Fated to be a professor?

My family has included professors for four generations, most of them associated with the University of Toronto. This accounts for my attending that university as an undergraduate where I first studied sociology, and perhaps suggests that I was fated to go on to become a professor myself. I also embraced as a teen-ager the now obsolete identity of “intellectual,“ centered on left-wing political convictions and literary aspirations. This led me into the orbit of the “New York intellectuals“ when in graduate school at Columbia and later to sympathetic identification with my former teacher C. Wright Mills's argument in The Sociological Imagination. My father's posting as a diplomat in Washington during the early years of the Cold War made me, however, a critical supporter of American foreign policy and a liberal opponent of the New Left of the 1960s, a salient presence in the New York University sociology department where I have long taught. The collapse of communism in the early 1990s has led to the death of socialism as an ideal and a decline in the influence of Marxism within sociology. It is difficult to foresee what the effects of this on the field will be in the long run. Dennis H. Wrong, author of The Problem of Order: Power, Its Forms, Bases, and Uses.     

Socio-genealogical connectedness, attachment theory, and childcare practice

At the heart of child welfare policy and practice are issues of loss and separation, issues of loss and discontinuity of parent–child or carer–child ties. Consequently, John Bowlby's ideas concerning attachment have been influential in this field over the past 50 years. This paper argues that the society in which Bowlby originally developed his ideas has altered greatly; in Western societies, family dynamics have changed remarkably, and continue to change. The present paper therefore argues that these ideas may not adequately address the developmental needs of to-day's children. Hence, it puts forward the notion of socio-genealogical connectedness to complement our existing knowledge and understanding of the psycho-social developmental needs of modern-day children. The notion's implications for policy and practice are also highlighted.     

On the benefits of operational flexibility in a distribution network with transshipment

We consider a centralized distribution network with multiple retailers who receive replenishment inventory to satisfy customer demand of the local markets. The operational flexibility of the network is defined as the opportunity that one retailer's excess inventory can be transferred to satisfy other retailers’ unmet customer demand due to stock-outs. A general modeling framework is developed to optimize retailers’ order quantities under any possible flexibility level of a stylized two-stage distribution network. We apply the framework to formulate and solve the transshipment problem of a distribution network with three retailers. Six typical flexibility levels are investigated to make the comparison study on the firm's profit performance under three ordering quantity policies: average demand, newsvendor order quantity, and optimal order quantity. We find that the operational flexibility and system optimization are complements to the firm's performance. The ordering policy with newsvendor ordering quantity can perform fairly well with moderate flexibility level when compared with the optimized ordering policy with full flexibility.     

Drinking plans and drinking outcomes: examining young adults' weekend drinking behavior

This study examined relationships among drinking intentions, environments, and outcomes in a random sample of 566 undergraduate college students. Telephone interviews were conducted with respondents before and after a single weekend assessing drinking intentions for the coming weekend related to subsequent drinking behaviors. Latent class analyses found evidence for four distinct drinking environments distinguished by private/public setting and presence of few/many intoxicated people. There was evidence that the drinking environment mediated the relationship between drinking intentions and heavy episodic drinking in this young adult sample. Future research might focus on examining person/environment interactions as they relate to heavy episodic drinking.     

Does care matter? Care capital and mothers’ time to paid employment

The aim of this study is to introduce the concept of care capital and provide an example of its application in the context of childcare and maternal employment using the currently most suitable American data. We define care capital as the nexus of available, accessible, and experienced resources for care. The American setting is an ideal context to investigate the linkages between child care capital and maternal employment as the patterns of child care use tend to be more diverse compared to other national contexts. In the presented application of care capital, we examine mothers’ entry to paid employment during the first 36 weeks following a birth, and its association with the experience of non-parental child care use before labour force entry. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey—Birth Cohort (N = 10,400 mothers), results from discrete-time hazard models show that use of non-parental child care prior to employment is independently and positively associated with entry into maternal employment. This finding applies both to first-time mothers (n = 3,800) and to mothers of multiple children (n = 6,600). Although data currently available for investigating child care capital are limited with regard to care availability and access, our results suggests that childcare availability, access, and use, understood as a form of capital alongside economic and human capital, should be considered in future studies of maternal employment.