Social Change and the Gendered Division of Household Labor in Canada

Housework is asymmetrically distributed by gender. This uneven allocation is an important indicator of inequality between women and men. The imbalance is closing, although exactly why remains uncertain. It is also unclear if the convergence has more to do with women's lives becoming more like men's, or whether it is because men are changing their practices on the home front. Using 30 years of nationally representative time use diary data, we explore three broad theoretical frameworks addressing social change—cultural, structural, and demographic—to examine how and why the gender dynamics around housework are shifting. We find that structural factors, and in particular women's engagement with paid work, have changed most sharply as drivers of greater symmetry in domestic labor, although changing cultural beliefs have contributed as well. Furthermore, there have been significant changes in men's behavior. One focal point for this domestic change is in men's and women's shifting practices around childcare. Intensive parenting, not just intensive mothering, has become more prevalent.     

Why Don't They Just Change? Contract Farming,Informational Influence,and Barriers to Agricultural Climate Change Mitigation

Using a mixed‐methods study of contract seed‐corn farmers in southwest Michigan, we examine the effect of interlocking macro and micro social forces on climate change behavior and apply the theoretical frames of treadmills of production and informational influence. We find that competitive agricultural contracts in the seed‐corn industry impose significant structural barriers to adopting climate change mitigation behaviors. Seed‐corn contracts constrain adoption of those behaviors through competitive rankings based solely on net commodity production and by limiting farmers’ access to information to make judicious management decisions. At the micro level, our findings suggest that informational influence—that is, where farmers turn for trusted information—also affects climate change mitigation behaviors, and that these informational networks are embedded within structural constraints. Our findings suggest that agricultural contracts serve as a significant structural constraint on the adoption of mitigation practices and that climate scholarship and policy must address both macro and micro dimensions simultaneously to encourage adoption of climate change mitigation.     

‘Doing Something Meaningful’: Gender and Public Service during Municipal Government Restructuring

Research on the gendered dimensions of workplace restructuring often focuses on management strategies and their structural consequences. Less attention is paid to employees’ gendered practices. In this article, we analyse material from in‐depth interviews with front‐line public‐sector employees following a major reorganization of their jobs and workplaces. Our study makes three contributions to theory and research on gender and organizational change. Firstly, it highlights the micro‐level dynamics at the heart of restructuring by showing how workers engaged with an ideal that was central to their understanding of public‐sector work — the public‐service ethic — which they believed was threatened. Secondly, it highlights the importance of gendered meanings and identities in shaping how workers engaged with the public service ethic. Thirdly, the study shows that front‐line employees did not passively accept management plans for change but struggled to resist or transform them in gendered strategies for dealing with organizational change.     

Saving out of Remittances: Evidence from Ethiopia and Kenya

This article examines the saving behaviour of remittance recipients in Ethiopia and Kenya. The few existing estimates of savings from remittances, often obtained indirectly using expenditure analysis, vary widely. The analysis presented here relies on ordinal saving categories reported in response to a direct survey question. The results reveal that the savings rate is higher in Kenya than Ethiopia, in the raw data and the multivariate model, although in both countries it rises with receipt size. Interestingly, gender is a robust predictor of differential savings, albeit with a contrasting pattern: women save more than men in Ethiopia, while the reverse is true in Kenya. In other results, a pre‐migration agreement about remittances has a strong positive effect on savings. Savings rates are also positively associated with financial inclusion in Ethiopia and formal channel flows in Kenya. Many of these results are confirmed by analysis of broader forms of saving/investment.     

The role of evidence in nutrition policy‐making in Ethiopia: Institutional structures and issue framing

