Families in Poverty in the 1990s: Trends,Causes, Consequences,and Lessons Learned

During the 1990s, poverty rates in the United States remained relatively stable despite a robust economy in which unemployment and inflation were at their lowest points in many years. Approximately 13% of individuals, 11% of families, and 19% of children lived below the poverty line in 1998, a decline of only 1% or less for each of these categories since 1990. These high rates of poverty result in many severe consequences. This essay reviews the research and theoretical and conceptual developments during the past decade, including: (a) a background on how the poverty line was developed; (b) general research themes in the 1990s; (c) the causes of the virtually unchanged poverty rate; (d) the consequences of poverty, particularly for children; and (e) the lessons we have learned from research over the past decade, with some directions for the future.     

Ordinary heroes: England international football players in the 1990s

This paper considers recent debates about the quality of English football, and it also looks at alleged connections between declining standards and the restructuring of the Football League in England. It contrasts the specific qualities of the British style against those more commonly associated in English eyes with the continent and it also looks at the increasing in fluence of television in shaping the consumption of football as a global idiom. It concludes by arguing that growing commercialization and globalization per se cannot alone explain the increased physical stresses on players and the peculiarly robust style of play in Britain. For this one also needs closely to examine discourses on masculinity, class, nation and tradition, and to locate the effects of these discourses as mediators of recent trends in the management and marketing of the sport.     

Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s Through the 1990s

This article examines trends in family attitudes and values across the last 4 decades of the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the past 2 decades. The article focuses on attitudes toward a wide range of family issues, including the roles of men and women, marriage, divorce, childlessness, premarital sex, extramarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, and unmarried childbearing. More generally, the article considers trends in 3 broad contemporary values: freedom; equality; and commitment to family, marriage, and children. Five data sets are used for the article: Monitoring the Future, General Social Survey, International Social Science Project, Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children, and the National Survey of Families and Households. These 5 data sets reveal substantial and persistent long‐term trends toward the endorsement of gender equality in families, which may have plateaued at very high levels in recent years. There have also been important and continuing long‐term trends toward individual autonomy and tolerance toward a diversity of personal and family behaviors as reflected in increased acceptance of divorce, premarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, remaining single, and choosing to be childless. At the same time, marriage and family life remain important in the cultural ethos, with large and relatively stable fractions of young people believing that marriage and family life are important and planning marriage and the bearing and rearing of children.     

Unionization and faculty salaries: New evidence from the 1990s

The literature on how unionization affects faculty salaries and compensation is inconclusive. I use the 1993 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty to investigate how collective bargaining affects faculty salaries. Union representation significantly alters the returns to individual and institutional characteristics, and unionized faculty receive a premium of between 7 and 14 percent, an earnings differential that is substantially larger than those found in most earlier studies.     

Humanistic Leadership in the 1990s: Heart,Soul, and Head

The Leader of the Future: New Visions, Strategies, and Practices for the Next Era, edited by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 1996. 319 pp., $25.00 cloth. Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit, by Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. 195 pp., $20.00 cloth. Leading and Managing the Expressive Dimension: Harnessing the Hidden Power Source of the Nonprofit Sector, by David E. Mason. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. 323 pp., $29.95 cloth.     

Family-Centered Practice in the 1990s:

This paper presents a multicultural perspective for family-centered social work practice. Such a perspective uses ethclass and value orientation theory as sensitizing conceptual frameworks for understanding a family's cultural reality. This understanding, used by a multicultural practitioner, leads to the use of approaches most congruent with the multicultural world views of the families served.     

城市发展转型的缘起、内涵与态势

文章分析了传统城市发展模式带来的弊端与面临的挑战,阐述了中国城市发展转型的基本内涵,即发展理念、产业结构、增长方式、发展动力、体制机制五大转型的有机统一,总结了21世纪以来我国城市发展转型的总体特点与态势,并据此提出了加快推动我国城市发展转型的对策建议。     

Fields of Action: Australian Women's Agricultural Activism in the 1990s1

Abstract In recent years, women's contribution to farming has been increasingly recognized by academics, decision makers, and some sectors of the farming community. In contrast, women's activism in agricultural politics is less well accepted or understood. This paper investigates data from a number of farm activist groups operating on a variety of scales in Australia. The paper examines the ways in which farm women develop political agency and then mobilize across a number of “fields of action” to effect both personal and industry-wide change.     

