Correction to: Divorce among European and Mexican immigrants in the U.S.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained few errors in tables. In Tables 2a, 2b, 3a and 3b, the “Percent of sample” and “Percent spouse absent” should be in decimal in order to be consistent. In Tables 4 and 5, the first row should read as “Age at marriage” instead of “Percent of sample” and the “Sample size” was incorrect.     

The quantity and quality of new immigrants to the US

Since immigration to the US began to accelerate in the 1970s, economic and social policy issues surrounding immigration frequently raise concern and generate debate. These policy debates often aim to mitigate the costs of immigration and augment the benefits. Key to this is understanding the characteristics of immigrants, especially those related to economic success and integration. A commonly accepted finding in the economic literature regards the declining economic “quality” of successive immigrant cohorts as measured by differences in entry wages across cohorts. In this paper, I refine our understanding of immigrant cohort quality. I show that increasing competition in the labor market among immigrants can explain a significant portion of declining “quality”. This result suggests that labor market interactions are as important to immigrant economic integration as their inherent “quality”.     

What is a problem?

Among others, the term “problem” plays a major role in the various attempts to characterize interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, as used synonymously in this paper. Interdisciplinarity (ID) is regarded as “problem solving among science, technology and society” and as “problem orientation beyond disciplinary constraints” (cf. Frodeman et al.: The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). The point of departure of this paper is that the discourse and practice of ID have problems with the “problem”. The objective here is to shed some light on the vague notion of “problem” in order to advocate a specific type of interdisciplinarity: problem-oriented interdisciplinarity. The outline is as follows: Taking an ex negativo approach, I will show what problem-oriented ID does not mean. Using references to well-established distinctions in philosophy of science, I will show three other types of ID that should not be placed under the umbrella term “problem-oriented ID”: object-oriented ID (“ontology”), theory-oriented ID (epistemology), and method-oriented ID (methodology). Different philosophical thought traditions can be related to these distinguishable meanings. I will then clarify the notion of “problem” by looking at three systematic elements: an undesired (initial) state, a desired (goal) state, and the barriers in getting from the one to the other. These three elements include three related kinds of knowledge: systems, target, and transformation knowledge. This paper elaborates further methodological and epistemological elements of problem-oriented ID. It concludes by stressing that problem-oriented ID is the most needed as well as the most challenging type of ID.     

The Application of Co-modality in Greece: a Critical Appraisal of Progress in the Development of Co-modal Freight Centres and Logistics Services

This paper discusses the situation in Greece as regards the introduction of co-modal transport services. It starts with basic definitions of “co-modality” and what it means for Greece. It then presents the results of a demand data collection and analysis exercise which resulted in the first ever estimates of the “potential” for road/rail co-modal transport in Greece today and in 2015. Based on these forecasts it seems that at least for two thickly populated areas of the country (i.e. Athens and Thessaloniki) this demand can be as high as 40% of the total freight flows. The paper then goes on to examine the means by which the responsible authorities can “induce” co-modal services in the country. It does this by examining the policies necessary, the infrastructure (both hard and “soft”), the necessary actions and incentives for the development of a “co-modal” market, and the necessary training––education actions for human resource development. The overall conclusion is that unless specific actions are taken on behalf of the government (such as those mentioned in the paper) the “land” based co-modal transport has no future in Greece.

Two deadly diseases and one nearly fatal cure: The sorry state of American sociology

Recent diagnoses of the contemporary crisis in American sociology generally fail to address some of the discipline's most deeply rooted problems and therefore cannot provide an effective remedy. If sociology is to escape from its current moribund condition in the United States, it must move away from prevalent “biologizing” and “naturalizing” attitudes, while also rejecting the false cure of “postmodernism.” A true renaissance will require a critical approach that combines moderate empiricism and moderate relativism with a strong human-rights perspective. Larry T. Reynolds, is the author of over one hundred publications, including twelve books. A senior fellow of the Rockport Institute, he is also past president of the North Central Sociological Association and former chair of the Marxist section of the American Sociological Association.     

