Socio-economic wellbeing in Australian mining towns: A comparative analysis

Understanding the links between resource dependence and socio-economic wellbeing has long been a subject of interest amongst social scientists in North America. By contrast, relatively few Australian studies exist on this topic. This is despite the significant role of resource industries in shaping Australia's economic and social geography. Where research has been undertaken it tends to focus on the experience of a single town or region. This paper presents a cross-sectional analysis of socio-economic performance across 33 small mining towns in Western Australia. We design and test a number of empirical models that are hypothesised to account for the variability in socio-economic performance across different resource industry contexts. The results of the analysis suggest that socio-economic wellbeing in these towns is highly variable, and contingent on a range of factors including the nature of the particular commodity, company structure, and location.     

The restructuring of local government in rural regions: A rural development perspective

Rural development is a multidimensional phenomenon. The political dimension, relating as it does to power, resources, accountability, priorities and choice, is a pivotal aspect of rural development. Local government is often the centrepiece of rural political systems. Interventions to reconfigure local government are therefore quintessentially rural development initiatives. They serve to supplement, neutralize or detract from other development initiatives. One way to critically examine local government restructuring policies and programmes is to determine the extent to which they accord with commonly held principles of rural development, both in terms of outcomes and process. This research critically examines a particular public policy intervention in rural Ontario, Canada. Through the application of rural development principles and criteria, it concludes that the process was antithetical to rural development, and in terms of outcomes, of dubious value. It poses several questions and challenges for rural development theory, including governance, and practice.     

Rural restructuring and agriculture-rural economy linkages: A New Zealand study

Rapid rural restructuring in New Zealand has occurred following government policy changes in the mid-1980s. This paper seeks to explore the impact of these events on agriculture-rural economy linkages, with a study of a rural service town in Southland, the southernmost region of the South Island. The findings show that the town experienced recession soon after agricultural deregulation due to cutbacks in farmer expenditure. The responses of a range of agriculturally-related businesses, and also community responses to recession, are explored through documentary research and in-depth interviews. It is concluded that deregulation has altered agricultural-rural economy linkages but has not lessened their importance.     

Age and gambling behavior: A declining and shifting pattern of participation

The relationship between age and gambling has received relatively little attention in the social sciences. An aging American population might have a fundamental effect on gambling behavior suggesting that such research is needed. A random telephone survey of 1,011 Iowa residents was conducted. Chronological age was found to be negatively related to gambling behavior in this study. Within this trend, however, people of different ages were also found to be participating in different types of gambling. The general decline in gambling across age categories can be conceptualized as a result of an age decline in experimentation with gambling for self-identity, self-presentation, as well as an historical increase in the social acceptance of gambling. The differential rates of participation in different types of gambling could result from differential needs and resources related to different stages of development and thus age categories.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Eighth International Conference on Risk and Gambling in London, England on August 17, 1990 and the 43rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America in Boston on November 19, 1990. This research was partially funded by the Iowa Department of Human Services. The authors would like to thank Dan Hoyt, David Huff, Motoko Lee, Henry Lesieur, Mack Shelley, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Population and towns in Senegal: demo-geographic growth

Using data from the 1976 and 1988 censuses, the author notes that the population of Senegal has grown by 37.6 percent over the period and that this growth is concentrated in urban areas. One feature of this trend has been the growing primacy of the capital Dakar and a decline in the relative importance of smaller towns. The need to discourage rural-urban migration by promoting socioeconomic development in rural areas is stressed. (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

Community Foundations: A Growing Resource for Community Development

Like many nonprofit organizations, community development corporations (CDCs) rely on various sources of funding and support for their activities in poor and distressed neighborhoods. Funders often include the federal government, state and local government agencies, financial institutions, and philanthropic organizations. The author explains how community foundations are different from other philanthropic organizations and describes the various mechanisms that community foundations use to support community development. She suggests that there is a natural fit between the purpose of community foundations and the philosophy of community development, concluding that it is important for CDCs, as well as other nonprofit organizations, to understand how community foundations are different from other philanthropic organizations so that they may better position themselves to take advantage of the many resources that community foundations bring to their communities.     

Why American business demands twenty-first century learning: A company perspective

Microsoft is an innovative corporation demonstrating the kind and caliber of job skills needed in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates its commitment to twenty-first century skills by holding its employees accountable to a set of core competencies, enabling the company to run effectively. The author explores how Microsoft's core competencies parallel the Partnership for 21st Century Skills learning frameworks. Both require advanced problem-solving skills and a passion for technology, both expect individuals to be able to work in teams, both look for a love of learning, and both call for the self-confidence to honestly self-evaluate. Microsoft also works to cultivate twenty-first century skills among future workers, investing in education to help prepare young people for competitive futures. As the need for digital literacy has become imperative, technology companies have taken the lead in facilitating technology training by partnering with schools and communities. Microsoft is playing a direct role in preparing students for what lies ahead in their careers. To further twenty-first century skills, or core competencies, among the nation's youth, Microsoft has established Partners in Learning, a program that helps education organizations build partnerships that leverage technology to improve teaching and learning. One Partners in Learning grantee is Global Kids, a nonprofit organization that trains students to design online games focused on global social issues resonating with civic and global competencies. As Microsoft believes the challenges of competing in today's economy and teaching today's students are substantial but not insurmountable, such partnerships and investments demonstrate Microsoft's belief in and commitment to twenty-first century skills.     

