Migrant women’s economic success in Russia: objective reality and subjective assessment

This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the outcomes of labour migration by focusing on the effects of migrant legal status on the economic and perceptual measures of migration success. To study the effects of legal status, we use a sample of Central Asian migrant women who work in Russia and of their native counterparts who occupy the same positions on the labour market. Similar to the studies in the developed settings, we find that a temporary legal status is associated with an earnings penalty and that permanent legal status corrects this earning disparity. We also find that both temporary and permanent migrant status is positively associated with perceptions of pay inequality but that, irrespective of these perceptions, both types of migrants are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs than natives. We interpret these findings within the legal and social context of migrant economic incorporation in Russia and relate them to the findings from other migrant-receiving settings.     

Organizational transformation among NGOs,North and South

Going Global: Transforming Relief and Development NGOs, by Marc Linberg and Coralie Bryant. Bloomfield, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 2001. 271 pp., $25.95 cloth. Towards Financial Self‐Reliance: A Handbook of Resource Mobilization for Civil Society Organizations in the South, by Richard Holloway. London: Earthscan, 2001. 233 pp., $25.00 cloth.     

Understanding Care Leavers in Russia: Young People's Experiences of Institutionalisation

Abstract

Care leavers in Russia represent one of the most disadvantaged groups in society. However, they have rarely been the focus of welfare policy debate and they receive little or no support in their independent living. This paper presents the findings of a survey of Russian care leavers. The emphasis is on care leavers' experiences of the Russian institutional care system, and the issues that impacted on their postcare transition to adulthood. A number of factors were found to influence the wellbeing of care leavers, including placement instability, institutional isolation, poor education, stigmatisation of care leavers, relationships with “houseparents”, and supportive and often challenging friendships. Findings are discussed in relation to debates about the degree and nature of institutional care of children in Russia and elsewhere.     

Optimal linear projections for enhancing desired data statistics

Problems involving high-dimensional data, such as pattern recognition, image analysis, and gene clustering, often require a preliminary step of dimension reduction before or during statistical analysis. If one restricts to a linear technique for dimension reduction, the remaining issue is the choice of the projection. This choice can be dictated by desire to maximize certain statistical criteria, including variance, kurtosis, sparseness, and entropy, of the projected data. Motivations for such criteria comes from past empirical studies of statistics of natural and urban images. We present a geometric framework for finding projections that are optimal for obtaining certain desired statistical properties. Our approach is to define an objective function on spaces of orthogonal linear projections—Stiefel and Grassmann manifolds, and to use gradient techniques to optimize that function. This construction uses the geometries of these manifolds to perform the optimization. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate these ideas for natural and facial images.     

Economic Incorporation,Civil Inclusion,and Social Ties: Plans to Return Home Among Central Asian Migrant Women in Moscow,Russia

This study uses data from a survey of female labor migrants from three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – in Moscow, Russia, to examine factors that influence these women's plans to return to their home countries. The conceptual framework considers three types of factors of migrants' attachment to the host society – economic incorporation, civil inclusion, and social connectedness – while also accounting for migrants' ties to their homelands. The results of multivariate analyses point to the importance of sector and type of employment, income, legal status, experience of ethnically motivated harassment, and social ties to adults relatives and friends in the host society in shaping return plans. In contrast, connections in the home country do not appear to influence the likelihood of having plans to return. These findings are contextualized within the political, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural reality of the post‐Soviet world and related to the cross‐national scholarship on return migration.     

“Strivers”, “doers”, and “seekers”: Social workers and their commitment to the job

Amid considerable interest in the experiences of early career professionals in social work in England and internationally, and the relationship between these and retention and progression, this article reports on the findings of one element of a larger evaluation. It reports the findings and analysis of interviews with 42 relative newcomers to social work, some 3 years following qualification, focusing on their current career orientations, and how these appear to affect their future intentions. We identified three distinct groups, designated as “strivers,” “doers,” and “seekers.” Each of these groups demonstrated a different kind and level of commitment to their social work role and identity: Strivers were oriented towards career progression and taking on senior roles; doers were committed practitioners who saw themselves as continuing in front line service delivery for the foreseeable future; and seekers, although still committed to social work in principle, tended to be more unsure about their future place in the profession. This typology appears to be reasonably robust on the basis of our investigation and has implications for career planning and supervision of social work professionals, especially at the early stages of their careers.     

Financial hardship assistance behind the scenes: Insights from financial counsellors

Financial hardship, in a credit society such as Australia, can affect almost anyone. To protect consumers from the negative impacts of financial hardship—which can include the stresses of enforcement action and disconnection from essential services—legal protections have been incorporated into the regulatory frameworks for the consumer credit, energy, water and telecommunications sectors. In this article, we outline the findings of our study, which used a survey of financial counsellors around Australia and focus group interviews with Victorian financial counsellors to examine how these legal protections are being implemented by service providers in these four sectors. Our findings highlight a tendency on the part of service providers to take a generic, one‐size‐fits‐all approach to compliance with these legal protections that prevents them from effectively assisting consumers struggling with debt. We discuss the particular shortcomings of this approach in the context of consumers living on low incomes—especially Centrelink incomes—and outline the policy implications of our findings for assisting these vulnerable groups.