Awards 2010

Can an Improved Sales Contract Speed Adoption of Improved Stoves?
Garrick Blalock, AEM
David Levine, University of California

Youth, Identities, and Transnational Flows
Debra A. Castillo, Latin American Studies
Mary Jo Dudley, Cornell Farmworker Program
Sofia Villenas, Latino Studies

The Interaction of Syntax, Semantics and Prosody in Slovenian
Molly Diesing, Linguistics
Draga Zec, Linguistics

Limited Rationality and the Strategic Environment: An Experimental Study
Ori Heffetz, JGSM
Michael Waldman, JGSM
Kristen B. Cooper, AEM

Capital Jurors Deciding Intellectual Disability: What Matters and Why?
Sheri Lynn Johnson, Law
Christopher Seeds, Law
John Blume, Law

Unpacking the Nano: The Price of the World’s Most Affordable Car
Kent Kleinman, AAP
Mary N. Woods, AAP

Immigration, Intra- and Inter-generational Socio-Economic Mobility
Daniel R. Lichter, PAM
Dean R. Lillard, PAM
Rebekka Christopoulou, Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center
Co-sponsored with generous support by the Cornell Population Program

Do International Bond Markets Diversify Portfolio Risk?
Edith X. Liu, AEM

What Drives the Stock Price Runups? Insider Trading vs. Market Anticipation
Qingzhong Ma, Hotel Administration

The Coevolution of Individuals and Their Social Setting: A Multi-site Longitudinal Study
Brian Rubineau, ILR
David Lazer, Northeastern University
Michael Neblo, Ohio State University

The Impact of Social Eating Patterns on Workplace Productivity and Organizational Commitment: Initiating a Program of Firefighter Research
Brian Wansink, AEM
Kevin M. Kniffin, AEM
William D. Schulze,AEM
Carol M. Devine, Nutritional Sciences
Jeffery Sobal, Nutiritional Sciences

Can an Improved Sales Contract Speed Adoption of Improved Stoves?|
Garrick Blalock, AEM and David Levine, University of California

2010 Project Description: Almost half the world cooks on inefficient wood and charcoal cookstoves. Each year these stoves kill over a million people a year from indoor air pollution, contribute to deforestation, and release billions of tonnes of CO2. Improved cookstoves can reduce these problems and also save poor households substantial time and money. Nevertheless, improved stoves are not widely adopted by the global poor. Constraints limiting the dissemination of improved cookstoves include liquidity constraints, lack of information on the benefits of the improved cookstoves, distrust that the benefits will be realized, and lack of confidence that the stove is durable. An improved sales contract can address these constraints. In this pilot test in Uganda we will offer a warranty, a small amount of free food, a free trial period, and scheduled installment payments the customer can stop at any time if they dislike the stove (that is, rent-to-own).

2012 Progress Report: Prof. Blalock's research team has leveraged the initial ISS small grant funds with a second grant from ACSF and a third grant from USAID. As a result, the project is now much bigger than initially projected. This project is up and running with data coming in via mobile phone. Data from the field team in Uganda will accrue over the first half of 2012 with analysis to start in the Fall 2012.

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Youth, Identities, and Transnational Flows
Debra A. Castillo, Latin American Studies, Mary Jo Dudley, Cornell Farmworker Program and Sofia Villenas, Latino Studies

2010 Project Description: The Latin American Studies Program, the Latino Studies Program and the Cornell
Farmworkers Program, in collaboration with Ithaca College and Syracuse University, are coorganizing a March 4-5, 2011 conference on the topic of “Youth, Identities, and Transnational Flows.” Other co-sponsors include Africana Studies, which is donating use of their space for this event at no charge. This event brings distinguished cultural psychology researcher Carola Suarez Orozco from NYU and Enrique Morones from the San Diego advocacy group “Border Angels.”

2012 Progress Report: Spring 2011 conference on "Youth, Identities, Transnational Flows" complete. This international conference included speakers, performers, and activists from many different national origins and disciplines, as well as presenters that ranged from Syracuse high school students to internationally regarded experts on educational policy. We were pleased to see overflow audiences of over 150 participants. The conference has seeded an ongoing project in the Latin American Studies program on youth culture, that has continued this year, and will include a follow-up symposium next fall 2012.

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The Interaction of Syntax, Semantics and Prosody in Slovenian
Molly Diesing, Linguistics and Draga Zec, Linguistics

2010 Project Description: How do the various parts of the grammar – prosody, structure, and pragmatics – work together to produce an utterance? While there is much previous work on the individual components of the grammar, an integrated approach remains elusive. Our research has been based on the premise that the phenomenon of South Slavic second position clitic placement provides a unique opportunity for investigating the interplay of the major components of human language. In previous work on Serbian, we have shown that clitic placement is dependent on an intricate interaction of prosody, syntax and discourse factors. In this proposal we present a project to extend our research to Slovenian second position clitics.We seek funds to (1) collect and analyze data from Slovenian (2) travel to Ljubljana, Slovenia to consult with collaborators and conduct experiments with native speakers (3) prepare future funding proposals for a larger cross-linguistic project (4) report results in conference presentations and papers.

