Flexible Labor

This essay assesses the feminist potential of workplace flexibility when it emerged as an object of knowledge in 1980s US public culture. The keyword flexibility, which crossed economic discourses about topics ranging from production to remuneration to consumption, was constructed as coextensive with feminism at this time. The essay begins by analyzing popular knowledge concerning labor flexibility created in scholarship and mainstream news. Next, the paper focuses on the contemporaneous articulation of flexibility to feminism. Since 1980, news, scholarship, and film argued that flexibility might provide a feminist antidote for late twentieth-century capitalism's harsh draining of labor from bodies. Particularly, flexible working conditions became publicized as a way that mothers could be better accommodated in the workplace. Yet as the century waned, flexibility failed to uproot standard time-intensive models of work and excluded some women from job opportunities and job security. When flexibility appeared to fail, pundits blamed feminism for wage-earning women's difficulty balancing family and workplace. This analysis shows that the various contradictory practices understood as flexibility rendered it troublesome as a feminist strategy. The paper concludes with an examination of the contemporary implications of this recent discursive history of flexibility.     

Polish education in the crisis decade--the testimony of population census

"The purpose of this essay is to offer information on the links that exist between...demographic growth, education and the [labor force] in Poland, as revealed in past population censuses...taken in 1978 and 1988...." The effect of education on occupational status is discussed, and some projections for Poland's educational and employment sectors are made.     

Parental transfers and the labor supply of children

To finance their personal consumption, children may rely on transfers in the form of pocket money made by their parents and on personal resources earned from labor market activities. In this paper that focuses on the interaction between these two sources of income, we consider a model of parental transfer where the child can choose his own income through labor supply. The parent commits to a transfer amount that the child takes as given. For our empirical analysis, we use a cross-sectional French survey that includes detailed information about pocket money from parents to schoolchildren. Using a maximum-likelihood method, we estimate a simultaneous-equations model and find that parental transfers do not significantly influence the child's labor supply.     

Wage shocks,household labor supply,and income instability

Do married couples make joint labor supply decisions in response to each other’s wage shocks? The study on this question aids in understanding the link between the rising income instability and household insurance. Existing studies on household insurance either focus on consumption smoothing and take labor supply as a given, or only focus on wife’s labor responses to husband’s unemployment shocks. This article develops an intra-household insurance model that allows for insurance against permanent and transitory wage shocks from both partners. Estimation using the Survey of Income and Program Participation shows that wife increases labor supply in response to husband’s adverse wage shocks when both of them are working, and wife gets more nonlabor income when she is out of work. This intra-household insurance reduces earnings instability by about 2 to 9 %. These results suggest that joint labor supply decisions provide an extra smoothing effect on income instability.     

Homeland and neoliberalism: text,paratexts and treatment of affective labor

This essay examines Showtime’s television program Homeland, along with several examples of what Jonathan Gray calls paratexts, arguing that meanings produced through the intersection of text and paratexts create a preferred interpretation of the show’s main character, Carrie Mathison, which aligns with neoliberal and post-feminist ideologies surrounding affective labor. Using textual cartography to map meanings, I locate a preferred interpretation of Homeland that recognizes the instrumental value of affective labor while writing off the deleterious effects as individualized personal issues. This read supports a neoliberal, post-feminist interpretation of Carrie as a pathologically flawed individual woman inept at emotional self-management.     

The Analysis on the Potential and Trend of the Non-agricultural Transfer of Chinese Rural Labor in the Following 20 Years

The non-agriculturalization of rural labors,which has caught much research attention,is an ecessary phenomenonin the process of urbanization. However, conflicts exsitson some basic issues due to the disagreement on the concept and data of the rural non-agricultural labor force,and there is alack of systemic and quantitative research on the potentials of rural labor’s non-agricultural transfer in the future. By predicting the changing trend of future rural labor force, the demand for agricultural labors, and the trend of rural labor’s non-agricultural transfer, this paper estimated the potentials of Chinese rural labor’s non-agricultural transfer in the next 20 years. It found that the surplus labors in the countryside will decrease annually, and its total number will range between 100 million and 250 million by 2030. Although there is still some increase potential of the stock of rural labor’s non-agricultural transfer in the near future, its increase will approach to zero in 10 years, and rural transferrable surplus labor will also approach to zero in about 5 to 10 years.     

