ANTI‐POACHING AGREEMENTS IN LABOR MARKETS

We analyze competition for experienced workers among wage‐setting firms. The firms can design poaching offers with higher wages to workers who switch from rivals relative to wages paid to their own existing employees. We evaluate the profit and welfare effects of anti‐poaching agreements that eliminate poaching offers as a recruiting method. Anti‐poaching agreements increase industry profits, whereas workers are made worse off. We show that the effects of anti‐poaching agreements on total welfare are determined by the magnitude of workers' switching costs and the productivity change associated with switching employers. (JEL L41, L40, J42)     

Emerson,Cooley, and the American Heroic Vision*

Willful leaders and mindless masses are governing images in Carlyle's and Nietzsche's romantic conception of political domination. In contrast, the nineteenth century American notion of heroic leadership was inspired by liberal sentiment and drew mainly on classical republican definitions of greatness. These sentiments and definitions supplied the basis for Ralph Waldo Emerson's theory of heroes and hero worship. The first part of this paper shows how the tension between elitist and democratic conceptions of the hero permeated Emerson's early work, and how this tension was finally resolved in his essays on representative men. The second part of the paper deals with Charles Horton Cooley's admiration of Emerson, and the affinity between Emerson's mature ideas and Cooley's studies of genius, emulation, fame, and leadership. Cooley's political sociology, like Emerson's, was based on a profound attachment to democratic principles. Cooley also believed, as did Emerson, that these intangible principles only remain secure as long as society emulates the great men who personify them. Building upon Emerson's conception of the heroic figure as a symbol rather than a source of social order and social change, Cooley passed on to later generations of American sociologists a conception of heroic leadership that differs sharply from the romantic visions which prevailed in Europe from Emerson's time to Cooley's own day.     

Locating an American romanticism: Emerson,Cavell, 'Experience'

Abstract

This article reads Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1844 essay 'Experience' as a work of mourning that gives rise to critical reaction in the romantic tradition to specific philosophical ideas New England had imported from Europe early in the 19th century. The author reads this transatlantic interaction in the wider context of journal entries, arguing that the death of Emerson's son is a test to Emerson's philosophy and his literary form, indeed, the highest challenge, against which the claims of philosophy and literature could only fail. Moreover, it is the failure of his philosophy to contain his son's death, to express it, that makes Emerson's essay romantic. Defining romanticism as incompletion: the impossibility of a total system which would include, for example, the death of the other (Cavell, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Blanchot). This, the author argues, proposes a 'location' for American romanticism that constitutes an adequate response to Critchley's contention, in his reading of Cavell, that Emerson is not, in fact, romantic.     

Revivifying Russia: Literature,Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

Abstract

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.     

Habermas,Mead, and Rationality

This paper takes the position that symbolic interaction can become more relevant to the social issues of modernity and postmodernity by overcoming its traditional tendencies to be apolitical and to focus predominantly on micro aspects of social relations. It considers a serious reading of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action as a contribution to this effort. Specifically it sees Habermas' reconstruction of the conception of the individual actor involved in communicating through significant symbols into one consistent with speech act theory and the concepts of speaker and listener as constructive and helpful. The paper also examines Mead's behav-ioristic theory of attitudes, types of attitudes and taking the attitude of the other(s), and relates it to his logical formulation of rational universals. It suggests that Mead's optimistic image of society and his position on rationality are no longer appropriate for discussing social issues in a global society with multiple rationalities. It sees possibilities for reformulation in Habermas' theory because, like Mead's theory, it construes rationality in communicative terms.     

Frank O'Hara in New York Race relations,poetic situations,postcolonial space

Abstract

Frank O'Hara's 1958 poem 'Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets' cites 'race' as 'the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles', a phrase that points to both domestic and international contexts for reading this New York poet. At the same time, 'race' has a history of specific valences in O'Hara's work – as a focus of exoticized images of desire, aesthetic fulfillment, and social energy. Further, race, inflected through various colonial screens, becomes the central avenue leading toward O'Hara's project of rewriting the parameters of social space in poetry, a radical aestheticization not just of landscape but of social relations, with a consequent socialization of the act of writing. This article explores O'Hara's spatial poetics through the terms of Situationist theory, in which the techniques of dérive and détournement are applied to a reading of the poet's active suspension of the 'rules' of a gridded and hierarchical social order.     

Marital Conflict,Ineffective Parenting,and Children's and Adolescents' Maladjustment

Data from the 1988 National Survey on Families and Households were analyzed to examine the associations among marital conflict, ineffective parenting, and children's and adolescents' maladjustment. Parents' use of harsh discipline and low parental involvement helped explain the connection between marital conflict and children's maladjustment in children aged 2 through 11. Parent‐child conflict was measured only in families with a target teenager and also was a significant mediator. Although ineffective parenting explained part of the association between marital conflict and children's maladjustment, independent effects of marital conflict remained in families with target children aged 2 through 11 (but not for families with a teenager). With a few exceptions, this pattern of findings was consistent for mothers' and fathers' reports, for daughters and sons, for families with various ethnic backgrounds, and for families living in and out of poverty.     