2012 Progress Report: The timeline for this project has been delayed because coordination of experimental and corpus work in Ljubljana, Slovenia, took longer than originally projected. Following a new timeline, the groundwork for the planned experiments has been done. One PI (Zec) will make a trip to Slovenia in June 2012 and work on the logistics for conducting experiments that will be run in October 2012. The corpus component of the study will be completed over the summer of 2012.

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Limited Rationality and the Strategic Environment: An Experimental Study
Ori Heffetz, JGSM, Michael Waldman, JGSM and Kristen B. Cooper, AEM

2010 Project Description: The psychology and behavioral economics literatures show that real world decision making is frequently inconsistent with the rational actor model, but an important question is whether the presence of just a small number of rational individuals is sufficient for the predictions of the model to be correct. Recent experimental evidence shows that an important perspective concerning this issue is the nature of the strategic environment. These recent studies consider various related experiments and show that equilibrium behavior is less likely given strategic complementarity. But in a repeated setting with a single shock and a fixed set of players, even in the strategic complementarity case, play is eventually consistent with equilibrium behavior. We propose extending research in this area both theoretically and
empirically by introducing important real world complications such as multiple shocks, heterogeneous shocks, and a constant inflow of inexperienced players, where our focus will be on the nature of convergence after a shock in this more realistic type of setting.

2012 Progress Report: Prof. Heffetz’s team decided to run additional experimental treatments, designed to help them better understand results from the original experiments. During 2012, they will write a paper based on the research to date.

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Capital Jurors Deciding Intellectual Disability: What Matters and Why?
Sheri Lynn Johnson, Law, Christopher Seeds, Law and John Blume, Law

2010 Project Description: Since Atkins v. Virginia declared a categorical exemption from the death penalty for individuals with intellectual disability (mental retardation), few juries have decided the issue—by and large, Atkins decisions are judicial determinations. Among the juries that have determined the Atkins eligibility of capital defendants, however, findings of intellectual disability are exceedingly rare (approximately,11%). To better understand this infrequency, this project seeks to conduct interviews with a subset of jurors from each of the juries, across more than ten States, that reached a verdict on intellectual disability. Do jurors adhere to the substantive clinical definitions? Where jurors make the capital sentencing determination with the intellectual disability determination simultaneously, how do they juggle the distinct issues? What evidence matters to them the most, and why?

2012 Project Description: Prof. Johnson’s team has made some progress on their research interviewing jurors in capital cases on mental retardation issues. However, they have run into large obstacles in obtaining juror names. This difficulty has created delays, but they will continue on course with their research in 2012.

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Unpacking the Nano: The Price of the World’s Most Affordable Car
Kent Kleinman, AAP and Mary N. Woods, AAP

2010 Project Description: This symposium will treat with the social, cultural and environmental consequences of the world’s most affordable car, the new Tata Nano. The symposium is paired with an exhibition at Cornell’s Johnson Art Museum featuring the Nano automobile. It will focus on issues of environmental and socio-economic equity in the global south, the landscapes of automotive infrastructure, and the cultural impacts of mass automobility. Speakers and panelists invited include: Cornell economist Kaushik Basu and urban planner Neema Kudva; author Suketu Mehta; New York Times automotive reporter Phil Patton; landscape architect Dilip da Cuna; environmentalist David Orr; anthropologist Arjun Appadurai; Noble Laureate economist Amartya Sen; designers Bruce Mau and Abbott Miller; and Ratan Tata, among others. Research for the exhibition and symposium began in January 2010 with a multidisciplinary team guided by eight Cornell faculty and external advisors from the fields of economics, landscape studies, anthropology, planning, environmental science, architecture, art, and engineering. The two-day symposium will take place at Cornell on March 10/11, 2011. Graduate and undergraduate students from a fall 2010 seminar entitled “Cars, Culture, and the City: From the Ford to the Nano,” taught by Professor Woods, will also be involved with the symposium and will help to host the outside speakers.

2012 Progress Report: "The Tata Nano: the Price of the World’s Most Affordable Car" was an international symposium that addressed the complex and potentially monumental impact of the Nano — the new, sub-$2,500 automobile designed and produced in India by Tata Motors. The Nano taps deeply into the modernist trope of speed, individualized mobility, and mass production. Speakers and panel discussions explored the myriad issues raised by the Nano including: the design and engineering accomplishment; climate change and social equity on the Indian sub-continent; the cultural landscapes of mobility; and shifts in socio-aesthetic traffic associated with the automobile. Speakers included Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University; Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Sons; Abhay Deshpande, General Manager, Vehicle Integration, Nano Project, Tata Motors; Aleksander Mergold, Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture, Cornell University; Linda Nozick, Professor of Environmental Engineering, Cornell University; Phillip Patton, Author and Automotive Critic, The New York Times; Madhav Badami, Associate Professor, School of Urban Planning, McGill University; Dilip da Cunha, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania; Neema Kudva, Associate Professor of Planning, Cornell University; Vyjayanthi Rao, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research; Donald Albrecht, Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of the City of New York; Bijoy Jain, Architect and Principal, Studio Mumbai; J. Abbott Miller, Partner, Pentagram; Mary N. Woods, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, Cornell University; Durba Ghosh, Associate Professor of History, Cornell University; Suketu Mehta, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University. For more information see: http://aap.cornell.edu/events/nano/

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Immigration, Intra- and Inter-generational Socio-Economic Mobility
Daniel R. Lichter, PAM, Dean R. Lillard, PAM ,and Rebekka Christopoulou, Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center
Co-sponsored with generous support by the Cornell Population Program

