Review Essay: Race,Class, and Eyes Upon the Street: Public Space,Social Control,and the Economies of Three Urban Communities

Sociological Forum -     

Temporary Work in the Public Services: Implications for Equal Opportunities

This article examines the impact of the growing number of temporary employment contracts in the public sector on equal opportunity theory, policy and practice. Quantitative and qualitative data from two case study local authorities are utilized to examine the mechanisms by which temporary work becomes an equal opportunities issue. A strong association between part‐time work and temporary employment status is demonstrated as an important aspect of the gendered nature of temporary work. Links between ethnicity and temporary work are less clear but are based upon the insecurity of targeted funding for teachers and the under‐valuation of the skills of the workers concerned. The data indicate that temporary workers are largely excluded from equal opportunity policy and practice, bringing into question a concept of equality that can permit less favourable treatment for certain groups of workers. It is argued that public sector restructuring, particularly concerning decentralization and the quest for flexibility, has facilitated the differential treatment of employees, thereby fundamentally eroding the basis of equal opportunity policy and practice.     

Globalisation and the Politics of Persuasion and Coercion

This paper argues that an economic liberal discourse of globalisation has been pivotal to the policy‐making process in Australia over the past 15 or so years. Both Labor and Coalition Governments have aimed to restrict the electoral fall‐out from the process of restructuring by persuading Australians that the world economy has forced particular policy changes and made alternative economic policy choices unviable. Policy‐makers act to influence conceptions of the appropriate role and responsibilities of the state through persuasion – the rhetoric they speak – and coercion – the policies they make. The pervasiveness of globalisation rhetoric in the public sphere has been essential to the governing process as a complement to and buffer for the coercive impact of economic liberal policy changes. As Australia has shifted from a protectionist to an economically liberal policy structure, the effects of globalisation have become clearer. Liberalisation has intensified pressures from the world political economy and coerced changes in all areas of policy and the economy, as well as in public perceptions about the ‘limits of government’. Globalisation and economic liberalism as persuasion and coercion are the component parts of a restructured system of political and economic governance: a paradigmatic shift away from the economic protectionism of the first 80 years of Australian federalism.     

Birth weight and income: interactions across generations

This paper attempts to answer a series of questions regarding the interaction of income and birth weight across generations. First, does the effect of the income of a mother during her pregnancy on her infant's birth weight depend on the family's birth weight history (genetic predisposition)? Second, does the effect of low birth weight status on adult life chances depend on income during early childhood? These questions have implications for the way we envision the biological and social worlds as interacting across generations. To address these issues, this study uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, survey years 1968 through 1992. Results of sibling comparisons (family-fixed-effects models) demonstrate that maternal income has a significant impact on birth weight for those infants who are already at high risk hereditarily (i.e., who have a low birth weight parent). However, it is not clear whether income acts as a developmental buffer for low birth weight infants as their lives progress. These findings suggest the existence of biosocial interactions between hereditary predisposition and socio-economic environment.     

Front Line or All Fronts? Women's Trade Union Activism in Retail Services

This article draws on data from a case study of a trade union campaign to organize part‐time women workers in a large supermarket chain. The data indicate that combining paid work, work in the home and increased trade union participation means that the work of women activists and the resistance they encounter in its execution is broader than the customer/employee interface, or ‘front line’, that is the current focus in literature on service‐sector work and trade unionism. The findings are used to argue that established feminist literature, in which the location and recipients of women's work are conceptualized as multiple and shifting but inter‐related, still provide a useful analytical framework for service‐sector work. Therefore an ‘all fronts’ approach may better describe the lives of part‐time women workers and trade unionists in the sector. However it is argued that, far from simply being considered as an added burden, trade union activism was a powerful catalyst for change in the home and work lives of the working‐class women in the study.     

Finite decentralization in a Tiebout economy with crowding types

We study a model with local public goods in which agents' crowding effects are formally distinguished from their taste types. It has been shown that the core of such an economy can be decentralized with anonymous admission prices (which are closely related to cost share prices). Unfortunately, such a price system allows for an arbitrary relationship between the public goods level in a given jurisdiction and the cost to an agent for joining. Formally, this means that admission prices are infinite dimensional. Attempts to decentralize the core with finite price systems such as Lindahl prices suggest that this is possible only under fairly restrictive conditions. In this paper, we introduce a new type of price system called finite cost shares. This system has strictly larger dimension than Lindahl prices but, in contrast to general cost share prices, is finite. We show that this allows for decentralization of the core under more general conditions than are possible with Lindahl prices. Received: 18 January 2000/Accepted: 21 January 2002 The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.     

The ordinal egalitarian bargaining solution for finite choice sets

Rubinstein et al. (Econometrica 60:1171–1186, 1992) introduced the Ordinal Nash Bargaining Solution. They prove that Pareto optimality, ordinal invariance, ordinal symmetry, and IIA characterize this solution. A feature of their work is that attention is restricted to a domain of social choice problems with an infinite set of basic allocations. We introduce an alternative approach to solving finite social choice problems using a new notion called the Ordinal Egalitarian (OE) bargaining solution. This suggests the middle ranked allocation (or a lottery over the two middle ranked allocations) of the Pareto set as an outcome. We show that the OE solution is characterized by weak credible optimality, ordinal symmetry and independence of redundant alternatives. We conclude by arguing that what allows us to make progress on this problem is that with finite choice sets, the counting metric is a natural and fully ordinal way to measure gains and losses to agents seeking to solve bargaining problems.     

The Effect of Daughters on Partisanship and Social Attitudes Toward Women

Washington ( 2008 ) finds that daughters promote liberal voting (at least with respect to women's issues) among U.S. Congress members and attributes this finding to socialization. However, daughters’ influence could manifest differently for elite politicians and the general citizenry either due to self‐selection or the Trivers‐Willard hypothesis, which suggests that parents invest differently in male and female children depending on their social status. Using nationally representative data from the General Social Survey, this study asks whether biological daughters affect political party identification, traditional views of women, or opinions about abortion and teen sex. We find that female offspring promote identification with the more conservative Republican Party, but this effect depends on social status. There is no evidence that daughters promote liberal views of women and less consistent evidence that they influence views of abortion or teen sex. Overall, evidence supports the Trivers‐Willard hypothesis, but with a more complex interaction by social status.     

Mistakes that heterosexual people make when trying to appear non-prejudiced: the view from LGB people

In two studies, lesbians, gay men and bisexuals were queried concerning mistakes that well-meaning heterosexual people have made when interacting with them. In qualitative, open-ended research, we determined that the most common mistakes concerned heterosexuals' pointing out that they know someone who is gay, emphasizing their lack of prejudice, and relying on stereotypes about gays. Following up with a quantitative, close-ended questionnaire, we determined that the mistakes respondents experienced most often involved heterosexuals (a) relying on stereotypes and (b) ignoring gay issues; the most annoying mistakes were heterosexuals (a) using subtle prejudicial language and (b) not owning up to their discomfort with gay issues. We used two theoretical perspectives, shared reality theory and the contact hypothesis, to analyze the quantitative responses. Implications for intergroup relationships between heterosexual people and gay people are discussed.