“Apathetic,active, or antagonistic”: A history of the American Sociological Association’s involvement in high school sociology

The role that the American Sociological Association (ASA) has historically played in reforming high school sociology courses has been alternately apathetic, active, or antagonistic. Apathy marked the time period between 1905 and about 1960, and again during most of the 1970s and 1980s. The Association played a much more active role during the New Social Studies movement of the 1960s, and has also been actively involved since the late 1980s. But even in its activity, the ASA has been antagonistic toward high school courses and teachers. During the 1960s, and again since about 1989, the ASA has pushed solely for the teaching of sociology as a scientific discipline. This approach has proven problematic for two reasons. First, it directly contradicts the traditional objective of the social studies curriculum—citizenship education. Teachers are much more concerned about molding good citizens than exposing students to the nuances of scientific inquiry. Second, it ignores the well-documented fact that high school sociology teachers typically have little training in, exposure to, or experience with formal, academic sociology. For that reason, they have had great difficulty satisfying the demands made by academic reformers. I conclude that the ASA must address these two issues and several others if it is serious about improving secondary sociology courses. This paper was awarded the 2004 Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on the History of Sociology. I thank Larry Nichols and Afshan Jafar for their thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft.     

国际城市群金融资源空间配置研究

20世纪80年代以来,在金融自由化和金融创新为主旋律的背景下,金融资源的流动性进一步增强。同时,随着工业化和城市化的推进,城市群正逐步成为改变世界经济格局的重要地理景观和动力。在这一过程中,金融资源空间配置与城市群发展表现出诸多的耦合性。本文就美国东北部大西洋沿岸城市群、英伦城市群、欧洲西北部城市群和日本太平洋沿岸城市群等国际著名城市群金融资源空间配置实践规律进行分析和总结。     

Social Change and Social Policy in Taiwan: New Poverty, M-shaped Society and Policy Implications

Along with radical changes in the global economy and family structure, Taiwan has experienced the re-emergence of the poverty problem that was thought disappearing after remarkable economic growth in the 1980s. This article would like to provide an updated profile of social changes in Taiwan, with special reference to the related poverty issues like new poverty and the M-shaped society, as Ohmae defines it in his well-known book. To begin with, we place some of the most recent developments in the context of unbalanced growth and increasing family crises. Ironically, people in Taiwan have widely used the terms of new poverty and M-shaped society since the end of 1990s, while the "economic miracle" the island wrought still remains a fond memory. Official statistics on poverty, unemployment, divorce, mental disease, and child abuse have all shown increases. The trend is a matter of serious concern. Unlike in Japan, the earnings of workers in Taiwan did not significantly decrease in recent years. Taiwan seems to deviate from the M-shaped society. We have developed two tentative but handy yardsticks for examining the shift of the middle class: the "balance index" and the "M-ratio". The former provides as a relative measure among different income groups, while the latter is designed to indicate the change of the middle class relative to the overall contribution of the people. Finally, we also discuss its implications to social policy in Taiwan.     

Youth, drugs and resilience education

Billions of dollars are spent annually on school-based drug education programs, with youthful drug use remaining near peak levels since the 1980s. Institutional, policy, and program evidence presented here suggests that although primarily delivered in schools, the educational community rarely participates in the development of drug education; and despite the finding that "no-use" programs such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) or Life-Skills Training (LST) are likely ineffective, they continue to thrive in schools. This may be explained by insufficient educational participation and scientific discourse considering these issues; and the role of interest group politics, such as the symbiotic relationship between government, researchers, and the tobacco industry, in drug education. In addition to this evidence, resilience based program alternatives, evaluation, and implications are discussed.     

Continuity and discontinuity in the politics of the sixties generation: A reassessment

This paper reassesses the sources of sixties generation college graduates' liberal and radical politics through a reanalysis of General Social Survey and National Election Study data from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. Results of regression and ordered probit analyses of political attitude data do not sit well with the conventional view that the additive effects of education and membership of a particularly liberal generation explain sixties generation college graduates' politics. Instead, on some issues, the politics of sixties generation college graduates is discontinuous both with other groups in the early 1970s and with their own politics in the early 1980s. On attitudes to business and attitudes to state welfare spending, sixties generation college graduates were more liberal than the additive effects of their education and cohort membership can explain in the early 1970s. Moreover, they became substantially more conservative compared to other groups by the early 1980s on these issues. On other issues, notably social issues and attitudes to state consumption spending, this pattern of discontinuity was not found. Possible interpretations of these results are discussed.     