Malnutrition is the single greatest contributor to the global burden of morbidity and mortality, with most cases arising in low‐ and middle‐income countries. However, the multi‐sectoral nature of nutrition policy‐making adds considerable complexity to the implementation of effective programmes. This raises questions about why or how relevant policy change can come about within different country settings. This article examines multi‐sectoral nutrition policy‐making from the health sector perspective, specifically focusing on different sectoral perspectives and the role and use of evidence within this. Ethiopia provides a unique example of the challenging nature of multi‐sectoral nutrition policy‐making, even with a strong co‐ordinating infrastructure. In December 2014 we undertook 23 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with stakeholders from key health sector organizations, along with a related documentary analysis. Participants represented a diverse range of perspectives, including government representatives, policy stakeholders, aid providers from multi‐lateral organizations and academic researchers. Our respondents described how nutrition framing in Ethiopia is changing, with greater consideration of overweight, obesity and non‐communicable diseases, as well as undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. However, overweight‐ and obesity‐related concerns are still less evident in key documents. Some health actors described the challenge of enacting structural policy changes when doing so requires engagement from the agriculture sector. While multi‐sectoral plans and infrastructure to address malnutrition are in place, respondents suggested that the mandate for addressing nutrition resting with the health sector was reinforced by the nature of evidence collected. This study of nutrition policy‐making in Ethiopia highlights the complex interaction of evidence within different conceptualisations of policy problems and responses. Despite Ethiopia's strategic framework and its progress in achieving terms of nutrition targets, it shares the challenge of countries elsewhere in addressing nutrition as a multi‐sectoral issue.     

An alternative to farmer age as an indicator of life-cycle stage: The case for a farm family age index

In studies of farming, the age of the principal decision-maker (PDM) has been associated with numerous farm structural and managerial features and has been widely accepted as a good indicator of the influence of life-cycle factors on decision-making. As such, it has become an important aspect of many quantitative studies of agricultural change. However, contemporary studies of family farming demonstrate that the concept of a single PDM in family farms is becoming an anachronism as alternative enterprises, pluriactivity and the scale of family farms force more diffuse management/operating systems. This raises questions concerning whether the age of the PDM can still be taken as representative of farm structure, strategy or life-cycle stage? Using a study conducted in the Grampian Mountains region of Scotland in 2003 this note investigates the impact of using an alternative index—compiled by averaging the age of family members working on the farm. It suggests that PDM age is a relatively poor indicator of farm structural and managerial features compared to a family age index and calls for researchers to think about alternative approaches to measuring ‘age’ as an indicator.     

Ethiopia's developmental state: A building stability framework assessment

Ethiopia has been lauded for its economic growth and progress in human development indicators. For some, that success is rooted in the developmental state approach advocated by the government. For others, the theory of the developmental state and the practice in Ethiopia were often at odds. Up until 2018, ideas that challenged the state and its approaches were not welcome, and politicians, academics and journalists were jailed for expressing alternative views. However, this appears to have changed, and in June 2018 the Deputy Prime Minister called for debate on the developmental state model. This article explores Ethiopia's developmental state model using the building stability framework, analysing its ability to establish fair power structures, foster inclusive economic growth, develop conflict‐resolution mechanisms, create effective and legitimate institutions, and enable a supportive regional environment. We find the developmental state was effective in a number of ways, but that this modality of governance appears to have passed its peak of securing advantage in Ethiopia. A shift from the developmental state to developmental democracy appears to be underway. Decision‐making and economic policies need to align with this change.     

Social stratification in transitional economies: property rights and the structure of markets

In transitions from state socialism, property rights are re-allocated to organizations and groups, creating new markets and new forms of economic enterprise that reshape the stratification order. A generation of research has estimated individual-level outcomes with income equations and mobility models, relying on broad assumptions about economic change. We redirect attention to the process of economic change that structures emerging markets. The process varies across market sectors, depending on the entity that is granted rights formerly exercised by state organs, and on the combination of rights they are granted. The transformation of three sectors in China—agriculture, steel manufacturing, and real estate—shows how different allocations of property rights alter the stratification order in strikingly different ways. Historical analysis of the evolution of markets and enterprises integrates insights from economic sociology into research on social stratification, providing a structural perspective on transitions from state socialism.     

In the Long Run We Are all Dead: Hey Keynes, What Is Long in the Contemporary US Case?