2010 Project Description: In this project we will examine the social and economic mobility among recent immigrants to theUS and their offspring (i.e., second generation). We will use a unique combination of data from US and country of origin surveys that will allow us to produce new insights on the economic incorporation of first and second generation immigrants. Our research design is innovative in combining survey data at both origin and destination. Specifically, we match immigrants in the US to observationally comparable individuals in their country of origin. Unlike previous studies, US immigrants are matched to non-migrants at the origin (rather than to a particular cohort) and, in some cases, to behaviors and outcomes of people during the period before they migrated. We also examine socio-economic outcomes of migrants from six different origin countries with varying levels of economic development. These include Mexico, Canada, China, Russia, Germany, and the UK. We will focus on these countries because we have survey data from each that allows us to match US migrants with their counterparts. With the matched data, we plan to test (i) whether (and how much) first-generation migrants are upwardly mobile; (ii) whether inter‐generational mobility differs (and how) for second-generation immigrants compared to their counterparts in the country of origin; (iii) whether mobility patterns differ by gender; (iv) whether mobility patterns differ by country of origin; and (v) whether mobility patterns differ across ethno-racial groups.

2012 Progress Report: We have made significant progress with our project on international migration and marital homogamy. To date we have compiled and cleaned data and conducted preliminary analysis. We still need to refine our models and complete the final estimation. We hired a graduate student to harmonize and pool together all waves of the Current Population Survey (CPS) that contain information on country of immigrant origin (all monthly surveys from 1994-2011). From these data we drew datasets of US immigrants from the UK, Russia, China, and Germany. In a preliminary analysis, we have combined the data on British immigrants from the CPS with data of British natives who never left the UK from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). With the combined data we tested whether immigration affects marital mobility. That is, we tested whether the British who migrated to the US got married with partners more educated than themselves, whether this upward mobility was higher than for people who stayed in the UK, and whether migration had a causal role in this difference. To correct for bias due to marital sorting, we instrumented educational attainment using spending in education in the US and the UK during school-age. To correct for bias due to selective immigration, we instrumented the migration decision using economic conditions in the US during puberty and early adulthood. Currently, we are fine-tuning our empirical results for the UK and extending the analysis to countries other than the US.

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Do International Bond Markets Diversify Portfolio Risk?
Edith X. Liu, AEM

2010 Project Description: This project quantifies the potential gains for US investors to diversify portfolio risk using international bond markets. My initially analysis on this question, with non-filtered data and excludingthe most recent financial crisis of 2007-2010, finds substantial risk reduction gains to investing in foreign corporate bond markets. One way to interpret this initial finding is that there are potentially more diversification benefits in international bond markets that US investors are not capturing. This reduction in portfolio risk has the potential to generate large welfare gains by decreasing the fluctuations in individual wealth and consumption. This under-investment in foreign bond markets can be seen as another form of home bias often found in international equity markets, where investors have been found to be less likely to invest in foreign securities relative to domestic assets.(French and Porteba 1998, Coeurdacier and Rey 2010) While extensions of this project will address the potential explanation of home bias, ranging from informational asymmetry to behavioral bias to institutional frictions, this project will be an important first step in quantifying and understanding the degree of home bias that may exist in international bond markets. Further research plans will include disentangling the competing theories for the cause of home bias using the empirical results found in this project.

2012 Progress Report: The project found that international corporate bond markets offer significant diversification potential for US investors, exceeding that of global equity markets. Estimates show that US investors could have reduced portfolio risk by as much as 84% during the last financial crisis. The project is now completed and the paper is currently under review in a peer review journal.

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What Drives the Stock Price Runups? Insider Trading vs. Market Anticipation
Qingzhong Ma, Hotel Administration

2010 Project Description: In this project we investigate whether the stock price increases before the first public announcement of a merger agreement are due to insider trading or market anticipation. Different from previous studies that build upon indirect empirical evidence, we study the private deal-making process before the first public announcement of merger agreements. The private deal process is usually recorded by the merging firms themselves in their merger (or tender offer) proxy statements that they file to the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC). Typical information contained in the process include, for example, when the deal is initiated, the acquirer and target meet, the confidentiality agreement is signed, due diligence starts, the first offer is made, the auction process begins, when the deal is approved by the boards, etc. These detailed, timestamped, and privately-held activities provide rich contents to examine a series of questions related to how private information is incorporated into stock price, one of the major foci of the financial economics literature for the past half century. From these events we create a time-varying probability of deal announcement, which is privy only to the insiders involved in the deal process. By relating this private probability of deal announcement to public market activities, such as stock returns, stock volume, option trading volume, registered insiders’ trades that are subsequently reported to the SEC, we provide innovative empirical evidence that sheds light to the issue of insider trading. Furthermore, this time-varying probability of deal announcement also allows us to take a microscopic view on market anticipation events, which have been viewed as driving pre-announcement stock price increases as well. The findings have implications to bidding strategies in takeovers and regulation on insider trading.

2012 Progress Report: Prof. Ma has generated one paper under review, entitled “Through the Looking Glass: Channels of Information Leakage in Takeover,” and coauthored with Crocker Liu. This paper is also under review at several national and regional conferences for presentation. Two related projects are in the pipeline.