Marital Power,Roles, and Solidarity and Husbands' and Wives' Appraisals of Self and Other*

The purpose of this study was to investigate conditions underlying the social self process within marital relationships. Two hypotheses were tested in a mail questionnaire survey of 165 couples: 1) Mead and Cooley's hypothesis that self-appraisal is positively associated with other's view of self, and 2) an extension of this hypothesis suggesting that the association between self-appraisal and spouse's appraisal is greater, and the appraisals are more favorable, when marital power is shared, household role responsibilities are shared, and marital solidarity is high. The first hypothesis was supported: self-appraisal was significantly correlated with other's view of self. The second hypothesis was strongly supported for solidarity: the greater the couple's solidarity, the more favorable and the more similar were self-appraisal and other's appraisal of self. Only partial support was found for a positive association of shared marital power and roles with appraisals of self and other.     

Sunrise,America, and the Other Side

Abstract

The following essay employs the metaphor of 'the other side' in order to explore the symbolic relationship between America and Europe in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927). The essay argues that the film's symbolic stress on the dichotomy of Europe/America and there/not there rearticulates the role of the US in the immigrant imagination, redefining it in terms of the supernatural, almost deathly nature of early film. The journey west has long been equated with the mythical passage toward death, and in a similar way early responses to the mechanics of cinema also stressed the idea of film as phantasmal projections of this 'other side', a spectral realm haunted by ghosts, apparitions, and shadows. The paper thus positions theoretical notions of negative space (dealing in particular with Jean-Paul Sartre's notions of presence and absence) alongside the notion of the Atlantic crossing as a synonym for emptiness and vacuity, in order to provide a provocative interpretation both of Murnau's film and of the role of America in the European mindset.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption,Racial Reparation,and Racial Transitional Objects

Transnational adoption involves the intersection of two powerful origin myths—the return to mother and to motherland. In this case history of a Korean transnational adoptee, Mina, problems relating to Asian immigration, assimilation, and racialization are central to her psychic predicaments. Mina mourns the loss of Korea and her Korean birth mother as a profoundly intrasubjective and unconscious affair. Her losses trigger a series of psychical responses that reconfigure Freud's notions of melancholia not as pathological but an everyday (racial) structure of feeling and Klein's theories of good and bad objects as good and bad racialized objects, as good and bad racialized mothers. Mina's case also draws attention to the analyst as a raced subject. The “public” fact of the analyst's and the patient's shared racial difference, and the “public” nature of the analyst's pregnancy during the course of the patient's treatment, constitutes the analyst, to reformulate Winnicott, as a “racial transitional object” for Mina. As such, Mina “uses” the analyst to manage her envy and to transition into a reparative position for race, one allowing her to create space in her psyche for two “good-enough” mothers-the Korean birth mother as well as the white adoptive mother.     

Family size,father's education,and children's educational attainment in intact white families

One body of previous research has documented a negative relationship between family size and educational attainment (Blau and Duncan 1967; Sewell et al. 1980; Coleman 1988). Another body of research has argued that because parents are likely to act as potential equalizers of attainment gaps among their children, this relationship is likely to vary depending on the level of parental education (Johnson 1972; Zajonc 1976; Griliches 1979). In an attempt to integrate these two bodies of research, this study examines recent GSS data on white men and women from intact families and aged 25 and over. This research finds support for both arguments. The findings suggest that although there is a direct negative relationship between family size and educational attainment, it varies across levels of father's education. The effect of family size on educational attainment turns positive for men when the father's education is at least high school. For women, it is positive only when the father's education is at least a B.A. Additionally, this relationship holds for men born after 1950 and for women born before 1950. This study rationalizes that changing labor market conditions and cultural pressures to be educated have contributed to such differential impacts of father's education on children's educational attainment across cohorts.     

Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender and Development's Views, Events and Debates section. We'd like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on important contemporary issues of relevance to the journal's core concern: to strengthen and support development which supports women's empowerment and gender equality as goals. We'd also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender and Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: jporter@oxfam.org.uk     

'Becalmed on Strange Waters': Wordsworth,Reagan and Late Ashbery

Abstract

This essay presents an analysis of 'A Wave', the watershed poem of Ashbery's later career, as a Wordsworthian response, in the medium of the romantic crisis poem, to the rise of Reagan and neo-liberalism. 'A Wave' was composed between 1982 and 1984 amid drastic changes to US domestic and foreign policy that aggravate the necessity for a change in poetic stance from the newly 'central' American poet Ashbery had become. In this context, the relationship is explored between 'A Wave' and a poet similarly engaged in articulating crises of social conscience as part of a more specific development of poetic personality. 'A Wave', then, is read as a reading of Wordsworth's Prelude. In this, the particular stylistic issue of Ashberyan metaphor is raised, as 'A Wave', for the first time within Ashbery's reading of romanticism, begins to position irony at the centre of romantic metaphor. Finally, I conclude that the result of Ashbery's wavering crisis poem is a positioning of style as the ultimate determinant of social self-identity.     