当前我国农村劳动力转移面临的问题及对策

促进农村劳动力转移是我国实现农业和农村经济发展、不断增加农民收入的重要途径。当前,我国农村劳动力已实现了大规模的转移,且具有逐年增加、以青壮年劳动力为主、向沿海地区集中的特点,但劳动力市场制度分割、户籍制度与农地经营政策、劳动力素质偏低且劳动力合法权益得不到有效保护等因素影响着农村劳动力转移的进程,为此,应采取积极措施,走新型工业化道路,加快城市化步伐,推动城乡劳动力市场一体化和信息服务体系建设,并加大教育和培训投资力度,加快农村劳动力转移的速度,提高转移质量。     

街道(社区)就业潜力的调查与分析

本文在深入调查街道 (社区 )用工情况和需求的基础上 ,分析就业情况 ,把握用工需求 ,为各类求职人员转变就业观念以及各方加强就业引导 ,从而缓解就业压力提出对策和建议     

吉林省农村剩余劳动力的测算及转移对策探讨

实现农村剩余劳动力的合理转移,全面提高农村生活水平,是建设全面小康社会的必然途径和重要目标。利用定量方法测度了吉林省农村劳动力的剩余状况,测算结果表明,改革开放初期吉林省农业剩余劳动力一直呈增长的态势,2003年后农业剩余劳动力超过200万人。农业剩余劳动力的大量积累给农村经济的发展带来了巨大的阻力。根据吉林省农村剩余劳动力的动态变化过程,分析了剩余劳动力产生的深层原因,并据此对吉林省农村剩余劳动力的转移给出了一些对策和政策建议。     

Visibility of the ovaries and breasts: an analysis of Angelina Jolie’s medical announcements

Advanced epithelial ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecologic cancer; yet public knowledge about the disease is limited. This essay critically examines the limited visibility of ovarian cancer using Angelina Jolie’s medical announcements in 2013 and 2015 as examples. The essay also examines how Jolie’s case reinforces and also challenges hegemonic notions of femininity, the woman’s body and health, and how it explicates limitations in discourses of choice and risk. I argue that normative views about the female body play significant roles in shaping how and what we know about women’s health.     

Trade Liberalization And Women’s Integration Into National Labor Markets: A Cross-Country Analysis

This paper examines the effects of trade liberalization and the risks associated with participation in the global trading system on women’s integration into national labor markets. Using data from 1970 to 1995, I identify two global determinants of the female share of national labor markets: trade openness and transnational corporate penetration. Several local predictors of women’s labor force participation are also identified. While a cross-sectional analysis indicates that women have been pulled into national labor markets as a result of neo-liberal economic reforms, more dynamic models show that these same forces can also lead to a preference for male, rather than female labor. Moreover, the analyses specify that the effects of trade openness and trade risk on female labor force participation are determined by position in the world-system and region. These results illustrate that arguments about the relationship between globalization and the feminization of the labor force, are too simplistic and neglect to account for the diverse consequences of global economic expansion on gender relations.     

The Changing Institutional Context of Low Fertility

Using data for 1960–97 for 22 low fertility countries, we document a dramatic change in the association of fertility levels to women's levels of labor force participation. Until the 1980s, this association had been strongly negative. However, during the 1980s itbecame positive, and since 1990 strongly positive. We also document an emerging positive association of the country-level total fertility ratio (TFR) and nonmarital ratio (e.g., the proportion of births to unmarried women). We argue that these transformed associations reflect societal level responses that, in some contexts, have eased the incompatibility between mother and worker roles, and loosened the link betweenmarriage and childbearing. These arguments imply that societal responses to mother/worker incompatibility exert substantial influence on fertility levels in low fertility countries.     

大连市就业状况及劳动力供求演变趋势分析

就业是当今中国社会最突出的社会经济问题。对于正步入工业化后期阶段、经济和社会快速发展的大连市而言．目前及今后一段时期的就业和劳动力供求趋势是政府和社会密切关注的重要问题。本文结合统计资料．深入探讨了大连目前及今后一段时期内的就业和劳动力供求发展趋势,指出,按目前的人口和社会经济发展趋势。2015年前后大连将真正迎来劳动力短缺期,此后劳动力缺口将持续扩大。并将影响经济社会发展。要确保经济和社会的快速、持续增长．今后大连市应加大对人力资源的开发和人才引进力度,全面提升劳动者职业技能。同时加快科技进步步伐．全力提升社会生产力水平。以应对劳动力短缺所带来的制约和影响。     

Non-monotonicity in the longevity�Cincome relationship

In this essay, I empirically analyze the relationship between income and life expectancy for pensioners in the public pension system in Germany and find that the relationship is non-monotonic for major sub-groups in the data. Due to the application of non-parametric methods, this cannot be explained as an artifact of the estimation technique or by anomalies of the data, and the finding is robust against the inclusion of control variables. Furthermore, I theoretically derive a non-monotonic relationship between income and longevity, based on heterogeneous elasticities of labor supply and otherwise standard assumptions.     