Charitable conservatism, poverty radicalism and inequality aversion

In his Presidential Address to the European Economic Association, Tony Atkinson introduced the idea of a “charitable conservatism” position in public policy, which “exhibits a degree of concern for the poor, but this is the limit of the redistributional concern and there is indifference with respect to transfers above the poverty line.” This contrasts with the perspective of poverty indices, which give zero weight to those above the poverty line, which we call “poverty radicalism,” and with standard “inequality aversion” where the weights decline smoothly as we move up the income scale. The object of this paper is, first, to clarify the interrelationships between charitable conservatism, poverty radicalism and inequality aversion. We do this by showing how the patterns of welfare weights to which each of these gives rise are related to each other. Secondly, we are concerned to demonstrate the implications of these different views for optimal income taxation. In terms of levels and patterns of marginal tax rates, we show that charitable conservatism and poverty radicalism are on a continuum, and by choice of low or high inequality aversion one can approximate either outcome fairly well.     

Calendars and keys: The classification of “home” and “work”

This article presents a discussion of the relationship between classification systems and individuals' everyday activities. The concept of “boundary work” is defined as the practices that concretize and give meaning to mental frameworks by placing, maintaining, and challenging cultural categories. “Home” and “work” provide a case study for examining boundary work across a range of realm relationships, from those that are highly “integrating” to those that are highly “segmenting.” Boundary practices involving calendars and keys, clothes and appearances, eating and drinking, money, people and their representations (like photographs and gifts), talk styles and conversations, reading materials and habits, and work breaks (including lunches and vacations) are discussed. Mary Douglas's work on categorical purity helps illustrate the relationship between cognitive order and visible behavior seen in the boundary work of home and work. This article includes material that was published in a larger study,Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life (1996 University of Chicago Press), after it was presented at the 1995 Eastern Sociological Society meetings in Philadelphia.     

A Canadian rejoinder: Sociology north and south of the border

In response to the recent The American Sociologist special issue on Canadian sociology, this rejoinder dialogues with some of the perspectives offered there on the discipline north of the border with an eye towards lessons that American sociologists might learn from the Canadian experience. My reflections build on a larger analytic piece entitled “Canada’s Impossible Science: The Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis of Anglo-Canadian Sociology” to be published soon in The Canadian Journal Sociology. Particular attention is paid to the different institutional arrangements of higher education in Canada and the United States, Anglo-Canadian reliance on the particularly English “weakness as strength” strategy for sociology, tensions between the cultural values of populism, egalitarianism, and excellence, and the trade-offs between professional and public intellectual work. A critique is offered of the “origin myth” of Canadian sociology as a particularly vibrant “critical sociology,” with discussion of Dorothy Smith's influence on sociology in Canada. His research interests are in sociological theory, the sociology of culture, and the study of intellectuals from the perspective of the sociology of organisations and professions. He is studying Edward Said as a “global public intellectual” as part of a Canadian government-funded interdisciplinary grant on “Globalization and Autonomy” at McMaster University. He is also working “Canadian professors as public intellectuals,” a project also funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Economic,Financial and Geopolitical Governance: USA,European Union and China

The paper examines the policies, choices, structural reforms, regulatory rules, corporate and public administration matching the world standards, openness, innovation, competitiveness, fulfillment of multilateral obligations, integration and regional approach achievements and international relations conditionality in the “Global Governance and Geopolitics” of the main economic, financial and policy issues, with special focus on the new regional approaches pursued by America, the European Union and Asia and the role of the emerging and transition countries. After the US Dollar, now the Eurozone is under pressure and the main Asian countries fear a contagion effect. While somebody proposes a slow devaluation of the Euro in order to soften the public deficits of the group of most exposed countries and restore more competitiveness to the real economy, political leaders are thinking to adopt indirectly the Euro two speeds operative monetary strategy, through the introduction of the majority vote, instead of the full Members consensus, for the most important decisions at the ECB in Frankfurt. Aside these monetary and institutional measures, the binding of the single national fiscal policy to more strict EU parameters of compatibility with the Eurozone sustainability appear unavoidable. This paper represents the background of my lecture given on November 4 at the Beijing Forum 2011 “The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All: Tradition and Modernity, Transition and Transformation” () at the PEK University.     

