Job quality,industrial relations and the crisis in Europe

This paper reports results from recent Eurofound research on the impact of the crisis on industrial relations and working conditions in Europe, based on the output of Eurofound's European Working Conditions Observatory and European Industrial Relations Observatory and data from the European Working Conditions Survey. Overall, the crisis – even if it is sometimes difficult to separate the effect of the crisis from megatrends in working conditions and industrial relations – seems to have had an impact on both domains. With reference to industrial relations, the impact of the crisis has influenced actors, processes, and outcomes. Regarding working conditions, the results appear to be in line with the literature on the topic, which relates the crisis to an increase in job insecurity, a decrease in work intensity, in working hours, and in anti-social working time arrangements, and a general improvement in terms of health risks and related outcomes.     

Ethical living: relinking ethics and consumption through care in Chile and Brazil

Mainstream conceptualizations of ‘ethical consumption’ equate the notion with conscious, individual, market‐mediated choices motivated by ethical or political aims that transcend ordinary concerns. Drawing on recent sociology and anthropology of consumption literature on the links between ordinary ethics and ethical consumption, this article discusses some of the limitations of this conceptualization. Using data from 32 focus groups conducted in Chile and Brazil, we propose a conceptualization of ethical consumption that does not centre on individual, market‐mediated choices but understands it at the level of practical outcomes, which we refer to as different forms of ‘ethical living’. To do that, we argue, we need to depart from the deontological understanding of ethics that underpins mainstream approaches to ethical consumption and adopt a more consequentialist view focusing on ethical outcomes. We develop these points through describing one particular ordinary moral regime that seemed to be predominant in participants’ accounts of ethics and consumption in both Chile and Brazil: one that links consumption and ethics through care. We show that the moral regime of care leads to ‘ethical outcomes’, such as energy saving or limiting overconsumption, yet contrary to the mainstream view of ethical consumption emphasizing politicized choice expressed through markets, these result from following ordinary ethics, often through routines of practices.     

解码“中国经济增长”

消费是人类经济增长最初也是最终的目的，单纯为了经济增长速度、为了增加就业、为了出口创汇等，可能脱离经济发展的消费目的，未必有利于真正的经济增长。新时期中国理想的经济增长必须考虑以下六个制约因素，即居民增长的消费需求、资源的供给、环境容量、国际竞争力、科技创新和制度。关键是突出消费作为增长的目的，抛弃狭隘的速度思维，将环境保护放在首位，以分配公平为前提，建立有责任约束的经济增长机制。     

家电下乡政策的消费效应评估——基于全国221个村庄的4年跟踪调查

以全国221个村庄所获得的4年调查数据作为研究基础,对"家电下乡"政策的消费效应予以评估和分析。调查表明,家电下乡政策消费效应的最大特征是农民消费需求的释放,其中包括全国消费总额的上升,户均消费额增幅达到8成,全国各地消费总量和户均消费数量的增加。但家电下乡政策的消费效应在实践中也遇到了持续性疲软的难题,如农民收入的限制作用,农民购买下乡产品比重偏低,政府补贴额和补贴程序不足,政策宣传和解说不到位。为了使家电下乡政策的消费效应持续起效,必须不断完善政策,使家电下乡政策的实惠真正落实到农民身上。     

Did small and medium enterprises maintain better jobs during the early years of the recession? Job quality multidimensional evidence from Spain

While the literature has indeed confirmed a general tendency linking small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to a dynamic of greater job creation, there is little available evidence on what has happened to job quality since the financial crisis. Through a representative sample of 5311 employees in 2008 (first year of job destruction) and 4925 employees in 2010 (last year for which data were available), and using a two-stage structural equation model, this article empirically analyses the multidimensional determinants of job quality, by enterprise-size class, in Spain. The research has revealed three main results. First, job quality in Spain improved in all enterprises, regardless of their size, during the early years of the recession. Second, the greatest improvements were found in SMEs. Although job quality was already better in SMEs than in large enterprises in 2008, the differences between them subsequently widened. Third, this accelerated divergence was explained by the following dimensions: working conditions, work intensity, health and safety at work, and work–life balance. These dimensions were much more positive in SMEs. Employment-related public policy should therefore focus more specifically on SMEs. There are two reasons for this. First, despite the recession, SMEs have shown themselves to be key factors in the explanation of job quality. Second, by making changes to their value generation model, they could continue to drive the creation of better quality jobs.     

Decomposition of Variance for Spatial Cox Processes

Abstract. Spatial Cox point processes is a natural framework for quantifying the various sources of variation governing the spatial distribution of rain forest trees. We introduce a general criterion for variance decomposition for spatial Cox processes and apply it to specific Cox process models with additive or log linear random intensity functions. We moreover consider a new and flexible class of pair correlation function models given in terms of normal variance mixture covariance functions. The proposed methodology is applied to point pattern data sets of locations of tropical rain forest trees.     

Jamming the jamming: Brazilian protests as an illustration of a new politics of consumption

ABSTRACT

Based on a reflexive and critical analysis of the citizen protests that pervaded Brazilian cities in June 2013, in this article we argue that a significant part of the demonstrators’ dissatisfaction took the form of a new politics of consumption with particular characteristics, including the subversion of the culture jamming concept by citizens and by corporations. Our main contribution is to provide the Brazilian protests as an illustration of a new politics of consumption, where ‘citizen-consumers’ direct their dissatisfaction toward the government using tactics that, historically, were considered counter-hegemonic and directed to the market, as is the case of the culture jamming. Likewise, the corporations present themselves as partners of those citizen-consumers. Mobilizing a dialectical reasoning, our results invite readers to reflect on the ambiguities among politics of consumption and culture jamming, and the challenges they bring to organizations and society.     

Gaps in social protection for health care and long‐term care in Europe: Are the elderly faced with financial ruin?

While public expenditure on health care and long‐term care (LTC) has been monitored for many years in European countries, far less attention has been paid to the financial consequences for older people of private out‐of‐pocket (OOP) expenditure necessary to access such care. Employing representative cross‐sectional data on the elderly populations of 11 European countries in 2004 from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we find that OOP payments for health care and LTC are very common among the elderly across European countries and such expenditures impact significantly on disposable income: up to 95 per cent of the elderly make OOP payments for health care and 5 per cent for LTC, resulting in income reductions of between 5 and 10 per cent, respectively. Failure to prevent financial ruin, as a consequence of excessive OOP payments, is evident in 0.7 per cent of elderly households utilizing health care and 0.5 per cent of elderly households utilizing LTC. Those particularly concerned are the poor, women and the very old.     

论消费在国际传媒生产总过程中的地位

在国际传媒生产贸易中，传媒产品消费的本质就是价值认可式的精神性消费，在自愿获得消费物的消费中，得到精神与心灵上的满足，实现对一国传媒产品的最优化接受。由此本质出发，总结了消费的六种类型，在分析梳理其逻辑关系的基础上，论证了消费在国际传媒生产总过程中的主导地位。     

德莱塞笔下的新女性形象——嘉莉妹妹的个性分析

在美国文学史上,德莱塞塑造的嘉莉妹妹一直是个有争议的人物形象.本文从19世纪末20世纪初美国新兴消费文化和新女性崛起这一特定社会历史背景出发,从自我实现、自主选择、自我塑造三个方面尝试解读嘉莉妹妹这一形象在个性上表现出的新女性内涵.