The North American Free Trade Agreement and Women

This article discusses some of the effects of NAFTA on women workers in Canada and Mexico. The main purpose is to show that NAFTA represents a continuation of the capitalist dynamic, which is characterized by the enormous mobility of capital across countries and regions, and which privileges the search for profit. Through an analysis of the labour conditions in Canadian and Mexican manufacturing, the article reveals how this new capitalist period has produced de-industrialization in developed countries while depressing labour conditions in both developed and developing countries. The study indicates that women workers most affected in this process are those working in industries (especially the clothing industry) that seek to reduce their costs of production in order to remain competitive in national and international markets. In addition, those working in regions important to transnational industries, such as the Mexican Free Zones where maquiladoras abound are also seriously affected.     

Our American Heritage

This article offers a contextual analysis of contemporary immigration issues impacting the institutions in the United States, in particular the school. It discusses the importance of addressing this theme in the classroom and presents its curricular value in the elementary and middle school social studies and interdisciplinary curricula. Using a picture book thematic text set on the topic of immigration allows for multiple curricular venues and connections through which teachers can address the complexities of immigration. Included is a recommended thematic text set annotated bibliography of twenty-three picture books of different reading levels about historical and mostly contemporary immigration issues. This annotated bibliography is a valuable curriculum resource for teachers because it supports the social studies’ curriculum and its integration with other subject areas, such as language arts and the arts. Each book's bibliographical information offers teachers suggested teaching focal themes and content knowledge, target processes of inquiry and discussion, and attitudinal dispositions that can be fostered.     

美国中东自由贸易区构想与难题

美伊战争结束后，布什总统为安抚阿拉伯各国，消除阿拉伯人对美的不满情绪，宣布用10年时间建成美国中东自由贸易区，以促进中东各国步入繁荣。但就目前中东局势看，美国的这一愿望将面临重重障碍，但也不排除它实现的可能性。     

美国中东自由贸易区构想与难题

美伊战争结束后,布什总统为安抚阿拉伯各国,消除阿拉伯人对美的不满情绪,宣布用10年时间建成美国中东自由贸易区,以促进中东各国步入繁荣.但就目前中东局势看,美国的这一愿望将面临重重障碍,但也不排除它实现的可能性.     

青少年公民意识培养主题探究模式

青少年公民意识培养的主题探究模式其目的在于开展青少年公民意识的实践研究,跟踪青少年公民实践活动过程及公民意识变化状况,通过实践引领学生经历“发现问题一选择主题一设计方案一躬身实践一整理成果一交流反思”的探究模式,其成效在于促进青少年公民意识的全面发展,践行了“学生为主体,教师为主导”的教育思想,有利于各种教育合力的形成并促使学生融入社会。     

The Condom Fairy program: A novel mail-order service for condoms and sexual health supplies

Abstract

Objective: In recent years college health professionals have used a variety of innovative strategies to increase availability and accessibility of condoms and safer sex products. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of a mail-order delivery program titled the Condom Fairy. Participants: Seven hundred thirty-three students (63.4% women, 86.1% heterosexual, and 59.2% Caucasian) completed a questionnaire assessing their overall experience with the program. Methods: Participants completed a 60 item questionnaire 30?days after receiving condoms and safer sex products. Results: Overall, 46,980 condoms were distributed over a six semester period. Almost all of the participants (97.4%) reported they ordered male condoms while 58.0% ordered sexual lubricant, 11.1% female condoms, and 10.2% latex dams. Nearly than three-quarters (73.9%) of participants reported they used the condoms provided. Conclusions: Findings support the implementation of innovative mail-in condom and safer sex product programs on college campuses.     

The American Way

Media consolidation and convergence have increasingly changed the way individuals as both consumers and citizens access, process, and communicate information at the local, national, and global levels. Media industries and institutions influence public perception and occupy our time at work and at home more and more. Media literacy has become recognized as a twenty-first-century skill necessary for civic competence and the development of informed, responsible citizens. Although it has long been established in the curricula of other nations, it is relatively new in the United States. Media literacy is not simply teaching with media—rather, it entails teaching about media. Key frameworks such as the Text, Audience, and Production (TAP) model, which is explained in this article, can be used to help students systematically analyze and evaluate the wide range of media texts they are exposed to on a daily basis. The author discusses how media literacy is also compatible with several of the major strands identified by the National Council for the Social Studies and can be facilitated by the growing range of resources available to teachers.     

