Active Living : Transforming the Organization of Retirement and Housing in the U.S.

We examine the transformation of the social institutions of retirement and housing in the US in the latter part of the 20th century. Using institutional ethnography we explicate a woman\u27s experience relocating to an age segregated community. Her relocation is predicated upon ideological practices that reconceptualize retirement as active living and the construction of a setting in which retirees engage in this new lifestyle. We demonstrate the textual mediation of this ideological and organizational reformation through an examination of an advertising campaign undertaken by the Del Webb Development Corporation in the marketing of Sun City, Arizona. The advertising texts provide an ideological code to manage and reorganize at multiple sites the social relations of one segment of the housing industry under late capitalism

Introduction to the Special Issue: New Scholarship in Institutional Ethnography

Twelve years ago the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare (JSSW) published a special issue devoted to institutional ethnography, “Institutional Ethnography: Theory and Practice” (Winfield, 2003). This alternative sociology, founded by Dorothy E. Smith, begins from the standpoint of the experiences of particular, active subjects and sets out to discover and describe the social relations shaping those experiences (Smith, 1987, 2005, 2006). JSSW, dedicated to publishing new, cutting-edge theoretical and methodological articles, was the first academic journal to devote a special issue to this new mode of inquiry used to investigate the social world. Over the ensuing years, the number of international practitioners of institutional ethnography has increased across a diverse array of disciplines, opening up new areas of investigation and methodological strategies, and in the process increasing our knowledge of “ruling relations,” that “expansive, historically specific apparatus of management and control that arose with the development of corporate capitalism and supports it operation” (DeVault, 2006, p. 295)

Global patterns of terrestrial biological nitrogen (N2) fixation in natural systems

Human activities have clearly caused dramatic alterations of the terrestrial nitrogen cycle, and analyses of the extent and effects of such changes are now common in the scientific literature. However, any attempt to evaluate N cycling processes within ecosystems, as well as anthropogenic influences on the N cyclc, requires an understanding of the magnitude of inputs via biological nitrogen fixation (BNF). Although there have been many studies addressing the microbiology, physiology, and magnitude of N fixation at local scales, there are very few estimates of BNF over large scales. We utilized >10G preexisting published estimates of BNF to generate biome- And global-level estimates of biological N fixation. We also used net primary productivity (NPP) and evapotranspiration (ET) estimates from the Century terrestrial ecosystem model to examine global relationships between these variables and BNF as well as to compare observed and Century-modeled BNF. Our data-based estimates showed a strong positive relationship between ecosystem ET and BNF, and our analyses suggest that while the model's simple relationships for BNF predict broad scale patterns, they do not capture much of the variability or magnitude of published rates. Patterns of BNF were also similar to patterns of ecosystem NPP. Our best estimate of potential nitrogen fixation by natural ecosystems is -195 Tg N yr-1 with a range of 100-290 Tg N yr-1. Although these estimates do not account for the decrease in natural N fixation due to cultivation, this would not dramatically alter our estimate, as the greatest reductions in area have occurred in systems characterized by relatively low rates of N fixation (e.g., grasslands). Although our estimate of BNF in natural ecosystems is similar to previously published estimates of terrestrial BNF, we believe that this study provides a more documented, constrained estimate of this important flux.This work was supported in part by a Biosphere-Atmosphere Research Training Grant (C. Cleveland) to the University of Colorado from the National Science Foundation (BIR- 9413218), and by a NASA New Investigator Program Award to Alan R. Townsend (NAGW-5253). In addition, we would like to acknowledge the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation through the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, for their support of the International SCOPE N Projec