The Half Full or Half Empty Glass: The Views of the Economic Optimist vs Pessimist

This paper examines the economic beliefs andvalue correlates of adults either optimistic orpessimistic about their economic future. On the basis ofan internally reliable, 19-item scale, nearly 277British subjects were divided into economic pessimists,optimists, and status quo observers. These economicviews were then correlated with ratings on economicsocial comparisons, beliefs about work, job involvement, and economic values. Subjectswith Marxist-related work beliefs tended to be morepessimistic and those with leisure ethic beliefs tendedto be more optimistic. A multiple stepwise regressionshowed that nearly 45% of the variance could beaccounted for by five factors which indicated thatolder, less religious, richer people who stronglybelieved in the humanistic work-belief system, but notin the leisure ethic, tended to be more pessimisticabout the economic future of their country. The resultsare discussed in terms of the literature onpsychological and economic optimism andpessimism.     

The Selection of Partial or Full Retirement by Older Workers

The study investigated whether older workers chose partial or full retirement instead of full-time work. Partial or full retirement status was modeled as a combination of self-reported retirement status and change in number of hours worked. The results of multinomial logistic regression using data from the first and fifth waves of the Health and Retirement Study collected in 1992 and 2000 showed that age and gender had similar effects on the likelihood of partial and full retirement. Full retirement was also influenced by investment assets, pensions, employee health insurance, and poor health. The likelihood of partial retirement was also influenced by self-employment, chronic health conditions, and education. Workers who seek partial retirement need working conditions that allow them to make this choice.     

The Anthropology of Empty Spaces

We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our reflections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-reflexive and self-reflective. This text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the field. The anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other, a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. The researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is just the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While anthropologically moving around different organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations.