Adolescents’ Friends,Parental Social Closure,and Educational Outcomes

There is a growing recognition of the importance of the social resources accessed through friends on adolescents’ educational outcomes. However, the research on the influence of these social resources remains inconclusive, due primarily to the different ways in which social resources have been conceptualized and measured. Using panel data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we estimate the association between two measures of adolescents’ social resources in the Educational Longitudinal Study base-year, their high school grade point average in the first follow-up, and the likelihood of attaining a four-year college degree by the third follow-up. Grounded in the literature on social capital, our findings show that friendships that provide access to high social closure parental networks are favorably associated with grade point average and college completion. We discuss results in terms of their implications on school reform efforts intended to manufacture adolescents’ access to norm-reinforcing networks.     

Latin American immigration policy and the Jews, 1938–43: The discrepancy between word and deed

This article deals with a distinct minority group, the Jews, and Latin American perceptions of them as well as perceptions of Jews as immigrants and the discrepancy between official statements and actual policy. A main point of the article is that this discrepancy between word and deed was evident prior to the Marín survey of 1942–43, as epitomized by the Evian Conference of 1938 on refugees and immigration, and continued into the Second World War, at a time when more open immigration policies were so desperately needed.     

Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England,Ireland and Scotland 1800–1945

Shamit Saggar, Race and Politics in Britain (London: Harvester Wheat‐sheaf, 1992). Pp.xxi + 236. ISBN 0 7450 1206 X

Virginia Yans‐McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics (New York, Oxford University Press [USA], 1990). Pp.viii + 342. £11.95. ISBN 0 19 505511 X

Gary P. Freeman and James Jupp (eds.), Nations of Immigrants: Australia, the United States and Migration (Melbourne, Oxford University Press [Australia], 1992). Pp.xi + 250. £15.95. ISBN 0 19 553483 2     

The ‘Old New Russian Town’: Modernization and Architectural Preservation in Russia’s Historic North West, 1961–1982

Abstract

The emergence of a Soviet preservationist movement, which gained institutional coherence in the mid-1960s, appears to stand at odds with the ideas of rationalization and standardization that informed the Khrushchev-era urban development programme. Yet, as I argue in this article, these two strands of post-Stalin era Soviet culture were not as antagonistic as they may first appear. In Khrushchev’s Russia, the preservation of architectural heritage was rationalized as a means of strengthening the foundations of Soviet society by rooting it in the national past. Rather than detracting from the goal of building communism, cultural heritage was made an integral part of that process, a focus of national pride and source of social solidarity.     

Problems of Taxonomy,Issues of Class,Citizenship, Consumption,and Avdot’ia Smirnova’s KoKoKo (2012)

Sundry discussions of Russian society by scholars, journalists, and politicians suffer from imprecise taxonomy, wielding labels such as middle class, civil society, and creative class in an automatic transfer of discursive categories long defining Western societies to one at increasing odds with numerous Western values. As various surveys by Russian sociologists have indicated, a ‘middle class’ and ‘civil society’ in the traditional sense do not exist in Russia. Moreover, even ‘the intelligentsia’, as historically defined, seems to have diminished, evaporated, or emigrated. Indeed, the incisive portrayal of contemporary Russian class distinctions in Avdot’ia Smirnova’s film KoKoKo (2012) exposes the impotence of the self-serving intelligentsia, contrasted to the vitality and drive of ‘the people’, who may be the only hope for Russia’s future – neither the radiant future fantasized by the Soviet Union nor the democratic future that seemed possible after perestroika, but one that meaningful resistance to the authoritarianism of Putin’s regime will need to elaborate step by painstaking step.     

A Jew,and coloured too! Immigration of ‘Jews of middle east origin’ to Australia, 1949–58

In 1949, Jews classified by the Australian Department of Immigration as being of ‘Middle East Origin’, were a prohibited import, which had not been the case previously. The antipathy was far from aberrant in the annals of Jewish migration to Australia, and was a consequence of the meshing of two influences. The racial angst of the ‘White Australia policy’, buttressed by a finely tuned public paranoia, held across the political spectrum, and serviced by enthusiastic bureaucrats. All this was set in an ephemeral cultural and mystical anti‐Semitism endemic to Western culture. This article argues that this policy of exclusion was eroded only when the administrative props on which it relied were reluctantly removed.