Planning and development control through lease conditions

The Hong Kong government has pledged to deal with the imbalance between supply and demand of housing. Given the innate constraints of limited land resources in Hong Kong and the extensive and expedient control enforced through lease conditions, the Hong Kong government can alleviate the long-recognized problem of housing shortage by modifying specific development conditions. Therefore, the supply of housing units can be changed at a faster pace to satisfy the requirement of private dwellings. Other factors affecting the property market in Hong Kong include land supply, economic issues, population growth, and income growth. Many studies, for example, Hui et al. (Monograph, Department of Building and Real Estate, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Hong Kong Government (Study of Housing Demand, Hong Kong Government Printer, Hong Kong and Study of Housing Demand Model, Hong Kong Government Printer, Hong Kong), have investigated in detail the impacts of these factors on the property market. However, little or nothing is known about the planning and development control through lease conditions. Therefore, this study particularly attempts to examine how the Hong Kong government exerts its influence in the local private residential market through changing the development conditions. These conditions will be studied separately and distinctively in order to capture their unitary effects upon the local private residential real estate market. Section 1 looks at Hong Kong's tenure system, followed by the deliberation of how planning and development control is done through lease conditions (in Section 2). 3 and 4 set out the analytical framework and report on the findings of how lease conditions affect property supply. The concluding section gives out recommendations.     

Still Going: Recent Debates on the Goldschmidt Hypothesis1

Abstract The literature on the Goldschmidt (1978a) hypothesis has passed through distinct stages. This article is a commentary on the present status of the literature and particularly on a recent article by Barnes and Blevins (1992). Our arguments draw in large part from our previous work. Researchers in the 1970s and early 1980s were concerned mainly with replicating Goldschmidt's work. However, these studies had a number of methodological and conceptual limitations that limited closure on the debate. A new generation of research from the mid-1980s onward was premised upon addressing the limitations, including the need to incorporate indicators of nonfarm economic structure, to take spatial or geographic features into account, and to adequately conceptualize farm structure. Barnes and Blevins (1992) disregard these inroads, evident in that their article repeats earlier arguments, offers solutions to problems addressed a decade earlier, and is vulnerable to its own methodological problems. To move inquiry forward, new directions for studies concerned with the broader issues raised by Goldschmidt are suggested.     

Women farmers and economic change in northern Ghana

Structural adjustments can have negative impact, especially for the poorest people in the rural areas. This article explores the consequences of the liberalization of cotton production in northern Ghana, in terms of gender relations in the household and the bigger community in the context of production and provisioning. It draws on an 18-month study conducted in 1995 and 1996. Section 1 describes gender relations and agriculture in Kusasi, northern Ghana. Section 2 looks at the households, farming and provisioning situations in Mamprusi. The effects of liberalization and structural adjustment and how women responded to the new opportunity are discussed in sections 3 and 4, respectively. The final sections examine the difficulties faced by women who take on new burdens as a result of structural change and looks at alternative means of meeting strategic needs of women farmers.     

Africa's Rising Demand for Wheat: Trends,Drivers, and Policy Implications

This article analyses trends in wheat consumption and imports in sub‐Saharan Africa since 1980, and estimates the economic and demographic determinants of this rising demand for wheat. Results point to rising incomes, growing populations, and increasing women's labour‐force participation as key drivers. Urban wheat‐expenditure shares generally exceed rural ones and SSA's demand is met largely by imports and partly through domestic production on large‐scale farms. Rising demand may therefore entail few farm–non‐farm synergies and minimal prospects to spur broad‐based economic development. The article concludes by discussing policy options for African countries to meet their staple food needs while also promoting pro‐poor agricultural growth.     

Life and death in Australian ‘heartlands’: pastoralism,ecology and rethinking the outback

Australian outback mythology is frequently invoked in attempts to unify Australians and smooth over differences. This is accomplished by appeals to shared heritage and shared cultural and economic interests. To a significant extent outback mythology is associated with the extensive grazing industries of the inland and north of Australia. Through association with a mythology of national origins, pastoral land use has been important in both national building in Australia and in generating a sense of settler belonging. The positive cultural association of pastoralism, however, have come under intensifying criticism since the 1980s from environmentalists and others. Drawing on ecologically based nationalism, critics of pastoralism draw on outback mythology to emphasise a geography of death in the inland caused by grazing and to articulate alternative inland geographies grounded in ecological thinking. These politics of nation building highlight new forms of long standing tensions between the outback as both rural heartland and wilderness in national origin stories, the role of land use practices in struggles over who and what ‘belongs’, and the roles of mythology in struggles over resources. These visions of the inland are however limited by frontier thinking and the boundaries and disjunctures this creates. The variety of connections between land and peoples are not part of these visions. In Sack's terms (Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness and Moral Concern, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997) the morality of these geographies of the inland is questionable as they render the inland opaque and prevent ‘seeing through to the real’. Protagonists in these debates and researchers must grapple with the reality and diversity of connections and disconnections between land and people to create moral geographies of the inland and grounded conversations beyond mythology.     