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The Coevolution of Individuals and Their Social Setting: A Multi-site Longitudinal Study
Brian Rubineau, ILR, David Lazer, Northeastern University and Michael Neblo, Ohio State University

2010 Project Description: People are influenced by their social environments in a myriad of ways. At the same time, people shape their social environments through their choices and actions. The coevolution between individuals and their social milieu creates a challenge for empirical study. Disentangling social influence processes from social selection processes is a notoriously difficult problem. The proposed study begins a multi-site longitudinal research project to help solve this problem, and in so doing, elucidate a variety of important social processes. Students in a unique undergraduate scholarship program live in a program-owned dormitory that defines these students’ dominant social milieu throughout college. This program operates dormitories at 14 different university campuses across the U.S. By surveying students upon entry into these social systems, we can observe students’ characteristics prior to the systems’ influence. By surveying entrants and members characteristics and social networks regularly thereafter, we can observe how the social system shapes the individual and vice versa. A pilot one-semester study in this setting has already yielded insights into peer effects on voting behavior, career plans, and health outcomes. The proposed 4-year longitudinal study will improve the power and generalizability of recent findings as well as allow greater scrutiny into the duration and development of these and other effects. This proposal is for support for the first year of this study while we seek funding for later years.

2012 Progress Report: The ISS small grant supported the first year of a proposed 4-year longitudinal study investigating social influence processes among college students. Fall 2010 represented the first year of data collection, and the grant was instrumental in both collecting the data and establishing the relationship to allow further data collection between our team of researchers and the scholarship program serving as our empirical context. We have now completed two years of data collection as a part of this project; we have a manuscript analyzing our initial results we anticipate submitting to a top sociology journal within the next 6 weeks; we have already submitted one grant proposal for additional funding; and we will be submitting another grant proposal to NIH on May 11, 2012.

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The Impact of Social Eating Patterns on Workplace Productivity and Organizational Commitment: Initiating a Program of Firefighter Research
Brian Wansink, AEM, Kevin M. Kniffin, AEM, William D. Schulze, AEM, Carol M. Devine, Nutritional Sciences and Jeffery Sobal, Nutiritional Sciences

2010 Project Description: The evolution of cooperative behavior is a puzzle for conventional economic models that presume that people are rational or selfish agents. In order to study this question, we propose to investigate a set of mechanisms that facilitate and/or disrupt cooperation within sub-groups of a community where cooperation is traditionally prized. Through a study of eating patterns among firefighters in a large urban fire department, we will test hypotheses concerning the relationship between communal eating among co-workers and various measures of individual and group performance and satisfaction. Our proposal draws upon multiple disciplinary perspectives and promises implications for several fields, including occupational health, industrial psychology, and behavioral economics.

2012 Progress Report:With support of the Philadelphia Fire Department's leadership, the project successfully engaged a representative sample of more than 75% of the Department's officers to complete a survey related to food consumption within firehouses. The survey built upon two weeks of site visits during which interviews were conducted. We are presently completing two papers about the project that will focus on the role of food consumption in relation to (1) organizational behavior and (2) occupational health. Likewise, findings have been shared with the Department's leadership (i.e., Labor and Management) and two Invited Talks have been given about the project.

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Spring 2010 Awards

Expertise Recognition in Cross-Cultural Collaboration: The Impact of Computer-Mediated and Face-to-Face Communication
Natalya Bazarova, Communication and Connie Yuan, Communication

2010 Project Description: The goal of this research is to investigate the interplay of cultural factors and communication technology on expertise recognition in cross-cultural collaboration. Although a team’s success depends to a large extent on how well members recognize and integrate one another’s knowledge and skills, expertise recognition is a major challenge in teamwork. This challenge can be further intensified in cross-cultural collaboration because of cognitive and behavioral differences, such as stereotypical perceptions of expertise and communication styles, between cultures. These differences may become less or more prominent depending on the type of communication technology used for collaboration. Building on preliminary interviews conducted for this research, the first study tests predictions about the interaction of culture and technology on expertise recognition in cross-cultural groups. Future studies will examine cross cultural teams with members located in different countries, with an ultimate goal of developing successful interventions to improve expertise evaluation in international collaboration.

2011 Progress Report: Profs. Bazarova and Yuan’s project goal was to examine the interplay of culture and communication technology on members' communication styles, and expert recognition and influence in intercultural groups. The results of their laboratory experiment using Chinese and American participants demonstrated that the effect of experts' ethnicity was moderated by communication technology. Despite having similar levels of task expertise, in face-to-face groups Chinese members participated less, were perceived as less confident, and had their expertise underestimated compared to American members. In computer-mediated text communication Chinese and American experts showed more similar communication styles, which led to reduced differences in expertise recognition and influence of Chinese experts compared to American experts. The results of this study are coming out in the following publication: Bazarova, N.N., & Yuan, C.Y. (forthcoming). Expertise recognition and influence in intercultural groups: Differences between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communicaiton.

