abstract: Men may engage in financially risky behaviors when seeking mates for several reasons: Risky behaviors can signal to potential mates one's genetic fitness, may facilitate success in status competition with other men, and may be a necessary strategy for gaining sufficient resources to offer potential mates. Once in a relationship, however, the same financial riskiness may be problematic for males, potentially suggesting to partners an interest in (extra-curricular) mate-seeking and placing in jeopardy existing resources available to the partner and the relationship. In the current research, we employed guided visualization scenarios to activate either a mating motivation or no motivation in single and in attached men and women. Participants indicated their preference for either guaranteed sums of money or chances of getting significantly more money accompanied by chances of getting nothing. As predicted, mating motivation led single men to become more risky and attached men to become less risky. These findings replicated across different samples and measures. Interestingly, in all three studies, women exhibited the opposite pattern: Mating motivation led single women to become less financially risky and attached women to become more risky. Thus, two additional experiments were conducted to explore the potential causes of this effect. The results of these latter experiments support the "mate-switching" hypothesis of risk-taking in attached women. That is, women who are able (i.e. have high mate value) were more risky in order to exit an undesirable relationship and move into a better one. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Psychology 2012

The dramatic increase in the masculine practice of tattooing among girls in Western societies is an area of interest for feminist researchers and visual culture educators. Girls’ tattoos are perceived as diverse practices of conformity, resistance, reclamation, and empowerment, and/or as contemporary markers of femininity, sexuality, and desire. Eleven adolescent girls with tattoos from the Central Okanagan region of British Columbia were interviewed during a 12 month period in 2007/2008. Discourse analysis was employed as a method to interpret and deconstruct girls’ narratives with respect to understanding why girls have adopted traditional Western male practices of tattooing as expressions of individuality or identity. Secondly, responses were examined with respect to girls’ knowledge of potential risks involved with tattooing. The majority of participants had strong attachments to their relatives and their tattoos signified a desire to maintain that close family relationship. Research findings indicated girls’ mothers were influential in their daughters’ decisions to get tattooed and in the type of image tattooed. Girls were adamant that popular media figures with tattoos and advertisements of models with tattoos could influence or encourage girls to engage in body art. Knowledge of potential risks was learned primarily from tattoo artists and relatives, with infection indicated as the main associated risk. Participants suggested the distribution of pamphlets in school counseling centres could inform students of potential risks and provide information related to safe body art practices. Participants believed societal norms respecting girls’ behaviors and practices were different than those experienced by their mothers. However size, placement, and image of their tattoos, their own biases, and their experiences with older relatives including grandmothers and some fathers indicate that traditional Western attitudes regarding femininity and the female body continue. In spite of this, girls believe that they have the freedom to choose how they enact femininity and assert their individuality, and they believe “if guys can do it, so can girls”. As visual culture educators we need to listen to and respect the voices of girls to achieve a greater understanding of how girls experience and perform gender through their everyday practices within the popular visual culture. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Risk has become a key concept in social theory and has had a significant impact across academic disciplines including criminology. On the one hand, several criminologists argue that the rise of risk has fundamentally reconfigured the operations of courts, corrections, and policing. Many claim that, over the last few decades, crime control has moved away from the old rehabilitative and retributive approaches of the past and towards more actuarial approaches based on risk management – crime has become a risk to be managed in aggregate terms rather than a moral transgression in need of rectification. On the other hand, while risk-based approaches to governing crime have grown significantly, cultural criminologists and sociologists of sport have noted a heightened emphasis on risk-taking by urban graffiti writers, illegal street racers, extreme sports enthusiasts, and illicit drug users. For these people, the risk-averse logic of actuarial governance – risk as potential harm to be avoided – is inverted such that risk is positively embraced for the excitement it affords. What is particularly characteristic about the present, then, is that a politics of risk management is colliding with a culture of risk-taking. In attempts to make sense of this puzzling paradox, in this thesis I offer a primarily theoretical investigation of the dominant approaches used in the study of risk management (chp. I) and risk taking (chp. II & III) in sociology and criminology. After exploring how the rise of risk has reconfigured crime control over the last quarter century in Chapter one, in Chapter two I develop the argument that orthodox criminology provides two dominant images of criminal risk-taking. While dispositional theories explain criminal risk-taking as the pathological behaviour of individuals with particular body types, low-self control, or of lower-class origin, situational theories conceive of criminal risk-taking as the (ir)rational decisions of necessarily risk-averse actors. Despite differences between dispositional and situational theories, both leave no room for risk-taking that is controlled and intentional. In Chapter three I enlist the work of Jack Katz on the seductions of crime and of Stephen Lyng on the sociology of risk-taking to develop a third, cultural approach to risk-taking that is voluntary and cross-class. I illustrate how, for Katz’s and Lyng’s actors, risk is approached as a challenge rather than seen as a deterrent. Lastly, I add to the historicity of the cultural approach to risk-taking by tracing its roots in a romantic worldview that arose out of 19th century disenchantment with the bureaucratic rationalism and alienation of capitalist modernity. In conclusion, I summarize the main argument of the thesis and outline some potential avenues for future research.