The Paradox of Protestantism and Women in Elected Office in the United States

ABSTRACT

In cross-national studies, scholars have found that wealthy countries and those with a Protestant tradition are more likely to have higher levels of women in elected office. Even though the United States should then be high in this domain, it lags behind many similarly situated countries. We posit that one reason for this paradox is that Protestantism in the United States is far more socially conservative than is typical in other Protestant countries. To test our argument, we use state-level data on the proportion of women in elected office from 2002 to 2004 and survey data on church membership. We find a negative relationship between the percentage of Protestants belonging to churches associated with the National Association of Evangelicals, a lobbying group representing socially conservative Protestant denominations, and the proportion of women in elected office.     

Health Promotion using Tablet Technology with Older Adult African American Methadone Clients: A Case Study

This exploratory study examined three single case studies to investigate the feasibility of handheld tablet computers for older adult methadone clients. The intervention targeted African American adults (N = 3) over the age of 50 who were in substance abuse treatment. Subjects participated, via a face-to-face video program, in 12 educational sessions focused on healthy living. Both the feasibility of teaching older adult subjects to use tablet computers and their levels of engagement in the intervention were assessed. In addition, completion of participants’ goals and their ability to remember those goals were tracked weekly. Findings revealed that participants were able to learn how to operate the tablets and enjoyed using the technology. Frequent interactions between the counselors and the participants, using face-to-face video, facilitated success in achieving program goals.     

阿曼的军火贸易

阿曼苏丹国是海湾合作委员会成员之一。海湾战争结束后，为实现军队的现代化，阿曼不断从英、法、美等国进口先进的武器装备。本文对阿曼的国家安全战略、军火贸易情况进行分析、阐述，认为未来阿曼军火市场前景仍然乐观。     

街道办事处改革与城市社区建设

改革开放以来,中国城市基层治理结构经历了以“单位制”为主转向以“街居制”为主的制度变迁。由于“街居制”在运作中面临一些深层矛盾,街道办事处改革的呼声一直很高。推进城市治理结构扁平化,有必要撤销街道办事处,由区政府直接指导社区建设,实行“二级政府、二级管理”体制。撤销街道办事处是一项系统工程,它有待于推进大部门体制、调整行政区划、培育非营利组织、发展公私合作关系等配套改革相支持。     

The American Revolutionary Period

The United States is currently experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history. This contemporary immigration is unprecedented in its diversity of ethnicity, class, and countries of origin, and large urban areas are no longer alone in absorbing arrivals. The author reviews children's picture books about dilemmas that immigrant children face, such as being different, coping with great and small changes, responding to one's name, learning a new language, relating to previous generations and traditions, maintaining ties with distant relatives, and visiting their homelands. Classroom materials relevant to the social and cultural experiences of children generate interest in and enthusiasm about learning. When teachers include books about the negotiation of another culture in the curriculum, children learn through reading that stories can be about people like them, that stories of their experiences are worthy of being in a book, and that other children have felt the way they do.     

Reformulation as a strategy for managing ‘understanding uncertainty’ in office hour interactions between international teaching assistants and American college students

This article provides a discourse analysis of problematic communication in office hour interactions between international teaching assistants and American college students. The goal of the article is to explicate what is termed here as ‘understanding uncertainty’, something which has received little attention in existing studies. The data under consideration consist of a number of dyadic interactions that naturally occurred during office hours. The data analyses revealed that the type of understanding uncertainty as defined here was displayed and managed in six types of reformulations. The findings suggest that reformulation may be used as an interactive strategy to achieve mutual understanding across linguistic and sociocultural boundaries in educational contexts.     

The Evolution of Skill-Biased Effects on American Wages in the 1980s and 1990s

This study estimates the contributions of skill-biased technological change and international trade to the rise in the skill premium during the 1980s and 90s using the Feenstra and Hanson (Q J Econ 114(3):907–940, 1999) two-stage methodology. Newly available data on high-technology capital provide separate measures of computer and software investment. New estimates suggest that investment in software contributed to a substantial portion of the observed increase in the skill premium while investment in computers lead to a reduction in the rate of skill premium growth. Contrary to the findings of Feenstra and Hanson for the 1980s, neither software nor computers had a significant effect on wages during the 1980s. Foreign outsourcing does not appear to have significantly affected wages during the 1990s. The contribution to theory is that software is more complementary to increases in worker productivity due to human skills. Computers, on the other hand, reduced the growth of wage inequality by giving unskilled labor a more efficient set of tools with which to work.