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Preventing Deviant Internet Behavior: An Application of Prospect Theory
Sahara Byrne, Communication and Sunny "Sun Jung" Kim, Communication

2010 Project Description: Just as organizations embraced the Internet as a primary method of task-related communication, a social phenomenon was born - employees using Internet access for non-work related purposes, i.e., cyberloafing. Cyberloafing refers to deviant behaviors that describe employees use of their companies’ Internet access for personal reasons during work hours, and it is often perceived as aimless and dysfunctional work behavior. Despite continuous attempts to intervene with organizational policy and technical systems to prevent employees from engaging in cyberloafing from the top-down perspective, there is a lack of empirical research on how to change beliefs, attitude, and behaviors of Internet users through communicative approaches, i.e., campaigns. Based upon theories from communication, psychology, and behavioral science, this project aims to test cyberloafing prevention campaigns by varying conceptual components from message framing and prospect theory. Theoretical foundations, research designs, and future research directions are discussed.

2011 Progress Report: This research resulted in an article, titled “Conceptualizing personal web usage in work contexts: A preliminary framework,” published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

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Leveraging the ASHEcon Conference at Cornell to Promote Exchange Across the Social Sciences
John Cawley, Policy Analysis and Management

2010 Project Description: The third biennial conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon) will be hosted by Cornell University June 20-23, 2010. ASHEcon is the professional organization of U.S. health economists and its biennial conference is the premiere health economics research conference in the U.S. The goal of this proposal is to take advantage of the conference’s presence on campus to facilitate exchange of perspectives, methods, and findings across the social sciences. This will be accomplished by subsidizing the conference registration of social scientists (other than economists) at Cornell, subsidizing the conference registration of graduate students at Cornell, and sponsoring three paper sessions at which multiple social science disciplines will present their perspectives and findings on a similar research topic (e.g. elderly decision-making as concerns health, peer effects in risky behaviors).

2011 Progress Report: The ASHEcon conference was a fantastic success. As the Executive Director Dick Arnould wrote in the Fall 2010 ASHEcon newsletter: “There was record of almost 750 people in attendance; there were over 500 oral presentations and 115 poster presentations. Of those responding to the online survey, over 93% gave the conference a rating of 4 or 5, where 5 is the highest score. The quality of papers received very high ratings. Equally important is the fact that in no area was there a low rating.” By hosting the conference at Cornell, the profile of social science at Cornell was raised within the nationwide community of health economists andat the same time more social scientists at Cornell were able to hear about the first-rate research being done in health economics nationwide.

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Overseas Charity in Early Modern Europe: Empathy, Obligation, and Global Networks
Duane Corpis, History

2010 Project Description: Current scholarly commentary on global charity recognizes the roles that power, interest, and ideology play in wealthy nations’ humanitarian projects of foreign aid, whether private or state-run initiatives. However, this scholarship typically lacks historical depth. What were the aims, goals, and consequences of European overseas charity at a time before the modern nation-state, when European commercial capitalism was just beginning to consolidate? My project aims to provide a historical account of the emergence of overseas networks of European charity in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The first stage of my research this summer entails visiting the German city of Halle, the center of German Pietism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The archives located here include extensive materials on the Pietists’ wide-ranging global activities, especially their missionary work in North America, Eastern Europe, and India. Charitable funds gathered from Pietist congregations throughout Germany followed the missionaries in order to build new schools and churches, provide Bibles to new converts, and supply clothing and shelter for overseas communities. My research aims to answer several questions. Who were the various agents that maintained the material and social networks along which European overseas charity moved? How did a European humanitarian ethic develop to accommodate the growing awareness and recognition of non-European societies, while also restructuring the global hierarchies distinguishing Europe from the rest of the world? How did expanded European interaction with the world transform charitable empathy from a face-to-face experience within the immediate local community to one that extended into a largely imaginary global space? What types of obligation did early-modern overseas charity demand of recipients, and what were the cultural, social, and political expectations and tensions such reciprocity generated?

2011 Progress Report: In 2010, Professor Corpis spent 2 months in Leipzig, Halle, and Dresden, three cities in Germany that were centers of eighteenth-century Lutheran Pietism. While researching in the church and city archives of Leipzig, Halle, and Dresden, he discovered a massive collection of documents relevant to his research project. The best collections were housed in Halle at the Frankesche Foundation Archives. There, he knew he would find correspondence between Protestant missionaries and by the church and civic institutions in Halle, including documents concerning charitable funds used to support missions in India and North America. He found account books and receipt books that will help him reconstruct the transfers of moneys and gifts from German Protestant coffers to overseas missions. What he did not expect to find was a body of documents dealing with the Pietists’ work on ransoming Protestant prisoners of war taken in both Russian and Ottoman territories. He had originally assumed that ransoming POWs was largely a Catholic endeavor, but apparently rescuing Protestants in non-Protestant lands in order to keep them from converting seemed as desperate a goal as converting non-Christians in foreign territories. This initial research will form the basis of a very large-scale book project, including English and possibly Dutch archival sources.