On the multi-preference approach to evaluating opportunities

The purpose of the paper is to provide a general framework for analyzing “preference for opportunities.” Based on two simple axioms a fundamental result due to Kreps is used in order to represent rankings of opportunity sets in terms of multiple preferences. The paper provides several refinements of the basic representation theorem. In particular, a condition of “closedness under compromise” is suggested in order to distinguish the flexibility interpretation of the model from normative interpretations which play a crucial role in justifying the intrinsic value of opportunities. Moreover, the paper clarifies the link between the multiple preference approach and the “choice function” approach to evaluating opportunities. In particular, it is shown how the well-known Aizerman/Malishevski result on rationalizability of choice functions can be obtained as a corollary from the more general multiple preference representation of a ranking of opportunity sets. Received: 3 September 1996 / Accepted: 18 August 1997     

A model of monopoly and “efficient” unions with endogenous union coverage: Positive and normative implications

We present a model of a rent-maximizing union that organizes to increase its coverage of an industry and analyze monopoly and “efficient” unions in this setting. Our model is unique in that we allow for a competitive industry with free entry and find union and nonunion firms coexisting with product market equilibrium. This is achieved by incorporating the insight that firms are heterogeneous in productive characteristics. An important implication of our model is that an “efficient” union that covers a nontrivial share of the market is not efficient and may in fact be less efficient than a monopoly union.     

Union activity and the decline in American trade union membership

This paper extends recent research on the determinants of the decline in union membership in the United States. Using biennial state-level data for a set of years between 1958 and 1982, my model tests “union organizing,” “structural,” “management opposition,” and “public policy” hypotheses concerning union membership and suggests improved specifications of each of these hypotheses. The paper also examines the relative importance of each factor in explaining the decline in unionization. The results support each of the hypotheses and confirm previous findings that changes in the structure of the labor force are most important in explaining union membership decline.     

Disunity within the house of labor: Change to win or to stay the course?

In September 2005, six unions representing 5.4 million workers held their founding convention as a new federation independent of the AFL-CIO. Infelicitously named “Change to Win Federation” (CTWF), the new alliance has called for a rededication of union resources and energies towards organizing the unorganized. Although CTWF has occasioned considerable interest and speculation among labor supporters and observers, it is difficult to determine why the break occurred, other than, perhaps, the personal agenda of some of its leaders. An unstated, significant reason may be a desire on the rebels’ part to operate relatively free of “noraiding” strictures of the AFL-CIO, even though the group disclaims any interest in challenging existing bargaining relationships and has penned “solidarity pacts” with some of its principal AFL-CIO competitors and with state and local units of the federation. Competitive forces are missing in the market for workplace representation services. The new group may reignite the rival unionism that spurred organized labor’s marked growth from 1935–1954, but early returns suggest an emphasis on militant posturing and on trendy, implausible themes such as “global unionism” and “subcontracting out strikes.”     

Global-market building as state building: China’s entry into the WTO and market reforms of China’s tobacco industry

This article analyzes how China’s increasing engagement in the global market induced significant institution-building in China’s tobacco industry and enabled a power shift from the local authorities to the central authority in controlling this market. During this process of “getting onto the international track,” the central government reorganized the industrial tobacco system and broke up the “monopolies” set up by local governments in order to enhance the competitive capacities of China’s tobacco industry in the global market. Given such a concrete institutional change in China’s tobacco industry, I propose the theory of “global-market building as state building” to explain the interactions among the global market, the nation-states, and the domestic market-building projects. I suggest that nation-states strategically seek to engage themselves in the global market and that, under certain circumstances by taking advantage of their global market engagement, the nation-states can enhance their abilities to govern the domestic market.