The deinstitutionalization of American marriage

This article argues that marriage has undergone a process of deinstitutionalization—a weakening of the social norms that define partners' behavior—over the past few decades. Examples are presented involving the increasing number and complexity of cohabiting unions and the emergence of same‐sex marriage. Two transitions in the meaning of marriage that occurred in the United States during the 20th century have created the social context for deinstitutionalization. The first transition, noted by Ernest Burgess, was from the institutional marriage to the companionate marriage. The second transition was to the individualized marriage in which the emphasis on personal choice and self‐development expanded. Although the practical importance of marriage has declined, its symbolic significance has remained high and may even have increased. It has become a marker of prestige and personal achievement. Examples of its symbolic significance are presented. The implications for the current state of marriage and its future direction are discussed.     

The state of American Sociology

Sociology appears to be one of the most internally divided disciplines, if not the most. Departmental struggles, which have led to sociologists complaining to administrators about each other, have put the field in bad repute among campus officials and have endangered its survival in some schools. The American Sociological Society and American Sociological Association have been among the most conflict-ridden associations in academe for generations. Severe internecine struggles have a long history in the field. It may be suggested that they are related to the propensity of the field to attract social reformers and political activists. But hard evidence indicates sociology graduate students are among the weakest, as judged by test scores.This is an elaboration of an American Sociological Association presidential presentation to a plenary session of the Southern Sociological Association on April 2, 1993.     

中国与海合会货物贸易的发展现状、问题及其应对

2000年以来的石油繁荣使海合会国家货物进出口贸易规模不断扩大,中国与海合会国家的货物贸易也进入了快速发展期。由于我国对海货物出口仍过于依赖资源和劳动密集型商品,中等技术含量投资类商品缺乏竞争力,消费类商品缺少品牌效应,因而导致我国对海货物出口对价格极为敏感。2008年以后,受人民币升值影响,我国对海货物出口贸易也开始进入瓶颈期。因此,我国政府、出口企业以及其他相关部门应当采取必要措施,提高消费类商品的品牌效应和中等技术含量工业品的竞争力,从而促进我国对海货物贸易的健康发展。     

The institutional origins of American literary history

Abstract

This article deals with the importance of institutions in the construction of literary classifications. Following Mary Douglas, the article offers a double-stranded perspective on institutions that stresses both their social and cognitive anchorage. This is applied to one particular case, namely the genealogy connecting Emerson (and the Transcendentalists) to Jonathan Edwards. The article shows how Perry Miller's 'discovery' of that lineage in 1940 has an institutional history that goes as far back as the early beginnings of American literature as an academic discipline. Part of the function of the discipline, the article argues, is to hide this history in order to bring out the continuing relevance of such taxonomies. The concluding paragraph identifies some implications of this view on institutionalization for current discussions about the (post-) nationality of American literature.     

The IFIs and Labour Reform in Post Communist Economies

Since 1999 the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have sought to revise their policy approach to encourage participation, facilitation and dialogue with civil society organisations and trade unions. This Post Washington Consensus has been applied in transformation economies, where the IFIs have established labour market reform as a pre-condition for loans and grants. Such labour reforms have been deleterious to the interests of collective labour, and a continued source of contestation between unions, government, and the IFIs. This paper examines the reality of the new consensus framework with particular reference to the former Yugoslavia. Evidence is drawn from documents of the IFIs and from interviews with representatives of key union federations in the region. The article assesses the evidence against alternative theoretical frameworks from within political economy and international relations, and concludes that consensus is illusory, leaving unions consulted but then ignored.

Desde 1999 las Instituciones Financieras Internacionales (IFIs) buscaron la revisión del enfoque de sus políticas internas para reanimar la participación, facilitación y diálogo con las organizaciones de la sociedad civil y los sindicatos gremiales. Este Consenso Post Washington se ha aplicado a economías en transformación, en donde las IFIs han establecido una reforma de mercado laboral como un prerrequisito para préstamos y subvenciones. Tales reformas laborales han sido perjudiciales a los intereses de trabajo colectivo y una fuente continua de protesta entre los sindicatos, el gobierno y las IFIs. Este artículo examina la realidad del nuevo esquema del consenso con una referencia particular a la antigua Yugoslavia. Se ha extraído evidencia de documentos de las IFIs y de las entrevistas con representantes de las federaciones sindicales claves en la región. El artículo evalúa la evidencia contra los esquemas teóricos alternos dentro de la economía política y las relaciones internacionales, y concluye que el consenso es ilusorio, después de haber consultado a los sindicatos, pero luego dejándolos ignorados.