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Building on the Informalized City: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Jeremy Foster, Landscape Architecture, Lily Chi, Architecture, Neema Kudva, City and Regional Planning, and Caroline O'Donnell, Architecture

2010 Conference Description: The "informal" has emerged in a number of fields as an important theme of study. For many theorists, the informal is no longer a discrete sector of urban, social, and economic activity appended to the workings of the "formal" city, but an integral effect of the restructuring of cities and landscapes by contemporary economic, political and technological developments. Self-built architectures, ambivalent landscapes, nomadic and temporal spatial formations... the manifestations of the city "informalized" are situationally specific, but globally ubiquitous. The conference for which we seek support expands upon existing research by bringing the discussion of the informal to disciplines that act on the city in material and spatial terms: architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, civil engineering, media and product design... Charged with shaping and managing living environments, usually on behalf of instituted powers and resources, many of these practices broach intriguing disciplinary limits in confronting the informalized city: from the medium and matter of design, to representational tactics and premises, to questions of agency, constituency, and purpose. “Building on the Informalized City” identifies a number of these interstices for discussion by scholars and practitioners from diverse research and design fields. Through this venue, we hope to contribute a mapping of spatial modalities of the informal, as well as critical terms and tactics for ethical and creative engagement.

2011 Progress Report: This conference will be held in April 2012. For more details see conference web site.

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The Duality of Telecom Policymaking: The Case of Internet Governance Debates
Tarleton Gillespie, Communication and Dimitry Epstein, Communication

2010 Project Description: International policymaking in the field of information and communication technology involves numerous governmental bodies, private sector organizations, and civil society groups and is conducted primarily through a “rough consensus”. This study seeks to address two main research questions regarding how this consensus is achieved. First, it aims to understand how the agenda for global ICT policymaking is set through a continuous process of deliberation and consensus seeking. Second, it aspires to explain how frames and discursive patterns emerge in the fora where policy is discussed and how these frames and patterns portray ICTs. This research is expected to expand our theoretical thinking about the constitution of an “information society,” in which policymaking processes serve as mechanisms contributing to construction of social structures, systems, and norms. The study focuses on the ongoing global debate about internet governance and employs a single case study design where each multi-stakeholders’ meeting constitutes a unit of analysis. It is based on discourse analysis of policy statements, interviews with the stakeholders, and on observations of the Internet-policy related international meetings as discursive spaces.

2011 Progress Report: This research resulted in an article titled, “Who's Responsible for the Digital Divide? Public Perceptions and Policy Implications,” in The Information Society (v27n2, 2011): 92-104.

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An Exploration of the Effect of Design Interventions on Reducing Sedentary Behavior in Workplace
Ying Hua, Design & Environmental Analysis

2010 Project Description: Sedentary behavior is prevalent in today’s workplace and has been shown to have negative impact on health. The pursuit of efficiency and the permeation of modern communication and information technologies in workplaces increased prolonged sitting and physical inactivity at work, which is a major risk factor for developing obesity, depression, and a number of diseases among the white-collar workforce. Efforts to introduce deliberate exercise into workplace, such as building fitness facilities at the worksite or implementing programs to encourage walking during break time, have showed limited effects on changing behavior, especially for those who have inactive lifestyle. The challenge is how to reduce prolonged sitting and increase the activity level in the daily work patterns. The goal of the proposed research project is to understand the behavior patterns in modern workplace and the effect of workplace spatial design on the sedentary behavior of office workers, and to examine the potential of spatial design interventions to alter the immediate incentives for behavior choices in order to encourages a healthier lifestyle in today’s workplace. A multiple-tool methodology will be developed and tested in this interdisciplinary research.

2011 Progress Report: Prof. Hua conducted an extensive literature study on the topic of building's spatial design and occupants' walking behavior. Hua built a comprehensive matrix of indices on this topic by looking at all horizontal and vertical spatial design indicators studied and the level of detail that they have been examined. Hua has completed a report on the parameters matrix developed in the literature study and the state of knowledge and theories on the research topic, and is developing the report into a journal paper now. The findings also enabled her to propose "Workplace and Health" as one of the theme topics for an international research symposium on Future Workplace that she is participating in organizing for September 2012. Based on the literature review, Hua developed a new version of Workplace Level of Activity Survey tool for her field data collection, which integrates the frequently used International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) and workplace-specific activity questions. The large-scale field data collection using this new tool on campus buildings is scheduled for Spring2012. Data analysis will follow. A typology study has been conducted on candidate campus buildings' spatial layout and several layout types have been identified and are ready for comparisons and analysis. The field data and results from the analysis will be used in a grant proposal on workplace spatial design and healthy behavior to NIH R03 Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for investigator-initiated research for external funding.

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Exploring Trans-disciplinary Research in Environmental Education and Related Fields
Marianne Krasny, Natural Resources, Janis Dickinson, Natural Resources and Justin Dillon, London

2010 Project Description: The goal of this proposal is to explore new theoretical frameworks and research directions in environmental education and related fields, by creating a platform for dialogue among 24 faculty and two graduate students from diverse disciplines including environmental sociology, communication, psychology, education, and governance. The conference is part of a larger effort, which encompasses preand post-conference communications and will lead to an edited book published in 2011. The transdisciplinary theoretical frameworks emerging from dialogue among the participants have the potential to transform environmental education research at a critical juncture in its history. This project also addresses issues related to the potential for cross-disciplinary research to solve complex environmental problems and contributes to an emerging Cornell initiative on academic pluralism.

2011 Progress Report: This workshop, successfully held in October 2010, led to a book contract, as well as an EPA 5-year grant of $11,297,500 to conduct evaluative research on the National Environmental Education Training Program.