A ‘Wild West’ of trade? African women and men and the gendering of globalisation from below in Guangzhou

Based on fieldwork in Guangzhou, this paper documents the activities of a group of African women traders, highlighting their role in constituting globalisation from below or a counterhegemonic globalisation that emanates from China. It further builds on previous studies on women and development to show how neoliberal economic changes in Africa since the 1980s have forced African men into the traditionally feminine role of (informal) traders between Africa and China. Struggles for economic power between African women and men traders and representations of gender in such struggles as well as the construction of a hyper-masculine discourse in the Guangzhou context are analysed in discussing how women and men are engaged in a continual process of ‘making gender make sense’ outside of Africa.     

Atencingo Revisited: Political Class Formation and Economic Restructuring in Mexico's Sugar Industry1

Abstract Sugarcane growers have had a close relationship to the state since the 1940s when a series of decrees established a heavy state intervention in the sugar industry, which then became highly regulated. Growers became loyal to the state in exchange for low but secure incomes and other social guarantees. After the introduction of economic liberalism in Mexico during the mid-1980s (called "neoliberalism" in Mexico), the sugar industry became largely de-regulated, and sugar mills were reprivatized. This article explores the process of political class formation in the sugarcane region of Atencingo, in the state of Puebla. Whether cane growers posit peasant, proletarian, or peasant-entrepreneurial demands is examined, as is the character of organizations and alliances that direct producers have established since the 1930s (oppositional, popular-democratic, or bourgeois-hegemonic). This paper documents the emergence of a peasant-entrepreneurial class and presents initial results from a survey questionnaire administered in 1995. Rather than offering an economic argument based on a narrowly defined class position, this explanation emphasizes the prevailing regional cultures, the forms of state intervention, and the types of leadership-the crucial mediating determinations that explain political outcomes in Atencingo and other regions of rural Mexico.     

Some Log-Linear and Log-Nonlinear Models for Ordinal Scales With Midpoints, With An Application to Public Opinion Data

Ordinal response scales with a middle category are widely used in public opinion studies, psychology, medicine, computed tomography and other fields. The usual models in the statistical literature for ordinal response variables treat the case where the scale has a natural middle category no differently from the case where the scale does not have a middle category. This paper proposes new models for the analysis of ordinal response scales with middle categories, applying these to data collected in 1993-1994 on American opinion toward the balance between environmental quality and economic prosperity. Some of the models should also be useful when the scale does not have a natural middle category. The models are easily used to address issues of concern in empirical work—for example, stochastic ordering among covariate classes and asymmetry about the middle category. Log-linear models are considered in Section 2. The relationship between the normal distribution and a quadratic log-linear model with known scores, discussed in this section, is the basis for Section 3, which considers a log-nonlinear model with unknown scores estimated from the data. Section 4 shows how generalized log-linear and generalized log-nonlinear models can be used to simultaneously study whether the response is below, at, or above the midpoint, and the conditional distribution of responses above (below) the midpoint. These models are also useful when the response scale is viewed as nested and/or the response process is sequential.     

Changing Economic Opportunities,Family Structure,and Poverty in Rural Areas1

Abstract Instrustrial restructuring in the 1980s ushered in a new pattern of growing economic diversity over geographic space. The objective of this study is to examine the extent and etiology of changing spatial inequality between and within metropolitan (metro) and nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) areas, as measured by increasing or decreasing county poverty rates. Results based on data from the 1980 and 1990 census summary tape files suggest several conclusions. First, poverty rates increased more rapidly in nonmetro than metro counties during the 1980s; historical patterns of metro-nonmetro economic convergence slowed over the past decade. Second, poverty rates tended to decline in nonmetro counties with traditionally high rates of poverty, thus providing counter-evidence to arguments suggesting that the gap between traditionally poor and nonpoor nonmetro counties has widened. Third, spatial differences in poverty rates and relative increases in county poverty rates over the 1980s were most strongly associated with women's employment and headship status. The results raise questions about the extent to which traditional rural economic development strategies address the potentially deleterious economic effects of rising percentages of poor female-headed families.     

