On the Receiving End: Women,Caring, and Breast Cancer

Gendered definitions of care influence breast cancer survivors’ coping strategies, sense of entitlement to care, and ultimately their capacity to receive care. Using qualitative data from 60 intensive interviews, this study examines how gendered definitions of care influence women’s experiences as care-receivers. Findings indicate that negotiating gender boundaries to care for the self is both empowering and stigmatizing. Women with breast cancer are required to break gender norms that stress compliance, nurturing, and putting the needs of others first to prioritize their own needs for care. Concurrently, they take on additional nurturing roles to provide support to other women with breast cancer, relinquishing to some degree the individualistic approach to life they found necessary to cope with their illness in the first place.

Constructing Union Motherhood: Gender and Social Reproduction in the Los Angeles “Justice for Janitors” Movement

The literature recognizes the need for unions to change their strategies in order to organize women but whether these strategies reinforce or undermine gender inequality is insufficiently examined. An ethnography of the Los Angeles Justice for Janitors movement demonstrates how women can mitigate unequal gender relations tied to social reproduction through unions. Secondary documents, participant observation and in-depth interviews with Latina/o immigrant janitors and with union staff show how women janitors constructed a union motherhood that undermined the invisibility and devaluation of caregiving generally performed by women. As they moved into union leadership, women worker leaders made caregiving more visible in union practice and recognized its value in the way they framed a broader unionism for the family. Attention to how unions contend with social reproduction extends our understanding of the consequences of union renewal for gender inequality.

Gender Perspective in Cross-Cultural Couples

This article explores gender perspective in clinical work with couples whose romantic choices fall across cultural, racial and religious lines. A conceptual framework is presented to track the dimensions of differences between the two partners in intercultural couples (collective vs. individualistic). The article illustrates how emotional expressiveness, continuum of autonomy, gender differentiation, and sexuality play out in intimate cross-cultural relationships. It also shows how the embedded, culturally assigned gender beliefs and roles are addressed in treatment. Examples from the author’s clinical work are presented throughout the article.

The Multiple Meanings of Work for Welfare-Reliant Women

Based on ethnographic and interview data collected at two welfare to work offices, this paper explores the various meanings that welfare-reliant women give to paid work. Although studies show that welfare-reliant women support work requirements and believe that welfare receipt should be temporary, even Progressives often fail to see the multiple meanings work has for poor women, and how similar these are to the meanings most Americans attach to work. Not only do poor women want to work for basic economic survival, but they view paid work as a means to family security, a path to fulfilling personal aspirations, and as their civic responsibility.

“Family-Friendly” Fringe Benefits and the Gender Wage Gap

Evidence suggests a large portion of the gender wage gap is explained by gender occupational segregation. A common hypothesis is that gender differences in preferences or abilities explain this segregation; women may prefer jobs that provide more “family-friendly” fringe benefits. Much of the research provides no direct evidence on gender differences in access to fringe benefits, nor how provision affects wages. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we find that women are more likely to receive family-friendly benefits, but not other types of fringe benefits. We find no evidence that the differences in fringe benefits explain the gender wage gap.

Part-Time Work and the Gender Division of Labor

In response to the incompatible demands of work and motherhood, many mothers seek out part-time work schedules. Although many mothers consider this option “the best of both worlds,” scholars are divided about whether part-time work is in women’s best interest because it is linked to the gender division of labor in the home, and hence, to gender inequality. In this paper, we investigate the mostly unintended consequences of part-time work on the gender division of labor within the household. Drawing on 54 in-depth interviews with mothers who voluntarily work part-time, we explore how mothers experience household work and child care arrangements when they work part-time. Three factors emerged as most important in understanding how part-time work can shape mothers’ experiences of the gender division of labor: pathway to part-time work, work location, and work schedule. Depending on these factors, part-time work may be experienced as either enhancing or undermining of the gender division of labor, and thus, as promoting or undermining gender equality in their families.

