such a degree that there is no longer any difference: “Onlife,” he calls it.

The news on the news isn’t heartening. Reuters Institute’s eighth annual digital news report surveys media consumption behavior in 38 American, European, African and Asian countries, finding the public to be unenthusiastic at best about news media.