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Engaging Images: Artists and the Art of Life in 20th Century South Africa
Daniel Magaziner, History

2010 Project Description: Engaging Artists is the story of black South African art and artists during the 20th century. Until very recently, where scholars have examined the arts in South Africa at all, they have done so reductively. The literature abounds with political readings of artistic production; poets, playwrights, artists from whatever era are read as politicians of a different name. This perspective was perhaps historically appropriate, given than most arts criticism and analysis emerged in the wake of the 1970s and 1980s struggle against apartheid, when artists, musicians and others insisted that no creativity other than creativity-in-struggle was possible. Yet most scholars have taken this outcome for granted, without adequately exploring how it came to be. Engaging Images will probe into this past, reading forward with the sweep of the 20th century to see how one group of intellectuals – visual artists – thought about what they were doing. So doing, it will offer new insights into the cultural, social and intellectual history of a time period too easily reduced to political movements and the oppressive regimes with which they grappled. Artists’ position was fraught for reasons beyond the straightforwardly political, as they confronted the expectations of their missionary and other teachers, the local and international art markets, and assumptions about what constituted appropriate African art and identities. By tracing how artists navigated this terrain, Engaging Artists will offer new insights into the intellectual challenges of black life in 20th century South Africa. By exploring the choices artists made – about subject matter, about relationships with others in society, about political engagement, about how to live their lives – it will offer a history of the actual experiences and thought that preceded the more celebrated politics of 20th century South Africa.

2011 Progress Report: Prof. Magaziner traveled to S. Africa, supported largely by his ISS grant. He found a wealth of material in archives there, including art gallery libraries in Johannesburg and Cape Town, as well as smaller public and private collections. He also conducted a number of interviews with working artists, gallerists, and others throughout the country. His research so far has been the basis of two talks presented at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on 16 March 2011and the University of Pretoria on 24 March 2011. Prof. Magaziner has been awarded additional funding by the Cornell Society for the Humanities for this research.

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Rethinking Development in an Age of Climate Change
Fouad Makki, Development Sociology, Shelley Feldman, Development Sociology, Charles Geisler, Development Sociology, and Phil McMichael, Development Sociology

2010 Project Description: In the shadow of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, the world faces an uncertain future, combining ecological and economic crises with multilateral paralysis. In such moments of uncertainty, long-cherished beliefs about economic growth and sustainability can lose salience, legitimacy, and coherence. Arguably, this is the case today for the notion of development understood as a ‘master concept’ of the social sciences. Development’s meaning, scale, and impact are being irrevocably altered by the specter of climate change, and policy-makers, analysts and practitioners are engaged separately or together in rethinking the development paradigm. While emerging perspectives vary in focus and scope, they all recognize that development, understood as an epistemic and material response to global inequality, can no longer be addressed and practiced in isolation from climate change. Our proposal is to organize a Cornell Workshop to explore this repositioning of ‘development’ in the context of climate change. Its aim is diagnostic: to assemble a variety of analytical perspectives to identify the possibilities and limits of paradigmatic transformations in the meaning and practice of development.

2011 Progress Report: This conference was held in November 2011. For more details see Conference Web Site.

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Linguistic and Emotional Factors in Intergroup Linguistic Bias
Poppy McLeod, Communication

2010 Project Description: This proposal seeks to develop stimuli and to conduct pilot testing of experimentalparadigms for a larger program of research being proposed for funding from the National Science Foundation (Proposal #6991180), and from the United States Department of Agriculture Hatch
Foundation (USDA: Proposal #2010-11-157). This larger research program examines how intergroup bias – defined as showing preference for one’s ingroup and derogating outgroups -- is reflected in differential language choices and attributions of emotions in descriptions of ingroups and outgroups. The larger research program will contribute to the literature on intergroup bias by integrating major theoretical approaches to intergroup bias that have complementary perspectives but have heretofore developed independently.

2011 Progress Report: Prof. McLeod’s pilot research led to a $81,448 three-year grant from the USDA Hatch Foundation to study language use in public controversies, such as NYS natural gas drilling,

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Kin and Kingdom: Using GIS to understand the relationship between tribes and elections in Jordan
David Patel, Government

2010 Project Description: Why do “tribal” candidates in the Arab world win parliamentary seats in some districts, but not others? Why can some tribes, but not others, coordinate members’ votes in a way to maximize their chance of winning, and why do clan identities sometimes trump tribal ones? I seek to understand how tribes affect electoral politics and the extent to which electoral politics reinforce or even redefine tribal identities. I hypothesize that voters select the level of tribal identity that puts them in a minimum winning coalition and that gerrymandering and electoral rules can therefore reshape what level of the tribal pyramid is politically relevant. To assess this hypothesis and alternative explanations, I will build a
GIS geospatial database of Jordanian tribal boundaries, their constituent segments’ areas (i.e., clans, lineages, extended families), electoral districts, and candidates for parliament from five elections from 1989‐2007. I seek support from the ISS Small Grant Program for 1) training in GIS software at Cornell, and 2) travel to Jordan to collect these data on tribes, tribal boundaries, and parliamentary candidates.

2012 Progress Report: Prof. Patel’s research in Jordan has resulted in the working paper titled, "From Islamic to Ethnic Politics in Jordan.”