The concept of “social capital” has received considerable attention these years. Yet, few studies have explored the connections between social capital and bank risk-taking. In this study, I discuss the theory of social capital and its relevance to financial market behavior, and then I analyze the relationship between social capital and bank risk-taking across countries. To measure social capital, I follow Knack and Keefer (1997) and use the data of trust and civic norms collected from the World Values Survey. My measure of bank risk-taking is the nature logarithm of Z-score of each bank. Empirical results show that bank risk-taking is lower in countries where social capital is higher. It is also shown that the impact of social capital is stronger when the level of education in the country is lower. This paper investigates the negative impact of social capital on non-performing loan as well.

Many-psychotherapists feel that the capacity to risk is a necessary ingredient for change. Whether that change occur in a person seen in a professional context or in a person who views new behavior as being more rewarding, risk and change go hand in hand. Coleman (1972) described this relationship in the following way: Life often poses problems in which the pursuit of increased satisfactions involves giving up present hard-won security and taking new risks. For the neurotic, this is likely to prove an especially anxiety-arousing conflictful situation [p. 226]. Why should this be true? It seems that one of the major ways we keep ourselves from risking is by requiring knowledge of what is going to happen before we will try something new. Polster and Polster (1972) state: For most people the need to be able to predict the results of their actions prevents them from easily reaching beyond the existing forms of behavior where the greatest opportunities are present. If they venture into unfamiliar territory, while they might gain an increased sense of excitement and power, they might lose their easy understanding and feel unprepared and alien [p. 148]. Another force which makes risking, for change, a difficult process is the fear of knowledge of oneself. Part of our energy is directed towards maintaining and protecting was conducted by dividing the sample into two groups defined by attendance at the out-patient clinics. It was hypothesized that subjects attending the out-patient clinics would show larger changes in the direction of increased risk taking between pre and post-program testing conditions, and that their scores would be lower numerically, indicating a greater willingness to take risks. Change in the direction of increased risk taking was found to be the major predictor of attendance at the outpatient clinics. Absolute willingness to risk, as measured by the questionnaire was not found to be significantly different between the two groups.

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Thesis advisor: Thann Tran / Thesis advisor: Margaret Lombe / This study aimed to examine the influence of organizational pro-activeness, organizational risk-taking, and transformational leadership behaviors on social innovation outcomes. The specific aims, within this goal, of this study include the following: 1: Explore the influence of organizational pro-activeness on social innovation outputs - a. product/service, b. process/administrative- within CSOs. 2: Explore the influence of organizational risk-taking on social innovation outputs - a. product/service, b. process/administrative - within the CSOs. 3: Explore the influence of transformational leadership behaviors within CSOs on social innovation outputs - a. product/service, b. process/administrative – within the CSOs. Entrepreneurial Orientation Theory & Transformational Leadership Theory oriented this study and the hypothesis to test. This research is an exploratory-descriptive study using cross-sectional data collected from directors of CSOs in Mexico with a 37-item online survey cross-culturally adapted to the local context. Multiple statistical procedures were used to test the hypothesis, including bivariate robust correlation analysis and multiple and linear robust regression analysis. The sample size of the study is 139 directors of non-profit organizations from 25 different states of Mexico. Data was collected using convenience sampling.This study is relevant for multiple reasons, the primary being the following: 1) The results of this study may help CSOs identify what areas of organizations may need restructuring, improvement, or addition to generating innovations that could enhance program and service effectiveness and sustainability. 2) by providing knowledge about how to enhance the capacity of CSOs and involve their clients or beneficiaries (populations and groups in vulnerable or exclusion conditions) in innovation processes. 3) This study may contribute to the identification of critical components in the design of policies and programs aimed at strengthening CSOs innovation capacities and how to measure their results. 4) Finally, this study's results provide evidence on key variables to understand factors that enhance or limit organizational social innovation. In the context of the proposed study, to our knowledge, there is no readily available data from an extensive number of organizations to inform how CSOs are generating social innovation and with what intensity. Also, with the global socio-economic panorama in the last two years, innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, and the social performance of non-profit organizations have become subject to growing interest. This study has three main findings: Organizational proactiveness and risk-taking are significant predictors of social innovation outputs in non-profit organizations. On the other hand, transformational leadership was not a significant predictor of social innovation outputs. The primary contributions of this study are the generation of a baseline of the current situation regarding social innovation outputs generation among non-profit CSOs in Mexico. The study also contributes evidence on how social innovation can be promoted with organizational practices. It also contributes to the scholarly debate around leadership styles and their relationship to social innovation generation and CSOs better performance. This study explores social innovation in the non-profit field from an international context, specifically in Mexico, for a field mainly concentrated in the U.S. and West Europe. The study also informs some implications for practitioners, policy decisions, and scholarship regarding the need to assess how the notion of risk-taking and proactiveness permeated the CSOs and the non-profit sector. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.