进入国际发展议程前沿的“青年”——概念、多元政策议题与优先关注目标

以往数十年，伴随当代青年发展问题的逐渐凸显和日益复杂化，国际发展议程中有关青年的政策议题和优先关注目标也处于流变之中。青年问题在国际主流发展界逐渐由边缘走向中心，而今已占据了重要的一席之地。作为在国际发展中执牛耳的政府间国际组织，联合国在倡导和推动涉及青年的国际发展战略、政策议程和干预举措上发挥了举足轻重的作用。自20世纪80年代中叶以来，国际社会有关青年发展的政策目标、议题和优先关注目标在不断拓展，这既反映了青年人及其问题的多元化和复杂化．也折射了国际决策界对这些问题认识和理解的日益深化。     

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE,SWINE PRODUCTION AND FARM LOSS IN NORTH CAROLINA

Since the early 1990s, North Carolina has been the fastest growing swine-producing state in the country and the leading innovator in vertically integrated, industrially structured hog farming. Although the growth and concentration of swine production has been associated with a host of negative social and environmental impacts on the states air, land, and waterways, environmental justice and farm loss concerns have played a particularly key role in the evolution of the controversy in North Carolina. Using multivariate analysis of statewide census and agricultural data, we identified the county-level sociodemographic characteristics associated with farm loss between 1982 and 1997. We found that recent patterns of farm loss were more pronounced in Black communities, regardless of income, and low-income communities, regardless of race. Furthermore, counties that had greater hog industry growth in the early 1980s and had large hog populations by 1992 have suffered greater farm loss since the early 1980s than counties where the hog industry growth did not intensify until more recently. The implications of these findings with reference to an expanded environmental justice framework regarding the discriminatory impacts of swine facilities on minority and low-income rural communities are discussed.     

Demographic Responses to Economic Recessions in Latin America Since 1900*

This paper explores the linkages between economic cycles and demographic processes in Latin America since 1900. We identify the mechanisms through which economic conditions have an impact on demographic outcomes and assess the demographic and socioeconomic consequences of the 1980s. Selected historical evidence is reviewed to illustrate the effects of economic cycles in Western Europe and, aided by an heuristic framework, tentative hypotheses are derived to interpret empirical evidence about the effects of the 1929 and 1980 depressions in selected Latin American countries. Results show that the demograhic consequences of the Great Depression were nontrivial. The analyses of demographic and socioeconomic responses of the post-1980 recession, however, reveal only weak linkages for some outcomes. We argue that the weak relationships may mask important transformations currently underway and conclude with a discussion of the implications for future research.     

Rapid Reregulation,Agricultural Restructuring,and the Reimaging of Agriculture in New Zealand1

Abstract As a member of the Cairns Group, New Zealand is an excellent case for investigation of the impacts of market-based restructuring and the emergence of new mechanisms for regulation. The paper examines how agriculture in New Zealand has been impacted by economic reforms that have fundamentally changed the nature and interrelations of regulatory arrangements and economic processes. The paper sketches the origins of New Zealand's agricultural crisis and the main features of the reforms, outlines developments in several global commodity chains (meat, dairy, apples) that since the mid 1980s have shaped regulatory and governance adjustments, and explores dimensions of a reimaging of agriculture in new conditions. The paper concludes that agri-food restructuring in New Zealand is implicated in the wider integrative project of globalization. Agriculture's reconstruction reopens the scope and terms under which New Zealand labor and households might be able to participate in the agri-food sector.     

COMPUTERS, PRODUCTIVITY, AND INPUT SUBSTITUTION

This paper examines the relationship between computers and economic growth using U.S. sectoral data from 1947 to 1991. The computer-producing sector shows strong multi-factor productivity growth that reflects the fundamental technological progress behind the computer revolution. Although aggregate multi-factor productivity remains low, the computer-producing sector made a substantial contribution to its modest revival in the 1980s. In sharp contrast, computer-using sectors show little multi-factor productivity growth since 1973. For these sectors, the computer revolution is largely a story of traditional input substitution, investment and rapid capital accumulation with little evidence that computer investment affects multifactor productivity. (JEL O30, O47)     

THE IRRUPTION OF TRANCE IN CONTEMPORARY YORUBA THEATRE: THEATRE,WITCHCRAFT, AND SOCIAL FRAGMENTATION IN LAGOS,NIGERIA

The golden age of Yoruba folk opera, Yoruba travelling theatre, and Yoruba theatre is over and the brightly coloured trucks carrying the companies that cruised the Nigerian Federation up to the middle of the 1980s have certainly long since been dismantled. Although many actors, musicians, and directors have indeed moved from theatre to the flourishing home-video industry, a community of actors continues to present live performances that can be categorized as “neotraditional.” This genre of Yoruba theatre is undergoing a crisis in the context of an unrelenting economic recession in Nigeria that began in the early 1980s. This situation has released tensions that lead to a real and sadly all-too-justifiable sense of insecurity and to proliferating accounts of witchcraft attacks. The outcome has been a rise in violence manifested in the unleashing of the powers of witchcraft and enflaming relations between small rival groups hitherto unified under the sway of a salaried and—at least until the beginning of the 1980s—optimistic middle class. Yoruba neotraditional theatre that represents deities on stage that belong to “an invisible world” is playing with fire and, by conjuring up the powers of witchcraft, has in turn itself been bewitched.