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Fluid Empires: Water Management across the French Mediterranean
Sara Pritchard, Science & Technology Studies
Co-sponsored with generous support by the Einaudi Center

2010 Project Description: My second book-length project, Fluid Empires: Water Management across the French Mediterranean, explores the development and circulation of experts, knowledge, and technologies related to water management between France and its North African colonies and protectorates (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) since the late nineteenth century. This study thus examines imperialism and postcoloniality through social scientific investigation of science, technology, and environmental management. In particular, it considers the entwined political, economic, technical, and ecological relationships between France and French North Africa both during and after colonialism through the lens of water and its regulation. This new research is an outgrowth of my earlier work, both historically and theoretically, while addressing important new dimensions, including colonialism, postcoloniality, and globalization. More broadly, it reflects my work at the intersection of science and technology studies (S&TS), the history of science and technology, environmental history, and the historical discipline more broadly. Furthermore, this project contributes to several wider themes within the social sciences: it 1) foregrounds the role of technoscientific and environmental “expertise” in colonial and postcolonial societies; 2) interrogates the relationship between bodies of water and political governance (especially in colonial settings); 3) historicizes the politics of “development” (paying particular attention to the French case); and 4) helps contextualize contemporary water policy and legislation around the globe today.

2012 Progress Report: This research resulted in a 2012 article, titled From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond, published in the journal Social Studies of Science.

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Estimating the Impact of Alternative Canopy Management Practices on White
Wine Purchase Decisions
Todd Schmit, Applied Economics and Management, Bradley Rickard, Applied Economics and Management, and Anna Mansfield, Food Science

2010 Project Description: Because of the correlation between wine flavor properties and per-bottle price, research and extension efforts in the New York State have focused increasingly on improving white wine flavor qualities and wine grape potential. In addition, efforts to reduce chemical use by wine grape growers through improved canopy management practices may result in wines with differing characteristics and, thus, effect the valuation of that wine by consumers. To fulfill the dual goals of developing best management practices for growers and improving flavor quality, the key chemosensory attributes of wines that correlate with increased consumer demand must be well-defined. Additionally, if alternative practices to produce wines with specific flavor profiles are known, growers/winemakers must consider all of the costs and the benefits. Knowledge of both the desirable sensory attributes in wines and the expected return to growers or winemakers for achieving these qualities can be used to guide production decisions. This project will address these issues by estimating how the variation in a wines’ sensory profile due to alternative canopy management practices affect a buyers’ willingness to pay and provide recommendations to white wine grape growers and winemakers to enhance decision-making acuity for vineyard management and winemaking decisions.

2012 Progress Report: Todd Schmit’s research led to a presentation titled Consumer Premiums for Environmentally Friendly Production Practices in New York Wines , given at several venues including the 2011 Agriculture and Applied Economics Meeting. The Chronicle has also covered his work in relation to the Cornell course on Sustainability and Organic Grape and Wine Production in an article,”Sustainable sipping: New York produces eco-friendly wines.”

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Eating Network Partners
Jeffrey Sobal, Nutritional Science, Matthew Brashears, Sociology, and Karla Hanson, Nutritional Science

2010 Project Description: Everyone eats, and eating is often a social activity. Research suggests that the social context of eating influences the type and amount of food that people consume. However, little is currently known about networks of eating partners, a gap that this project seeks to help fill by acquiring unique data, constructing a data set, and conducting analyses that examine prevalence and patterns of eating network partners in the U.S. Social network analysis offers the potential to understand eating network ties, but full network analysis requires much time and expense to collect data from all network members. We propose to use time use survey data that identifies episodes of activity and also who was present with the respondent in each episode. We will analyze the large, contemporary, and nationally representative 2006/2007 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) that includes 25,191 respondents age 15 and older. The analysis will 1) identify types of eating network partners, 2) measure the strength of ties to eating network partners, 3) examine combinations of eating network partners and develop a typology of eating network partner classes, 4) describe the diversity of eating network partner classes, and 5) characterize demographic differences across partners and classes. This project will advance social network analysis by employing time use data to assess ego-networks, and also will provide new insights about the sociology of eating relevant to nutrition, and health. Our findings have the potential to motivate a new focus on with whom people eat as a novel pathway that shifts thinking beyond the traditional focus upon what and how much people eat that has potential for encouraging healthy eating. This initial ATUS analysis will be published and will provide a foundation for seeking external funding for more comprehensive analysis of eating network partners.

2012 Progress Report: This research has been delayed and is in the data analysis stage.

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The Causal Mechanisms of the Democratic Peace
Jessica Weeks, Government and Michael Tomz, Stanford University

2010 Project Description: The project’s goal is to increase our understanding of the past, current, and future effects of democratic institutions on international conflict. To do this, the project will substantially increase the quality and quantity of data about the causes of military conflict. There are two main components to the proposal. The first component involves building a revised version of the widely-used Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) Dataset. The second component consists of a series of survey experiments designed to identify how and why regime type and other factors affect citizens' support for using military force abroad. This research project will result in several publications, an online database, and will offer research and learning opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students. The project is jointly implemented with Michael Tomz, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

2011 Progress Report: Prof. Weeks’ research has led to two additional grants from the Cornell Affinito-Stewart program (2011) and Smith Richardson Foundation (2010). Her book manuscript is titled, Dictators at War. For media coverage, please see Two ISS small grant PIs Receive 2011 Affinito-Stewart Grants
and Government's Jessica Weeks Wins Grant for Book on War

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For more information, please see the FAQ, funding statistics, and overview.

All questions should be directed to socialsciences@cornell.edu.