Altruistic and Vicarious Fear of Crime: Fear for Others and Gendered Social Roles

Fear for others as distinct from personal fear is an understudied phenomenon. Relying on qualitative data, this paper explores gender differences in fear for others and identifies differences linked to social roles. For men, a paternal protector role characterized fears expressed mostly for their wives. For women, a maternal caretaker role characterized fears expressed for their children, elderly parents, and siblings. This paper offers a new way to conceptualize fear for others based on making distinctions between the object of fear and active or nonactive responses: kinship-based altruistic fear, kinship-based vicarious fear, general altruistic fear, and general vicarious fear.

Attachment Repair in Couples Therapy: A Prototype for Treatment of Intimate Relationships

This paper describes a prototype for the treatment of intimate relationships that takes into account how to evaluate attachment styles in the couple relationship and in psychotherapy, and how to integrate this understanding into clinical practice. It is important for the couple’s therapist to understand attachment, its neurobiological underpinnings, and its origins in early development. Secure attachment in an adult relationship may be challenged if one or both partners have experienced disruption of a primary attachment relationship. The goal of successful treatment is to restore the normative growth of intimacy, empathy, understanding, healthy dependency, and connection.

Urban ecosystems: What would Tansley do?

The ecosystem concept was introduced in ecology originally to solve problems associated with theories of succession and ecological communities. It has evolved to become one of ecology’s fundamental ideas, and has proven to be applicable to a wide variety of research questions and applications. However, there is controversy about whether or how well the ecosystem concept is suited to urban habitats. By examining Arthur Tansley’s original presentation of the ecosystem concept, and exploring how the ecological context of the concept has changed, we indicate that the fundamental concept of the ecosystem is well suited to urban ecological studies. The concept can be clarified for urban use by including a social complex and a built complex to insure that human social institutions and actions, and the structures and infrastructure they build are explicitly included in the ecosystem concept. The ecosystem concept is thus seen as clearly robust to use in urban areas.

Formative Experiences of Orthodox Jewish Women: Attachment Patterns and Spiritual Development

This qualitative study examines formative spiritual experiences of thirteen Orthodox Jewish women. The author discusses differences between Orthodox-born women and women returnees to Orthodoxy. From an attachment perspective, the data suggests that secure as well as insecure attachment bonds are the primary factors in religious development for these respondents. The author also argues that spiritual development from a Kabbalistic perspective offers a complementary paradigm from which to evaluate the respondents’ religious development. Finally, recommendations for clinical practice with Orthodox women are discussed.

Myths of Women and Their Reflection in a Therapy Group

One essential dilemma for modern clinical social work involves the relationship between the processes taking place inside the self and the social, cultural, and political developments affecting a person from the outside. The group-analysis approach focuses on four levels of relationships and communication within the group, among others a primordial level of shared myths, archetypical images, and the collective unconscious as an important component of psychotherapy. This article describes group-analysis therapy with women, analyzing a therapeutic process that used social myths to explore the formative institutionalization processes participants had undergone, thereby expanding themselves, growing, and changing.

Migration Decisions of Dual-earner Families: An Application of Multilevel Modeling

A comprehensive framework for guiding analyses of internal migration is lacking. This study contributes to the family migration literature in three important ways. We develop a multilevel theoretical framework emphasizing an integration of individual-, family-, and neighborhood-level effects; introduce multilevel statistical modeling; and explicitly assess how effects of economic-based explanatory variables vary by gender. Our data are from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We find that the likelihood of a family migrating is affected by economic and non-economic factors, some of which vary by gender. We add to the dual-earner migration literature by finding that wives are not likely to be tied-movers, but husbands are likely to be tied-stayers. Neighborhood factors also are important to the decision to migrate.

International Funding of NGOs in India: Bringing the State Back In

This article seeks to understand how the Indian state exercises control over transnational ties between foreign and domestic actors by examining the national legislative practices that determine receipt of foreign funds and the data on foreign funding flows to NGOs (a database of more than 18,000 associations). The article shows how legislative practices of democratic states serve to reduce foreign influence. Issue characteristics are also shown to determine state response to externalization, blocking transnational ties in “high politics” areas such as minority claims. Finally, within state imposed restrictions, religious rather than secular organizations remain dominant transnational actors in India. The study contributes evidence to suggest that contrary to the arguments of world polity theory and many transnational social movement scholars, states continue to remain powerful actors limiting transnationalization.