---

Rational choice and revealed preference without binariness

 This paper attempts to provide a unified account of the rationalization of possibly non-binary choice-functions by “Extended Preference Relations” (relations between sets and elements). The analysis focuses on transitive EPRs for which three choice-functional characterizations are given, two of them based on novel axioms. Transitive EPRs are shown to be rationalizable by sets of orderings that are “closed under compromise”; this novel requirement is argued to be the key to establish a canonical relationship between sets of orderings and choice-functions. The traditional assumption of “binariness” on preference relations or choice functions is shown to be analytically unhelpful and normatively unfounded; non-binariness may arise from “unresolvedness of preference”, a previously unrecognized aspect of preference incompleteness. Received: 28 August 1995/Accepted: 14 February 1996     

Privacy revisited? Old ideals, new realities, and their impact on biobank regimes

Biobanks, collecting human specimen, medical records, and lifestyle-related data, face the challenge of having contradictory missions: on the one hand serving the collective welfare through easy access for medical research, on the other hand adhering to restrictive privacy expectations of people in order to maintain their willingness to participate in such research. In this article, ethical frameworks stressing the societal value of low-privacy expectations in order to secure biomedical research are discussed. It will turn out that neither utilitarian nor communitarian or classical libertarian ethics frameworks will help to serve both goals. Instead, John Rawls’ differentiation of the “right” and the “good” is presented in order to illustrate the possibility of “serving two masters”: individual interests of privacy, and societal interests of scientific progress and intergenerational justice. In order to illustrate this counterbalancing concept with an example, the five-pillar concept of the German Ethics Council will be briefly discussed.     

Budgets,Board Games,and Make Believe: The Challenge of Teaching Social Class Inequality with Non-Traditional Students

According to a 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of “traditional students” on college campuses is declining. Students increasingly are delaying enrollment, attending college part time, working full time, financially independent, and single parents. In this paper, we explore the extent to which sociologists are adapting their teaching to address these shifting demographics. Based on a content analysis of articles published over a 20 year period in Teaching Sociology that suggest strategies for teaching social class inequality we find that most authors assume that their students are “traditional.” Most often this means that students are assumed to come from a privileged, middle class background, lack direct and substantial experience in the labor market, and enter college shortly after graduating high school. Accordingly, most articles advocate classroom strategies of “looking down,” whereby students pretend to be in the shoes of those less fortunate. Examples include creating household budgets based on poverty wages, playing board games, or assuming the role of the poor for a day. These strategies run the risk of being ineffective, alienating, and potentially ethically suspect when used with non-traditional students, whose real life experiences may resemble these simulations. We conclude with recommendations for pedagogical approaches to teaching social class inequality that are more appropriate for, and inclusive of, students from diverse backgrounds. Our goal in this paper is to start a discussion about pedagogy, social inequality, and the non-traditional student.     

The Government–Third Sector Interface in Québec

In this paper, the authors analyze different forms of interface between the government and third sector organizations in Québec. In order to do so, they studied relationships in eight different fields of activity: homeless youth services, housing for intellectually deficient people, support organizations for natural caregivers, community leisure centers, community housing for the elderly, daycare centers, social economy organizations for domestic assistance, and services specializing in employment for handicapped people. Following a review of international literature on the relationship between the government and the third sector, the paper analyzes these relationships on the basis of the typology developed by Jennifer M. Coston, which is adapted to the Québécois context. In the eight activity sectors studied, the authors found the presence of four different types of interface between the government and the third sector: “subcontracting,” “coexistence,” “supplementarity,” and “co-construction” relationships.

Charles Tilly,German Historicism,and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science

This paper examines Charles Tilly’s relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a “historicist.” The “search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,” he argued, was a “waste of time” and had “utterly failed.” Tilly’s approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on “historical individuals” rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly’s program of “relational realism” resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism’s argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly’s ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.     

Philosophy on the Ground: An Appreciation of a “Spirit Master”

This essay is an appreciation of Melvin Pollner’s distinctive sociological approach to topics that are usually associated with philosophy. Pollner’s dissertation and early writings took up the theme of “mundane reason,” which he defined as an incorrigible presumption of a real world that is implicit in everyday conduct. Pollner addressed mundane reason, and the reciprocal idea of “reality disjunctures”—momentary divergences between perceptual accounts of the “same” mundane reality—by describing routine exchanges in traffic court and confrontations between doctors and patients in psychiatric settings. Pollner’s work anticipated current enthusiasms for developing novel “ontologies” in social and cultural studies of science, medicine, and other subjects. Although he did attempt to locate metaphysics in the midst of everyday experience, this essay suggests that his “philosophy on the ground” radically transformed philosophical ontology into an original and imaginative way to investigate constitutive activities.