WOMEN'S WORK:

We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to provide medical information and emotional support to geographically dispersed veterans. Activism transformed women activists by endowing them with a sense of empowerment and a somewhat broadened concern for social justice. Although their transformations disposed the women to become active on related issues, it did not extend to concerns about gender discrimination. We suggest that the next research step is to investigate gender differences in movement processes by surveying activists across a variety of movements to test propositions and to identify the characteristics of other social contexts that structurally instigate a departure from traditional gender roles.     

Privatization of refuse removal and labor costs

We examine the labor-cost savings associated with privatization by comparing earnings and employment trends of public and private sector refuse workers. Findings suggest that high union earnings for workers in the public sector are a source of labor-cost savings in the refuse industry. Evidence on job changers does not indicate that earnings for this group of workers are a compensating differential. Metropolitan area employment findings suggest that municipalities are less likely to use union refuse workers in the public sector when a relatively small percentage of area residents belong to a union. The authors thank Jacqueline Agesa, Keith Bender, Maria Crawford, and Richard Perlman for valuable suggestions. Research assistance from Eric Blackburn is greatly appreciated.     

Telecommuting: The future of work, corporate culture, and American society

Conclusion Throughout American history, first on the family farm and now in modern day business institutions, the workplace has been a stabilizing institution in American society that has anchored the ongoing, informal interactions occurring outside the workplace. In 1900, few Americans had a private mode of transportation. Barely 4,000 passenger automobiles were sold in 1900, and while horses were common, they were used primarily for farming, public transportation, and commercial activity in cities. By 1930, nearly 40 million cars had been added to America’s streets. The automobile recast life and work in central cities and eventually the suburbs.     

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for high dimensional inversion in remote sensing

Summary.  We discuss the inversion of the gas profiles (ozone, NO₃, NO₂, aerosols and neutral density) in the upper atmosphere from the spectral occultation measurements. The data are produced by the 'Global ozone monitoring of occultation of stars' instrument on board the Envisat satellite that was launched in March 2002. The instrument measures the attenuation of light spectra at various horizontal paths from about 100 km down to 10–20 km. The new feature is that these data allow the inversion of the gas concentration height profiles. A short introduction is given to the present operational data management procedure with examples of the first real data inversion. Several solution options for a more comprehensive statistical inversion are presented. A direct inversion leads to a non-linear model with hundreds of parameters to be estimated. The problem is solved with an adaptive single-step Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Another approach is to divide the problem into several non-linear smaller dimensional problems, to run parallel adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo chains for them and to solve the gas profiles in repetitive linear steps. The effect of grid size is discussed, and we present how the prior regularization takes the grid size into account in a way that effectively leads to a grid-independent inversion.     

Deposit Insurance,Institutions, and Bank Interest Rates

Many recent institutional reforms of the financial system have relied on the introduction of an explicit scheme of deposit insurance. This instrument aims at two main targets, contributing to systemic stability and protecting depositors. However, it may also affect the interest rate spread in the banking system, which can be viewed as an indicator of either inefficiency or market power in this financial segment. This paper provides an empirical investigation of the effect of deposit insurance and other institutional and economic variables on bank interest rates across countries. We find that deposit insurance increases the lending–deposit spread in banking. The main effect seems to arise not from the deposit side though, but from an increase in the lending rate. We interpret this result as evidence of the presence of moral hazard problems related to this instrument. We also find that higher quality of institutions is associated with lower spreads, thus contributing to eroding sources of market power in the banking sector.     

领导权理论与后现代思潮

英国著名教授E·拉克劳以其拓展马克思主义的革命理论而闻名,并成为西方“后马克思主义”的著名代表人物之一。在其代表作《领导权与社会主义策略》(“Hegemony”一词,曾有“文化霸权”等译法;但本文译者认为,在拉克劳的著作中,他主要是在“国家、革命、阶级和革命的领导者”等意义上来谈论这一范畴的,所以在这里把“hegemony”译为“领导权”)一书中,拉克劳把马克思主义的领导权理论与后结构主义等当代“时髦”理论相结合的尝试引人注目,但也备受争议。为此,他在另一本著作《我们时代革命的新反思》一书中,系统地回答了《领导权与社会主义策略》一书中的有关问题。这些问题涉及其领导权理论与社会主义革命在当今社会现实中所面临的理论困境,包括革命的主体、阶级的构成、阶级斗争、对立和认同等等。此外,领导权理论还涉及其与现代西方哲学思潮的内在逻辑联系,如胡塞尔的现象学、维特根斯坦的后分析哲学、德里达的解构主义以及其他的后现代主义理论等。针对这些理论和现实问题,拉克劳一一进行了认真的回答和阐述。英国《新左派评论》编委会的部分成员罗宾(Robin Blackburn)、彼德(Peter Dews)和安娜(Anna-Marie Smith)于1988年5月策划专访拉克劳。以下访谈是从拉克劳《我们时代革命的新反思》一书中选译     

Campus attitudes toward alcohol and drugs in a deep southern university.

In our zeal to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, we may have a distorted picture of what the majority of college students actually think about alcohol and drug use. Students in this study done at a public university located in the Deep South report being generally intolerant of substance abuse.     

The Farm Crisis and Mental Health: A Longitudinal Study of the 1980s1

Abstract This paper examines rural/urban differences and trends in mental health during the farm crisis of the 1980s in a large panel sample from a midwestern state. A community research perspective, which attributes differences to life styles, culture, and community context, is contrasted with an economic stress perspective, which focuses on individual differences in economic circumstances as determinants of rural-urban differences in mental health. Survey samples from 1981, 1986, and 1989 are used to examine differences among seven categories of community type. Multiple regression analysis of the trend and panel data provide support for both the individual economic distress and community context models.