Voluntary Childlessness in the 1980s

No abstract available for this article.     

Political Advocacy in the 1980s

Abstract

Government support for human services programs de creased considerably during the 1980s while defense spending rose dras tically. The shift in spending priorities is thought by some to be due to insufficiently active or incapable social welfare lobbyists. This paper ar gues that human services advocacy groups were as active as supporters of defense programs. Human services advocates were shut out of the de cision-making process primarily due to the lack of public support for their ideas. The implication, that social welfare advocates must build a solid base of public support for their proposals, can be applied to current issues.     

Mental Health Computing in the 1980s

This is the first of a two-part state-of-the-art review concerning current trends in mental health computing. It deals principally with general mental health information systems, the emerging role of microcomputers and general applications software, computerizing medical records, and computer support for quality assurance programs.     

Women inventors in Canada in the 1980s

Les femmes inventrices sont rares. Elles sont redéfinies, reformées et rendues invisible par des structures patriarcales et de genre. Dans cette étude, les expériences et réalités de 21 femmes inventrices contemporaines canadiennes, des femmes qui sont dans des occupations inusités même pour des hommes, sont rapportées. Les femmes inventrices, n'importe leur degré de succès, ont souvent de la répugnance à reconnaître qu'elles sont, de fait, inventrices. Un inventeur, dans notre imagerie culturelle, est un pionnier mâle qui est eccentrique, incompris, mais qu'on estime talentueux. Les femmes semblent être moins voulante ?accepter le stigmate associéà ces images. Les personnes qui sont proches des femmes inventrices, incluant leurs maris, font collusion en trivialisant les tentatives des femmes à inventer. Plusieurs forces entrelacées sont en opérations parmi les expériences des femmes inventrices. Les contributions des femmes ont tendance àêtre rendues invisibles dans une société patriarcale qui redéfinie tout ce que les femmes font en terme mâle. ?idéologie masculin prédomine ?en terme dont elle contribue à reformer ?expérience vécue des femmes dans un moule qui renforce les mythes de ce que la femme est et fait. Les femmes ne sont pas percues comme jouant un rôle actif dans la création et le contrôle de la technologie, mais plutôt comme étant contrôlé par celle-ci. Women inventors are rare. They are redefined, reshaped and rendered invisible by patriarchy and gender structure. In this study, the experiences and realities of 21 contemporary Canadian women inventors, women who are in an unusual occupation even for men, are related. Women inventors, no matter how successful, are found to be reluctant to acknowledge that they are, indeed, inventors. An inventor, in our cultural imagery, is a male pioneer who is eccentric, misunderstood but ultimately brilliant. Women seem less willing to accept the stigma associated with these images. People who are close to women inventors, including their husbands, collude in trivializing women's attempts to invent. Several interwoven forces are operative in the experiences of women inventors. Women's contributions tend to be rendered invisible in a patriarchal society which redefines all of what women do and are on male terms. Male ideology predominates in such a way as to reshape women's lived experiences to fit myths of what women are and do. Women are not seen as playing an active role in creating and controlling technology but in being controlled by it.     

Individualism and conformity in the 1950s vs. the 1980s

If the 1950s are remembered for conformity, the 1960s for rebellious individualism, and the 1970s for narcissistic individualism, images of the 1980s contain an ambiguous mixture of individualism and conformity, with similarities to the 1950s. But if the 1980s resemble the 1950s in some respects, are portraits of individualism and conformity in the later decade nevertheless different from their earlier incarnations? A comparative analysis of best-selling self-help books in the 1950s and the 1980s reveals the following changes: from “maturity” as a desirable end to an ever-changing self; from determinism about the self to antideterminism and constructionism; from institutional constraints and joys to interpersonal ones. These changes reflect the incorporation of ideas from the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and may also stem from perceptions of a simultaneous increase in structural determinism and individual empowerment.     

The Welfare State and inequality in the 1980s

A travers une etude surtout du systeme de transferts fiscaux, nous tentons de comprendre le r6le redistributeur de 1'Etat canadien dans les annees contemporaines. Nous faisons l'inventaire des facteurs qui ont module la structure des politiques sociales diveloppee disle debut des annees soixante-dix. Nous evaluons les modes de pression majeurs au cows des dix dernikres annCes en vue d'un changement dans les outils de redistribution, pourensuite mesurer I'impact de ces pressions sur la substance des politiques sociales et surle r d e redistributeur de I'Etat. Dans notre article, nous identifions un mouvement evident vers une plus grande inCgalitC dans les revenus du marche. Cependant, aucune des pressions structurelles ou ideologiques recentes sur I'Etat indique clairement une attCnuation des buts redistributeurs; les reactions ont CtC plut6t multi-directionnelles et ont tendu vers un accroissement. Au milieu des annees quatre-vingts, les changements de politiques n'avaient pas vraiment altC:C I'impact global des systkmes de transferts fiscaux, qui continuaient i neutraliser I'inPgalitC croissante au niveau des revenus du marche, suite i la plus profonde crise Cconomique des dernikres decennies. On est force de conclure quetoute interpretation des politiques sociales comme instruments de stabilite socio-politique a encore force de loi au Canada. This paper examines the redistributive role of the Canadian state in the contemporary period, focussing in particular on the tax-transfer system. The paper surveys the factors that shaped the structure of social policy that had developed by the early 19705, examines the major pressures for change in redistributive instruments during the last ten years, and then analyses the impact of those pressures on both the substance of social policy and the overall redistributive role of the state. The paper identifies clear movement towards greater inequality in market incomes. However, none of the structural or ideological pressures on the state in recent years points unambiguously towards a dramatic retreat from redistributive goals, and the policy response has tended to be multi-directional and for the most part incremental. At the mid-point of the 19805, policy changes had not significantly altered the overall impact of the tax-transfer system, which continued largely to neutralize the growing inequality in market incomes inherent in the deepest economic crisis in over four decades. This evidence suggests that interpretations of social policy as an instrument of social and political stability in Canada retain considerable force.     