The idea of declinism of the US had emerged in every decade after the World War Two and so it was as well after the end of the Cold War. The article argues that such a phenomenon may be attributed to the nature of the international system, where through the globalization the US enables ‘the rest’ to grow on its expense. China and other export led economies, made great benefit of the US open market that is functioning as a ‘big vacuum cleaner’. The focal question of article is two-folded: first, is ‘the raise of the rest’ causing the geoeconomic centre of power to shift from the Atlantic to Pacific; second, is the US in decline? Article presents economic data that show that there are no economic incentives for the geoeconomic shift. The geopolitical centre may indeed by shifting, but not due to the geoeconomic reasons, but rather due to military, political, and ideological power factors. The US has been in relative decline since the end of the WW2—other international actors seized the chance that the international system created by the US provided. Thus, the relevant question about declinism is—is the US in absolute decline? The article argues that the 2008 financial shock was not cyclical in nature, but rather systemic. It is the first time since the WW2 that the US was unable to answer to the challenge adequately. The main reason for that is not external, namely, the relative decline of the US—G8 was replaced by G20—but internal—the US is not tackling the core of its systemic economic problem. This suggests that the US is marching towards an absolute decline. To avoid its demise, the US has to change its Keynesian pragmatic short-sighted economic mentality and do the well needed structural reforms.     

Children's subjective well-being in Africa: A comparative analysis across three countries

Recent trends in child well-being research have shown a substantial advancement in studies investigating children's subjective well-being (SWB). This advancement has raised questions concerning the measurement of SWB and the extent to which various measures can be compared across countries and diverse cultures. With a dearth of empirical data on cross-cultural comparisons, the validation of existing measures and cross-cultural comparisons and adaptations, have been identified as a critical course of action. The current study contributes to this process – it aims to report on children's SWB in three African countries (Algeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa), using two multiple item measures of SWB (the context-free Students' Life Satisfaction Scale and the domain-specific Personal Well-Being Index-School Children). Within this process the study further aims to test the structural validity of these measures and to ascertain its cross-country comparability. Data from the second wave of the Children's Worlds survey were used; and includes a randomly selected sample of 3394 children between the ages of 11–12 from Algeria (Provinces of El Bayedh, Oran, and Tlemcen), Ethiopia and South Africa (Western Cape Province). Located within the goodness of fit theoretical framework, confirmatory factor analysis and Structural Equation Modelling were used to test the overall fit structure, while multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was used to test measurement invariance. The results show appropriate fit structure for the individual models, with metric and scalar factor invariance tenable across the three countries for the Students' Life Satisfaction Scale and partial scalar invariance obtained for four items on the Personal Well-Being Index-School Children. The Algerian sample scored significantly higher than Ethiopia and South Africa on both SWB measures. Appropriate fit structure was obtained for the combined model and for the structural model, indicating adequate convergent validity with the single item Overall Life Satisfaction. Metric and partial scalar invariance was tenable for the structural model, suggesting cross-country comparability for correlations, regressions and means. The overall findings suggest that the two measures are appropriate for use with children from the three countries and that meaningful comparisons can be made between the three countries.     

Injecting social psychology theory into conceptualisations of agricultural agency: Towards a post-productivist farmer self-identity?

Macro-scale changes to Western agricultural regimes have led to recent debates on the theoretical conceptualisation of agricultural change, particularly regarding the appropriateness of the productivist/post-productivist/multifunctionality (P/PP/MF) model. Within these debates concern has recently arisen as to whether the contemporary perspective, which derives largely from macro-level structural analyses (such as political economy), is compatible with the grassroots ‘agency’ perspective—i.e. whether our conceptualisations of agricultural change follow the Giddensian notion of structure/agency consistency. In this paper we contribute to this debate by investigating the extent to which farmers’ self-concepts and attitudes towards post-productivist approaches are compatible with the current structural changes in agriculture. By introducing the notion from social psychology of a complex self-structure comprised of multiple and hierarchically organised identities, and by investigating the structure of these identities in farmers’ idealised P/PP/MF selves, the study questions the idea that any transformation from productivism to post-productivism/multifunctionality will be in the form of a simple linear transition. Results from a survey of farmers in Bedfordshire (UK) and evidence from other studies throughout Europe and Western agricultural regimes demonstrate that—despite much talk of an increasing ‘conservationist’ component to farming—farmers’ self-concepts are still dominated by production-oriented identities. The study concludes that there is a temporal discordance between the macro- and micro-structural elements of transition implied in the P/PP/MF model, and that we are witnessing at most a partial macro-structural driven transition towards a post-productivist agricultural regime.     