The economic fallout from divorce: Issues for the 1990s

Economic consequences of divorce, especially for women, are negative and persistent according to a range of research studies. The question is whether, given changing social circumstances, this negative economic fallout from divorce is likely to diminish in the 1990s and beyond. Dramatic changes suggest both reasons for optimism and pessimism. On the positive side are the trends toward more continuous labor force participation among women and smaller contemporary family sizes. Negative influences include changes in the labor market for women, continuing problems with child support compliance, the persistence of the wage gap, and the difficulties of combining parenting and employment.The writing of this paper was supported in part by National Institute on Aging grants AG04895 and AG06591. We are grateful to Marina Adler, Sharon Price, Mara Skruch and Lynn White for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.(Ph.D., University of Southern California) conducts research on divorce, widowhood, older women's issues, and family support in later life families.(Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) focuses her research on divorce, bereavement, and the impact of life events on adjustment.(Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University) studies economic trends in U.S. society.     

Women's and men's subjective class identification from the 1970s to the 1990s

This study examines the subjective class identification of employed married women and men during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Using data from the General Social Survey, we test three competing models of subjective class identification: status borrowing, independent status, and status sharing. The findings indicate that the predictors of class identification for both women and men have changed considerably over the past three decades. The model for men has shifted from an independent model in the 1970s to a sharing model that depends on their gender‐role attitudes in the 1980s, and, further, to a sharing model irrespective of gender‐role attitudes in the 1990s. The model for women has moved away from a complex borrowing model of the 1970s toward a sharing model in the 1980s and 1990s, with women's gender‐role attitudes shaping their class identification process in the 1970s and 1980s, but not in the 1990s.     

What Brazil learned from labour flexibilization in the 1990s

The debt crisis of 1981–83 changed the course that Brazil's social and labour policy had followed from the 1930s to the 1970s. The social and labour protection systems built up over those five decades – in conjunction with urbanization, industrialization and the rise of wage employment – were gradually dismantled. The neo‐liberal policies adopted, however, failed to generate sufficient economic growth and brought worsening unemployment and job insecurity instead. Since the end of 2002, Brazil has been turning away from its “neo‐liberal society “project.     

Work and Family in the 1990s

This review highlights four themes emerging from the work and family literature of the 1990s. The first theme evolves from the historical legacy of the maternal employment literature with its focus on children's well‐being. The second theme, work socialization, is based on the premise that occupational conditions, such as autonomy and complexity, shape the values of workers who in turn generalize these lessons off the job. Research on work stress, the third theme, explores how experiences of short‐ and long‐term stress at work make their mark on workers' behavior and well‐being off the job. Finally, the multiple roles literature focuses on how individuals balance roles, such as parent, spouse, and worker, and the consequences for health and family relationships. In addition to these four major themes, advances in work and family policy initiatives over the past decade are discussed. Suggestions for future research focus on addressing issues of causality, attending to the complexity of social contexts, linking research to policy, and developing interdisciplinary theories and research designs.     

Racial wage differentials among young adults: Evidence from the 1990s

This study seeks to decompose wage differentials between black and white male young adults into those related to labor market discrimination and those resulting from human capital endowments. The importance of testing for significant differences in wage equations before conducting decomposition analysis is emphasized. Study results demonstrate that ignoring correction for the sample selection bias resulting from black-white differences in the probability of being employed would lead to an underestimation of the size of wage differentials. The study also shows that the results of models based on different assumptions regarding the nondiscriminatory wage structure might lead to different conclusions pertinent to the extent of labor market discrimination. Implications for public policy development are discussed. His current research interests include consumption economics, income distribution, and international comparative analyses of households' resources allocation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Her current research interests include family financial distribution and wellbeing and individual and family resource management. She received her Ph.D. from Iowa State University.     

The American sociologist: Characteristics in the 1990s

This article describes the characteristics, theoretical preferences, and political orientations of sociologists in the United States. The findings are the most representative of their kind reported to date. Other professional groups, such as psychiatrists, have been studied over time (Gallagher, 1977; Gallagher et al., 1987; Gallagher et al., 1990), but studies of sociologists have been almost non-existent. In fact, there has only been one study of this nature conducted in the 1990s, and that one sampled only sociologists whose names appeared on the membership list of the American Sociological Association (Sanderson and Ellis, 1992). However, that sampling frame did not provide a representative cross-section of American sociologists because it excluded the large proportion of sociologists who are not members of the ASA and who probably are systematically different than members. It is ironic that sociologists who intensively study the characteristics of all sorts of groups know so little about themselves. That is a major reason why this project was undertaken.     

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.     

Intermediary bodies in the 1990s: New settings,old problems?

Intermediary bodies liaise between the voluntary and statutory sectors. Frequently, they have also functioned as local development bodies. This article examines changes in the position of intermediary bodies following the growth of welfare pluralistic policies in the late 1980s, as viewed from the framework of a case study of the Council for Voluntary Service in northwest England. The author concludes that while the voluntary and statutory sectors may now be more willing to accept an intermediary role for such bodies, it remain difficult for them also to undertake development work.     

Food Aid in the 1990s

Book reviewed in this article: Food Aid Reconsidered: Assessing the Impact on Third World Countries. Edited by Edward Clay and Olav Stokke