品牌社区——一种后亚文化景观

"品牌社区"是当前传播学和市场营销学领域的热门话题,研究者多着眼于品牌社区的商业功能(即维持顾客忠诚度)这一维度,却很少从"亚文化"的角度来对其特征和功能加以反思。以亚文化研究中的关键词为切入点,对品牌社区的风格表意实践和差异的传达功能进行的研究发现,在后现代主义的语境下,品牌社区已经被"新族群"的概念所涵盖,成为一种"后亚文化"的景观。     

Five new towns in the Seoul metropolitan area and their attractions in non-working trips: Implications on self-containment of new towns

In the late 1980s, the Korean government initiated the “Two Million Home Construction Plan” to tackle severe shortages in housing and soaring housing prices. Five new towns (Bundang, Ilsan, Pyeongchon, Sanbon, and Joongdong) were planned around the city of Seoul. By the mid-1990s the residential areas in the five new towns were mostly developed. However, their commercial areas have remained underdeveloped and as a consequence, the new towns are believed to have become bedroom communities.This paper assesses self-containment status of the new towns by analyzing non-working trip patterns in the five new town areas. A survey conducted on non-working trip patterns of the residents in the five new towns and the nearby areas (to shop for groceries, clothing, electronics/jewelry, leisure/entertainment, and to access medical services) reveals that Bundang's commercial dependency upon the city of Seoul has been reduced significantly over the past 5 years (from 1995 to 2000). The survey results on non-working trip patterns of the residents in the five new towns and nearby residential areas in the Seoul Metropolitan Area indicate that the five new towns have been growing as suburban centers in the region in terms of retail attractions, even though they are still maintaining a high dependency on Seoul in terms of working commutes.These observations provide some new indications about self-containment arguments relevant to new town planning. The new towns are currently maintaining a decent degree of self-containment in terms of non-working trip, which has been an important aspect absent in self-containment arguments. In addition, the appeal of self-containment in non-working activities is growing in a dynamic sense. Observations on the dynamic process of the new town developments in Korea demonstrate that the self-containment can be established but through a long taking cumulative and stepwise process rather than immediately by planning.     

A culture of whiteness: How integration failed in cities,suburbs, and small towns

As America's neighborhoods have become more racially diverse in the last half century, are these shared spaces fulfilling the “promise of integration”? In this study, I review the literature on desegregation as it occurs in urban, suburban, and rural places, illuminating how a culture of whiteness works in each of these types of places to reproduce racial domination. The literature on multiethnic urban areas demonstrates how a culture of whiteness reframes gentrification as ‘revitalization’ and nostalgia, which result in social control and cultural displacement of non-white residents. In suburban places, I draw out the ways a culture of whiteness is expressed as ‘niceness’ and ‘governmentality’, resulting in symbolic exclusion and forced assimilation of people of color. Finally, in rural places, a culture of whiteness uses narratives of ‘pollution’ and ‘parasitism’ to understand often low-income migrants of color, which renders them invisible and reproduces their structural disadvantage in the community. Revealing the subtle and obscure mechanisms through which a culture of whiteness reproduces racial domination in diverse places ultimately provides the key to their undoing and opens the door to the promise of integration.     

Carl Milofsky: Towards an Institutional Theory of Community and Community Associations: A Review

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

New community governance in small rural towns: the Australian experience

State and federal governments in Australia have developed a range of policy instruments for rural areas in Australia that are infused with a new sense of ‘community’, employing leading concepts like social capital, social enterprise, community development, partnerships and community building. This has encouraged local people and organisations to play a greater role in the provision of their local services and has led to the development of a variety of ‘community’ organisations aimed at stemming social and economic decline. In Victoria, local decision-making, before municipal amalgamations, gave small towns some sense of autonomy and some discretion over their affairs. However, following municipal amalgamations these small towns lost many of the resources—legal, financial, political, informational and organisational—associated with their former municipal status. This left a vacuum in these communities and the outcome was the emergence of local development groups. Some of these groups are new but many of them are organisations that have been reconstituted as groups with a broader community focus. The outcomes have varied from place to place but overall there has been a significant shift in governance processes at community level. This paper looks at the processes of ‘community governance’ and how it applies in a number of case studies in Victoria.     

The new dependency: Technological change and socioeconomic restructuring in Latin America

This article analyzes the implications for the Latin American societies of the ongoing restructuring of the world economy, which is driven by the accelerated application of science and technology to the production process. After a short review of the current developments at the regional level, the article focuses on Mexico and Bolivia. These two extreme cases, ranging from high-technology industries on the United States-Mexico border to the growth of an underground economy based in the production of coca and cocaine, allow the analysis of new forms of dependency that are already constraining the economic adjustment and the democratization process in Latin America.     

Migrant workers in the Arab Gulf: the impact of declining oil revenues

"This article explores the relationship between government expenditure and labor immigration in the Arab Gulf states. This relationship was close and positive during the rapid growth of the 1970s. Using Kuwait as a case study, trends in immigrant labor movements over the period 1981-85 are considered in detail. This analysis shows that the current economic downturn, reflecting the collapse of the world oil prices, has not resulted in the large scale re-export of foreign labor which was envisaged. The reasons for this foreign labor retention are considered and the authors speculate on future migration trends in the region."