Slavery and the American university: discourses of retrospective justice at Harvard and Brown

American universities have drawn international attention in recent years as their ties to and historical complicity in slavery and the slave trade have been increasingly exposed. This essay examines Harvard and Brown's self-reflective investigations into their involvement in slavery and highlights how the universities have deployed a discourse of retrospective justice as a way to grapple with the incorporation of the history of slavery into the heritage of their institutions. The essay finds that by engaging in conversations about memorialization, apology, and reparations, the universities attempt to confront the past while constructing the future.     

Why are mediation effects so small?

Identifying mediators in variable chains as part of a causal mediation analysis can shed light on issues of causation, assessment, and intervention. However, coefficients and effect sizes in a causal mediation analysis are nearly always small. This can lead those less familiar with the approach to reject the results of causal mediation analysis. The current paper highlights five factors that contribute to small path coefficients in mediation research: loss of information when measuring relationships across time, controlling for prior levels of a predicted variable, adding control variables to the analysis, ignoring measurement error in one’s variables, and using multiple mediators. It is argued that these issues are best handled by increasing the statistical power of the analysis, identifying the optimal temporal interval between variables, using bootstrapped confidence intervals to analyze the results, and finding alternate ways of assessing the meaningfulness of the indirect effect.     

Mental Health Outcomes of Youth In-Care: Investigating the Effect of General Strain and Self-control Theories

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - The adverse mental health outcomes of youth in-care have been examined from a number of disciplinary perspectives. A sociological approach emphasizes the...     

"My spirit in my heart": identity experiences and challenges among American Indian two-spirit women

Many Native women embrace the term two-spirit to capture their sexuality and gender expression. By analyzing the narratives of five two-spirit women who are Native activists, we explored contemporary understandings of the concept and what it means for Native communities. The incorporation of the identity within indigenous worldviews, its manifestation in terms of (be)coming out, and the triple stressors of heterosexism, racism, and sexism emerged as key themes.     

Predicting Earnings Among Immigrants To Canada: The Role Of Source Country

The current study examines the importance of country of origin in predicting the labour market earnings among recent immigrants to Canada. The authors argue that, in addition to individual‐level characteristics associated with immigrant capital, macro‐level features associated with immigrant origins must be taken into account when considering the economic performance of immigrants in their host country. Country‐level factors are said to accompany immigrants to their destination country, which generate disparities in the “quality” of immigrants’ human and social capital across origin groups, as well as differences in how they are received by the resident population. The present study uses random effects multilevel modelling to investigate the extent to which immigrant incomes vary randomly across source country while taking into consideration individual‐level characteristics selected on the basis of human capital, social capital, and discrimination theories. Multilevel regression analysis confirms that immigrant incomes indeed vary significantly by country of origin, though the effect is small. Furthermore, it is revealed that the gross domestic product (GDP) of the sending country explains much of the level 2 variability in the labour market earnings of recent immigrants, as well as the relationship between racial minority status and immigrant incomes. The practical significance and policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

Ethnic and Religious Components of the Jewish Income Advantage, 1969 and 1989

Because Jewish ethnicity and religion do not necessarily coincide, the income advantage associated with Jewish identity can be separated into its ethnic and religious components. We estimate the impact of Jewish ethnicity and religion on household income in 1969 and 1989. In both years, ethnically Jewish households had a considerable income advantage over other non-Hispanic White households. This advantage appears to have persisted even among households without full-time workers. Mixed-ethnicity households (those with both Jewish-born and non-Jewish workers) had a conspicuous advantage in 1969 but not in 1989. While religion brought an additional income advantage to Reform, Conservative, and nondenominational Jews, Orthodoxy was associated with a relative disadvantage. Orthodox Judaism appears to impede economic attainment, perhaps by isolating its adherents from the social and economic networks established by the broader Jewish community.     

Performance planning and control in virtual business structures

It could be argued that the development of new business models has occurred at such a pace that many of the important considerations accompanying their development have been overlooked. It is interesting to note that due to the shift away from traditional business structures such as vertically integrated, closely controlled organizations, towards virtual organizations, for which coordination is more important, we have not paid sufficient attention to the important issues of planning and control needs for these new structures. This contribution reviews recent discussion on the structure of new business models and identifies some of the attempts at introducing planning and control into these organizations. The article proposes an approach to this problem by considering the components of the new business models, their stakeholders and their objectives and offers a model which forms the basis from which research can commence.