The determinants of a mother's choice of family structure

This study attempts to clarify the effect of welfare generosity on family structure while controlling for community mores, local labor market conditions, and other sociodemographic characteristics. In the existing AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) literature, these latter factors have been largely ignored. The empirical analysis is conducted by linking individual-level data from the 1987 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) with information on county-level unemployment rates, state AFDC benefits, and proxies of community mores. In particular, the detailed nature of the NSFH data set provides a unique opportunity to investigate the social and economic determinants of cohabitation, among other family structures. Local labor market conditions are found to significantly affect marriage and single-motherhood, while community conservatism is found to discourage the least conventional family structure — cohabitation. Finally, this study raises some question about the effect of AFDC policy on marriage and related events. Specifically, AFDC's statistical impact is found to be sensitive to the inclusion of an explicit measure of community conservatism in the empirical model specification.     

Local labor markets,children and labor force participation of wives

Most research on married women’s labor force participation relates characteristics of individual women to their probability of labor force participation. Some studies relate characteristics of geographic areas to average labor force participation rates in those areas, although these aggregate level analyses are usually gross tests of ideas about individuallevel processes. Here we take a quintessentially sociological perspective and seek to understand how characteristics of geographic areas structure the relationship between properties of individual women and their probabilities oflabor force participation. Our analysis has two steps. In step one, we fit individual-level probit models of married women’s probability of labor force participation. A separate model is fitted in each of 409 areas using 1970 Census data, and the relationship between individual characteristics and labor force participation is found to vary substantially across areas. In step two, we attempt to explain areal variation in the effects of women’s children on their labor force participation. We hypothesize that the effect of children on their mothers’ labor force participation is a function ofthe cost and availability of childcare, and of the “convenience” of jobs for working mothers in the places where the mothers live. Measures of childcare cost, childcare availability and job convenience are developed. Weighted least squares analyses of probit coefficients from the first stage are, in general, very consistent with our findings, and suggest that the approach taken in this paper is likely to be a fruitful one for future studies.     

亚洲女性收入对生育率影响的国际比较研究--基于劳动参与率、受教育程度、就业方式的视角

通过构建家庭效用函数模型,论证了家庭收入增长中女性收入对家庭生育决策的影响,说明了随着女性收入的提高,会降低生育率。进一步,通过引用女性劳动参与率、受教育程度及就业方式作为女性收入对生育率影响的中间变量,再运用相关数据进行实证分析,发现女性劳动参与率、受教育程度对生育率有着负向的影响,而女性非全日制就业方式对生育率有着正向的影响。再进一步,对亚洲各国生育政策的调整进行国际比较,探讨生育政策的具体措施与影响女性收入的三个因素之间的关系,最后针对中国目前的生育水平提出两方面的建议：硬政策的完善和软环境的支持,以有助于提高人口素质,优化人口结构。     

当代劳动力参与水平和模式变动研究

文章以世界劳工组织和联合国发布的劳动力参与相关数据为基础,应用STATA面板数据模型和AMOS结构方程模型,对当代分性别劳动力参与水平和模式变动趋势及其影响因素进行分析。研究发现,当代男性劳动力参与率持续降低,女性劳动力参与率先升后降。转变的基本规律是向劳动力参与时间不断缩短,学习和自由发展时间不断延长的方向发展。经济、教育、低龄组的劳动力参与率和人口年龄结构对这一转变有重要影响。加强学习型社会建设,普遍提高受教育年限,降低低龄组、次低龄组的劳动力参与率,在增加劳动力数量、质量供给方面具有根本性作用。     

Clinton and the playing-the-gender-card metaphor in campaign news

This article offers a critical discourse analysis of the use of the playing-the-gender-card metaphor in US campaign coverage, with a focus on its use in Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign for president in 2007. I argue that the media use the gender-card metaphor to stand in for a variety of complex arguments about women in politics. The essay serves as a case study to validate how political metaphors can be used to obscure socially unacceptable and empirically unsupportable arguments. It also reveals that it is taboo for women candidates to talk about sex discrimination on the campaign trail and that the culture operates to silence its legacy of proscribing women from the political field. Finally, the essay encourages future women candidates to plan rhetorical responses to the gender-card metaphor by understanding the latent arguments and connotations buried in it.     

Happy alone? Sad young men in East Asian gay cinema

This essay chooses as its texts three films representing contemporary gay male subjects from each of the "three" China's: HK, Taiwan, and the Mainland. Relocating the homoerotic image of the "sad young man," a trope popular from Hollywood rebellion films of the 1950s and 1960s, to contemporary China, I discuss how this masculine icon has been transformed from one of heroic rebellion to one of existential isolation. Indeed, as the politics of both the outmoded Confucian family and fractured Chinese nationhood intersect, what the sad young (gay) man rebels against is a political fluctuation which is no longer fixed; as the young man's opposition is no longer fixed, so too does he become alienated even from his own rebellious cause.