Attitude and Propensity to Divorce in Iran: Structural and Ideational Determinants

Divorce has been increasing worldwide, even in societies where religious impediments to it are strongest. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, divorce rates have risen rapidly since the mid-1990s. In this article, we investigate the attitude and propensity of young Iranians toward divorce and relate these attitudes and propensities to structural and ideational factors. The data are drawn from a survey of 720 married people ages 15 to 29 conducted in the city of Tehran in 2014. The results show that almost half of respondents approved of divorce as a solution for marital problems and one fifth of them have high propensity to divorce. Multivariate analyses indicate that approval of and high propensity toward divorce are significantly associated with ideational factors—namely individualism, secularism, and gender egalitarian views—and structural factors—including education, wife’s employment, and household economic insecurity—even after controlling for demographic variables. We discuss the implications of these findings for the understanding of marital stability in this rapidly changing context.     

Politics by numbers: poverty reduction discourse,contestations and regime legitimacy in Ethiopia

There are contradictory statistics about the number of poor people and changes in number of poor people in Ethiopia with statistics ranging from 26 to 86% of the total population in 2013. This paper analyzed how such contradictory statistics feed into national politics focusing on who uses which statistics and based on what justifications of authoritativeness. Drawing from data collected from print newspapers, blogs, websites, published articles, party publications, and interviews with four key informants and combining an actor’s centered discourse analysis (ACDA) with Van Dick’s (1997) approach of identifying and analyzing political discourses, the paper deconstructed the poverty statistics debate in Ethiopia to understand the basic contestations. Synthesis of the data shows that poverty numbers are being used as tools for, and manifestations of, ongoing power struggles in Ethiopia whereby different actors selectively use poverty statistics that promote their political agenda. While doing so, the underlying rationale of actors for choosing one statistics over another was not based on the merit of their preferred set of statistics over the others but on the suitability of the data for their political purpose. As such, the government disregards statistics except its own which portray rapid poverty decline in the country while opposition groups actively use and promote statistics coming from international organizations that depict increasing poverty or a slow rate of reduction of poverty. The paper argues that the underlying cause of such politicization of numbers is linked with the developmental statism ideology of the ruling party in Ethiopia and how it tries to justify its rule in Ethiopia – claiming that it is reducing poverty and bringing development in Ethiopia and therefore should be allowed to continue in power. Therefore, in debating poverty numbers what is being debated is not just the statistics but the legitimacy of the government, hence politics by numbers.     

Erwerbseinstieg und erste Erwerbsjahre

The debate about the structural change of the labor market and the organization of dependent work has not been decided, neither theoretically nor empirically. This paper investigates on the basis of data from the GSOEP (German Socio Economic Panel) the entry into the labor market and the first years of gainful employment for four birth cohorts. The central focus of our argumentation lies on the following questions: Is there an increase of atypical entries into the labor market (aged 15 to 26) — i.e. part-time employment, unemployment or non labor market participation — and what proportion of their first years of working life (aged 15 to 36) do people spend in full-time employment. The results show a rise of atypical entries into the labor market for the younger cohorts. The duration of male full-time employment will be shorter because of longer education periods, while this duration rises for women as a result of decreasing relevance of housewife work. An atypical entry into the labor market has long-term consequences for the further working life, so that it hardly can be compensated. A de-standardization of the entry into the working life is most frequent for men and women with lower professional qualification. The results show that society is increasingly polarizing along the lines of qualified and non-qualified persons.     

Young people's decision making involvement and educational attainment

Increasing participation in family decision making is an integral part of adolescent development. This paper uses longitudinal data from four low and middle income countries—Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam—to assess the relationship between young people's involvement in schooling decision making and schooling outcomes. In the pooled sample, compared to young adults who indicate to have no say in educational choices at age 19, adolescents who make these decisions unilaterally or jointly with parents are on average 17%–23% more likely to drop out by age 22. The effects are, however, heterogenous across countries.     

Policies,Interventions and Institutional Change in Pastoral Resource Management in Borana,Southern Ethiopia

The Borana rangelands of Southern Ethiopia are characterised by extensive livestock production under a communal land‐use system that has evolved in response to variable rainfall and uncertain production conditions. However, the last two decades have witnessed an increasing privatisation of rangelands for crop production and private grazing. The results of a quantitative assessment are used to develop a framework for assessing the drivers of change and their long‐term implications. It is concluded that certain national policies have resulted in conflicts of authority between traditional and formal systems, creating an avenue for spontaneous enclosures, associated conflicts and decreasing human welfare.     