The scoring rules in an endogenous election

Plurality rule is mostly criticized from being capable of choosing an alternative considered as worst by a strict majority. This paper considers elections in which the agenda consists of potential candidates strategically choosing whether or not to enter the election. In this context, we examine the ability of scoring rules to fulfil the Condorcet criterion. We show for the case of three potential candidates that Plurality rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies a version of the Condorcet criterion in two cases: 1) when preferences are single-peaked and, 2) when preferences are single-dipped.

---

Use of Self in Relational Clinical Social Work

Since the inception of social work social workers have noted the importance of relationship in practice. More recently clinicians and other social workers have developed the term “use of self” to indicate important aspects of the professional relationship. How that term is defined rests on how one conceptualizes “self.” The authors suggest that from a relational perspective the concept of self changes from the notion of self as separate and constant to self as process in interaction. They demonstrate on a theoretical level as well as through a case example how defining self as process in interaction might affect clinical social work practice.

Gender and Value Orientations—What’s the Difference!? The Case of Japan and the United States

This paper analyzes gendered social identity in Japan and the United States, countries with comparable postindustrial economic systems but distinct cultural traditions. Using national surveys (1995), we find gender differences in value orientations to be neither systematic nor consistent. They often disappeared after controlling for demographic and human-capital variables, though not so often for Japan. Other variables proved more important predictors of values than gender, although in different ways in Japan and the United States. We conclude by reassessing the use of the term gender in social research and the cultural meaning of gender relations by addressing the feminist concerns with issues of gender location.

The inverse plurality rule—an axiomatization

Under the ‘inverse plurality rule’, voters specify only their least preferred alternative. Our first result establishes that this rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies the minimal veto condition (MV). We then prove that the inverse plurality rule is characterized by MV and the four well known conditions that characterize scoring rules; namely, Anonymity (A), Neutrality (N), Reinforcement (RE) and Continuity (CO). Our new characterization result is related to the characterizations of approval voting and of the widely used plurality rule. We finally show how the axiomatization of the inverse plurality rule can be extended to the axiomatization of elementary scoring rules (vote for t-alternatives scoring rules). We are indebted to two anonymous referees for their most useful comments.

---

The Labor Market Participation of Sandwich Generation Italian Women

We empirically analyzed the labor market participation of Italian women, with special emphasis on the role of intergenerational family links. Older relatives, on the one hand, discourage the work participation of women by requiring care; on the other hand they may provide household services favoring labor supply. We studied this dual impact estimating a trivariate probit model where the three choices to be in the labor force, to use informal help from older relatives and to care for them are jointly determined. Our estimates show that care duties towards members of the previous generation hinder the labor market participation of Italian women, and that informal help received from older relatives strongly increases their probability of being engaged in paid work.

Are Rich Earners Time-Privileged in Taiwan? The Evidence from 1981 to 2006

This paper investigates how the relationship between income and working hours in Taiwan has changed over time. By using the official individual sample in the Manpower Utilization Surveys from DGBAS during 1981–2006, this study concludes that higher earners worked fewer hours as the economy is expanding and the price level increases in Taiwan; however, higher earners lose their time privileges as the economy relies on the service sector more than before. Furthermore, with regard to gender differences, it is found that higher earners still have time advantages relative to lower earners over time for male, but not so for female.

A Commentary on “Gender Perspectives in Cross-Cultural Couples”

This commentary expands on Kellner’s article by discussing clinical practice with Asian and Euro-American couples. Differences in Western and traditional Asian cultural expectations around intimacy and styles of emotional expression can often lead to misunderstanding among couples. Therapy can also be a challenge for couples when they do not share the same first language. A therapist who only speaks English can inadvertently create an alliance with the partner whose first language is English. On the other hand, bilingual therapists who use both English and an Asian language in the session can face challenges differentiating their roles as a therapist versus a translator. Case illustrations are presented to illustrate these challenges.