Health care cost containment in the 1980s.

Benefits administrators--and their employers--can no longer ignore the skyrocketing costs of health care. The wide range of measures explored here for controlling these costs include negotiating with providers, analyzing medical claims, enlisting the aid of employee/patients, structuring benefit programs to eliminate excesses, and setting up wellness programs to alter the lifestyles--smoking, drinking, poor nutrition--that result in crippling, even fatal diseases.     

Funding uncertainty and nonprofit strategies in the 1980s

The degree to which strategic action is related to changes in the perceived uncertainty of income from major types of funders was examined for a panel of nonprofit organizations. Uncertainty was found to be a pervasive phenomenon. Nonprofits in some parts of the sector reported increases in uncertainty over time, while those in other parts reported decreases. The use of new revenue, legitimation, or retrenchment strategies was associated with the reduction of uncertainty for some types of nonprofit organizations but not for others.     

Cultural Change and Gender Identity Trends in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract  As in most capitalist countries, the advent of the "consumer society" has brought about radical cultural change in Japanese society. In this paper I aim to illustrate the undercurrents of this change, focusing on the transformation of social consciousness and gender identity as it is reflected in the popular and youth cultures. In order to show these changes, I have sellected several bestsellers from youth fictions ( sekhun-shousetsu ) as my main object of study and have presented several diagrams to illustrate the apparent relationship between this type of fictions and the so-called "aprgs-guerre" generation, the "gang of sun," the "baby-boomers," the "moratorium generation," the "mutant generation." While analyzing the historical trend of youth fiction for the last 45 years and refering to the other types of popular culture (films, popular songs, comics etc.), I shall attempt to throw light upon the substance of these changes and predict what directions the Japanese culture is likely to take in the future.     

Lesbian Blood Drives as Community-Building Activism in the 1980s

As gay men began voluntarily withdrawing from blood donation in the early 1980s, lesbians in community with gay men in several U.S. cities organized drives to replenish the blood supply. These drives were sometimes the continuation of previously established drives by gay–lesbian organizations or faith communities, sometimes new initiatives in response to HIV/AIDS. However, after the initial publicity, mention of lesbian blood drives in print is both scarce and brief. Focusing on drives organized from 1983 to 1992 by a group known as San Diego Blood Sisters, this article is an initial step in documenting lesbian blood drives to inform and enrich conversations about histories of responses to HIV/AIDS, theoretical discussions of how community connections in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer spectrum are enacted and understood, and emerging research on intersections of gender and sexuality as they are expressed through blood donorship.     

Talk: Managing Large Community Sector Organisations in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

The community sector is a major provider of human services in Australia. It is comprised of community or private not-for-profit organisations, but is not the only industry sector where this class of organisation is found. Like an industry sector, the community sector contains some large and many small organisations. During the 1980s large community sector organisations consciously sought to improve their management and performance in a number of ways. Nonetheless their managers face further challenges in the 1990s, some of which will tempt them into competition with the more numerous small organisations in the sector.     

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.

Demographic and socioeconomic aspects of elderly migration in the 1980s

The availability of data from the Current Population Survey for each year makes it possible to monitor the migration behavior of the population on a year-to-year basis and facilitates efforts to detect changes in long-standing patterns of behavior. The data used in this article come from the published reports summarizing the results of the March administration of the Current Population Survey over a decade, and, in general, deal with the movement of persons during the 12-month interval immediately preceding the survey. Trends and changes in some of the principal aspects of migration behavior among the elderly are reviewed and summarized, focusing on the demographic, social, geographic, and economic dimensions. Also considered are differences in migration behavior along these dimensions from a temporal perspective as well as in comparison to the migration behavior of the younger population. When possible, the article provides insight on behavioral differences among the various age categories within the older population, differentiating between the youngest and oldest components of the group and recognizing the striking differences between the youngest and oldest members of the older population in nearly all aspects of the migration process.     

Rural policy in the 1980s: the revival of the rural idyll

A popular explanation for the absence of poverty and deprivation from the rural policy agenda in the past has been the power of popular rural imagery in masking their existence. Despite a decade of academic and policy debate which has exposed some of the reality behind the images, this paper illustrates that not only do they still condition our approach to rural socio-economic problems but they are being reinforced in many aspects of current rural policy. The paper advances some explanations for this revival of rural imagery and examines some of its wider implications for the rural deprived.     

Socioeconomic Performance in Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Areas during the 1980s

The socioeconomic gap between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas increased during the 1980s. We test three competing explanations for this trend during the 1980s: overdependence on manufacturing, especially in nonmetro labor markets, the emergence of producer services as a catalyst of socioeconomic growth, and federal spending. Using a model that is informed by a variety of perspectives in sociology and economic geography, and commuter zones (CZs) as spatial units of analysis, we estimate the effects of manufacturing concentration, producer service concentration, and federal spending on per capita income, per capita earnings, and private nonfarm employment growth during the 1983–1988 business cycle recovery. The OLS and interaction models show that all three factors help explain why metro areas outperformed nonmetro areas during this time period. The effects of producer service concentration, however, best fit with our expectations. Implications of our findings are discussed.