Constructing Clean Dreams: Accounts,Future Selves,and Social and Structural Support as Desistance Work

This article investigates the discourse individuals use when talking about desisting from criminal offending. I analyze the links between offenders’ accounts of past negative behavior, their construction of their possible “clean” future selves, and the social and structural conditions in which they were raised and continue to be embedded. Applying Scott and Lyman's (1968) framework on accounts and Markus and Nurius's (1986) framework of possible selves to interview data with twenty‐eight criminal offenders, I illustrate how excuses for past behavior provide a way for people to distance themselves from their past selves in attempts to preserve or re‐create a possible self that is still worthy to be redeemed in the future. This discourse becomes one mechanism that motivates individuals to change their lives—but it can be short‐lived. The analysis highlights how limited structural opportunities influence individuals’ lifestyles and behaviors, how individuals approach the desistance process even in the face of structural deprivation, and how they attempt to sustain this desistance process.     

Network brokerage and the perception of leadership

We renovate a classic experiment to define a research platform that provides data on network behavior and the causal effect of access to structural holes. Our hypothesis is that people are perceived to be leaders when they behave as network brokers, which is to say, when they coordinate information across structural holes. We focus on the perception of leadership to connect with the many field studies in which access to structural holes predicts success measures keyed to leadership. Our hypothesis is clearly supported. The broker-leader association we report is very similar in strength and form to broker-success associations reported in previous research. At the same time, it is also clear that people adapt to their randomly assigned network, re-shaping it to suit preferences that in some part emerge in team deliberations or outside the experiment. A modification to our hypothesis — at least for these small laboratory teams — is that monopoly brokerage is key to being cited as team leader. Leadership is ambiguous when multiple people are positioned to be brokers unless one person emerges by his or her network behavior as a monopoly broker. Our summary conclusion is that access to structural holes can be causal to the perception of leadership, a characteristic implicit in many success measures used to document the broker-success association.     

The case for an inhabited institutionalism in organizational research: interaction,coupling, and change reconsidered

This paper makes the case for an inhabited institutionalism by pondering questions that continue to vex institutional theory: How can we account for local activity, agency, and change without reverting to a focus on individual actors—the very kinds of actors that institutional theory was designed to critique? How is change possible in an institutional context that constructs interests and sets the very conditions for such action? Efforts to deal with these questions by inserting various forms of individual, purposive actors into institutional frameworks have created inconsistencies that threaten the overall coherence of institutional theory and move it farther from its sociological roots. To provide alternative answers, we turn to the growing line of work on “inhabited” institutions. Our exegesis of this literature has two goals. The first goal is to shift focus away from individuals and nested imagery and towards social interaction and coupling configurations. This move opens new avenues for research and helps to identify the spaces—both conceptual and empirical—and the supra-individual processes that facilitate change. This shift has important theoretical implications: incorporating social interaction alters institutional theory, and our second goal is to specify an analytic framework for this new research, an inhabited institutionalism. Inhabited institutionalism is a meso-approach for examining the recursive relationships among institutions, interactions, and organizations. It provides novel and sociologically consistent means for dealing with issues of agency and change, and a new agenda for research that can reinvigorate and reunite organizational sociology and institutional theory.

     

Globalisation Continues: The Maastricht Globalisation Index Revisited and Updated

Globalisation is a complex process which leads to an increasing connectedness and interrelatedness in the political, economic, social and cultural, technological, and environmental domain on many different scales. While this is a truly global phenomenon, it also has different impacts and manifestations in different geographic localities. As a result, different nations exhibit different levels of globalisation or connectedness. Further, perspectives on globalisation are manifold and change over time, therefore it is crucial to continuously reflect upon and revise existing methodologies. Composite indices are a powerful tool to capture and measure complex concepts that allow for monitoring complex systems over time and yield relative rankings and comparisons. This article presents a revised and updated Maastricht Globalisation Index for 117 countries and three points in time—2000, 2008, and 2012—including a new calculation methodology and data. Results show that globalisation still continues but has slowed down, due to the recent economic crisis.