Peter Mascini

'Why Do Churches Become Empty, While New Age Grows? Secularization and Religious Change in the Netherlands'

Research from the Netherlands has pointed out that the increased popularity of New Age since the 1960s by no means compensates for the dramatic decline of the Christian churches. From a theoretical point of view, however, it is more important to study why those remarkably divergent developments have occurred in the first place. This article does this by analyzing survey data collected among the Dutch population at large in 1998, focusing on a comparison of the young and the elderly. It is concluded, first, that there are no indications that the decline of the Christian tradition has been caused by a process of rationalization. Second, the decline of the Christian tradition and the growth of nonreligiosity as well as New Age are caused by increased levels of moral individualism (individualization). implications for the sociological analysis of cultural and religious change are discussed.

Gender Stereotyping in the Dutch Asylum Procedure: ‘Independent’ Men versus ‘Dependent’ Women

Attention for discrimination against women in asylum law has grown considerably during the last few decades. Yet it is male claimants who have had smaller success rates in the asylum procedures of different countries. Using administrative data from the Dutch INS, we show this difference is caused by the traditionally gendered migration pattern of asylum seekers. Men have a smaller success rate than women because they are less likely than women to have a spouse or children, are less likely to follow their spouse to the country of destination, and are more likely to come from countries considered to be safe. This suggests that men are less successful in their attempts to seek asylum because they better fit the image of “bogus” refugees, while women more clearly match the image of “victim of patriarchal domination.”

Risky Information: Social Limits to Risk Management

textabstractThis article demonstrates that systematic biases occur in (near-)accident reporting. This conclusion is based on a quantitative document analysis of 208 reports recently written by employees of an industrial company. The effectiveness of accident reporting, as an instrument for risk management, is hampered because employees take the relationship with their colleagues into account when reporting. The way of reporting proves to vary with the horizontal and vertical relational distance of the reporting employee to the person who is held responsible for the reported event. These findings support the Normal Accident Theory and weaken the empirical basis of the High Reliability Theory.

Can the Violent Jihad Do without Sympathizers

According to some terrorist fighters and academicians the constituencies of Muslim extremists are vital to the persistence of the jihad. Interviews and public information were used to examine the accuracy of this claim. The analysis demonstrates that sympathizers are indispensable to some preparative terrorist activities, yet not to others. Extremists depend less on sympathizers for making foreign journeys, generating revenues, and communication than they do for recruiting and sponsoring. So, sympathizers may be important for the persistence of the jihad, yet their role is not self-evident. This implies that receding of sympathy for the jihad will not automatically reduce it.

Neoliberalism and work-related risks: individual or collective responsibilization?

Based on a representative sample of the Dutch population (N = 2467), we test four hypotheses about how utilitarian individualism influences the responsibilization of work-related risks (i.e. the risk of dropping out of work because of unemployment, disability, or sickness). The risk society hypothesis understands utilitarian individualism as a laissez-faire ideological orientation and assumes it to lead to individual responsibilization. The blame culture hypothesis conceives utilitarian individualists as consumer citizens and predicts the reverse – that those concerned expect to be protected by the government. The resentment hypothesis assumes that particularly utilitarian individualists with a vulnerable labor-market position individualize responsibility, because they distrust those who share their fate more than others do. The narcissism hypothesis reverses this logic, because it assumes that utilitarian individualists’ narcissistic self-centeredness entices them to make others responsible for their own risks. The two hypotheses predicting an individualization of work-related risk due to utilitarian individualism are both confirmed, whereas the two hypotheses predicting it to result in their collectivization are both rejected.

Beyond the domestication of nature? Restructuring the relationship between nature and technology in car commercials

It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercials, this study develops a typology of constellations of nature and technology. Besides the well-known modern dichotomy of nature versus technology, with the latter being superior to the former, three types of articulations were found: technology as a flexible and superior technological mimicry of nature; technological mastery as harmful to nature; and nature and technology as two holistically connected realms. Implications for theories about the changing nature of nature and the restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology are discussed.

Integrating a Top-Down and a Bottom-Up Approach: Formal and Informal Risk Handling Strategies in a Utility Company

In this study, we bring together a top-down and a bottom-up approach of risk handling. We do so by conceptualizing and qualitatively and quantitatively measuring formal and informal risk-handling strategies in a Dutch utility company. We conceive of formal risk handling as regulating, training, and educating safety and enforcing rule compliance, while we distinguish three different informal risk-handling strategies: discretionary specialization, tacit knowledge, and taking personal responsibility. We show that the formal risk-handling strategy and the three informal risk-handling strategies can be measured separately. Hence, we have validated the measurement of all four strategies derived from two different risk-handling approaches. Moreover, we have demonstrated that the perceived use of the four strategies has different effects on unsafe behavior: formal risk handling and tacit knowledge decrease it, discretion increases it, and taking personal responsibility has no effect on unsafe behavior.

Transnationalism of Burundian Refugees in The Netherlands: The Importance of Migration Motives

It is equivocal whether the transnationalism of refugees differs significantly from that of labor and family migrants. On the basis of a strategic case study of Burundian refugees in The Netherlands we demonstrate that migration motives undeniably matter for transnationalism. Transnationalism is not self-evident for Burundians, as they are driven by a motive of flight. Moreover, transnationalism is not automatically oriented towards compatriots and manifests itself differently in The Netherlands than in Belgium. Therefore, we conclude that the study of refugees is an essential complement to the prevailing research on the transnationalism of settled labor and family migrant communities.

Remorse in Context(s): A Qualitative Exploration of the Negotiation of Remorse and Its Consequences

The presence or absence of ‘signs of remorse’ is often understood to have consequences for judges’ sentencing decisions. However, these findings raise the questions, first, how ‘remorse’ is communicated and demonstrated by defendants within court settings, and second, whether remorse plays a uniform role across and between various offence and offender types. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in a Dutch criminal court, we contextualize remorse to answer these questions. First, we demonstrate that the performance of remorse has to strike a fine balance between potentially competing legal and moral narrative demands. Second, we identify three different typified ‘whole-case narratives’, within which defendants’ performances of remorse assume differential levels of importance. In doing so, we seek to complicate binary portrayals of the role and consequences of remorse, arguing for a more holistic and narrative understanding of sentencing practices.

Empirical legal research: charting the terrain

In the academic discipline of the law, scholars have traditionally dealt with legal texts by organizing them, analysing their content from an interpretative, hermeneutical perspective and developing coherent arguments on the law while oscillating between logical deduction, inference and normative claims. Some legal scholars tend to search for logic and order in the continuous and disorderly flow of cases, legislative instruments and policy documents. Others focus their work on building philosophical foundations for the law as it stands or on developing an all-encompassing normative theory of just, fair, efficient or viable law. Most will agree that the academic legal discipline holds legal practice close to its heart and that many law scholars explicitly embrace the practice-oriented character of their teaching and research. Others will be more drawn to understanding the law in its social or philosophical context. There are also scholars who study the law in its social context or as a particular domain of social interaction. These scholars often represent legal subdisciplines with an embedded culture of empirical research – be it socio-legal studies, legal psychology, law and economics, criminology or any other type of research of social legal interaction. Today, therefore, a multitude of academic perspectives on the law impress their mark on law schools: there are those who teach and research positive law as a system which is in constant need of taxonomy, categorization and doctrinal evaluation; those who reflect on its theoretical and philosophical foundations; and those who scrutinize the law from an empirical perspective.1