Country Reputation in Multidimensions: Predictors,Effects, and Communication Channels

A country's reputation is a subject of increasing interest for the practice and research of public relations and public diplomacy. South Korea's reputation as viewed by Americans, the country's most strategic foreign public, is the topic of this study. It aims to (a) demonstrate a reliable, valid measurement model of country reputation in multidimensions for the research context; (b) examine effects of individual experience with and awareness of the country on country reputation; (c) assess the effects of country reputation on foreign publics' supportive intentions toward the country; and (d) explore strategic communication channels that can be effectively used for country reputation management. Key findings of this study include a valid, reliable measurement instrument of country reputation, strongly mediating effects of public awareness between individual experience and country reputation, and the encouraging effect of country reputation on nation branding.     

Faith,gender and development agendas in Nigeria: conflicts,challenges, and opportunities

Religion is a dominant force in private and public life in most developing countries. Based on fieldwork in Nigeria, where Christianity and Islam are the two major religions, this article looks at ways in which religion interplays with development and gender equality, and what this means for development policy and practice. First, it explores conflicts and challenges, looking at how religious and indigenous customary values converge as powerful influences, affecting all areas of women's lives. The article goes on to examine the impact of these influences on individual women's choices and aspirations in the context of Nigerian development policy on gender equality. Against this backdrop, it highlights opportunities that can stem from religion, pointing to the ways in which Nigerian faith-based women's organisations are beginning to use religion as a basis for challenging male bias and promoting holistic development.     

The Authenticity of Self: Conceptualization,Personal Experience,and Practice

Scholars across the social sciences often use the concept of authenticity to refer to such different things as sincerity, truthfulness, originality, and the feeling and practice of being true to one's self or others. Whereas the concept of authenticity refers to all of these things, a careful employment of this concept requires a clear understanding of it. By reviewing theory and empirical research on authenticity, we aim at a more precise conceptualization of authenticity. We argue that authenticity is about being true to one's self. When one is true to one's self, one experiences authenticity. This conceptualization views authenticity as a self‐reflective and emotional experience. In order to understand authenticity, a researcher must then take into consideration at least two things: people's emotional experiences of being true or untrue to one's self and people's ideas about what their true self is.     

COMMUNITY,COMMUNICATION, AND MEANING: THEORIES OF BUCHLER AND HABERMAS

The scope of Jürgen Habermas's “universal pragmatics” and communicative interaction theory are critically assessed in this article. Habermas's pragmatics are seen to reveal different assumptions than those of Peirce or Mead. This difference yields different assumptions about the research program embodied in Habermas's work. The ideas of Justis Buchler are presented in order to develop a comprehensive theory of meaning and community. This article provides the basis for an assessment of linguistic rationality, meaning, and human interests in daily life.     

Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender & Development's Views, events, and debates section. We'd like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on issues relevant to the journal's concern: to inspire and strengthen development initiatives which support the goals of gender equality and women's empowerment.

We'd also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender & Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: gadeditor@oxfam.org.uk     

What We Should Want with History: A Meditation on Cultural Studies,Methodology, and Politics

This essay evaluates two of the central problems for Cultural Studies as a field: how to generate methodologically rigorous scholarship that is also politically useful; and how to productively use models and theory in the practice of history. Beginning with conversations about the place of (disciplinary) history in Cultural Studies, this essay explores one of the legendary debates in the field: between E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and (at least in theory) Louis Althusser. Though the debate centered on the degree to which the English Civil War could be termed a “bourgeois revolution,” Thompson's fundamental critique concerned Anderson's use of abstract models in history. However, the distinctions Thompson makes are not nearly as clear‐cut in practice – particularly when we look at Ellen Meiksins Wood's attempt to intervene on Thompson's side in her 1991 book The Pristine Culture of Capitlism. Wood's understanding of capitalism relies on an abstract conceptualization of that mode of produciton that is ironically similar to that of Althusser and Anderson. Arguing this as an illustratration of the importance of explicit models and methods, the essay develops Richard Johnson's account of Marx's use of abstraction and theory in his own historical scholarship. Marx's framework is then deployed to reconsider the English Civil War in realation to a key contemporary concern: the origins of copyright and intellectual property. It ends by advocating for what I term anarchic abstraction: a conscious, rigorous, politically‐committed, and dialectical attention to the order and determinations of history with no strict hierarchy given in advance.