TEACHING TOOLS: COOPERATIVE LEARNING IN ECONOMICS

Cooperative learning is a structured, systematic instructional technique in which students work together in small groups toward a common goal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of cooperative learning with an illustrative example for teaching the labor supply curve. Recommendations for introducing the technique, forming groups, the instructor's role during group work, grading and extensions of cooperative learning to other topics are discussed.     

College Students' Money Beliefs and Behaviors: An Asian Perspective

The multidimensionality of money was investigated, using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The respondents, 290 college students from Korea, Japan, and the United States, were administered a survey, which included socio-demographic questions, and Furnham's (1984) Money Beliefs and Behaviors (MBBS) Scale. Through a series of principal components analyses, a three-factor model with 10 MBBS items was identified. The three factors, Power, Security, and Financial Modesty accounted for 53.6% of the variance. The findings have implications for college students and financial management practitioners.     

Nonstandard Employment in the Nonmetropolitan United States*

Abstract We examine the prevalence of nonstandard employment in the nonmetropolitan United States using the Current Population Survey Supplement on Contingent Work (1999 and 2001). We find that nonstandard work is more prevalent in nonmetropolitan than in central city or suburban areas. Logistic regression models controlling for sociode‐mographic and work characteristics, show that nonmetropolitan workers experience higher odds of nonstandard employment than central city or suburban workers. Variations in industrial and occupational structures in nonmetro and metro areas do not explain residential differences in nonstandard work. We also estimate the odds of employment in each of the three components of nonstandard work: contingent work, part‐time, and varied hour work. Nonmetropolitan workers are more likely than central city and suburban workers to be employed in contingent or varied hour work. The benefits and wages of nonstandard work are lower than for standard work across residence areas. The results highlight the importance of understanding nonstandard work and the components of nonstandard work, particularly when considering the nature of work across industries, occupations, and residence.     

Career Aspirations and Expectations of Black,Mexican American,and White Students

The career aspirations and expectations of Black, Mexican American, and White college freshmen were examined. In addition, students' career expectations were compared to the jobs available in the labor market. Results suggested that (a) there seem to be more gender than ethnic differences in students' career aspirations and expectations, (b) differences in the career aspirations and expectations among Mexican American and White students followed traditional gender patterns, and (c) with some exceptions, the career expectations of students resembled the distribution of jobs in the labor market.     

Participatory Organizational Research: Examining Voice in the Co‐production of Knowledge

This paper advances participatory methods in management research. We propose the term participatory organizational research to describe this adjunct to action research. We illustrate the potential of the method to allow sometimes unheard organizational members to generate alternative perspectives that can offer the potential for the co‐production of new forms of knowledge that are locally relevant. Participatory methods originate from work with marginalized groups and have been used more commonly in community and organizational development. The aim of such research is, generally, to change the social and organizational conditions within which participants operate by using their perspectives as active participants to develop alternative possibilities. As such, this research method has significant potential for management researchers in providing the means for unheard organizational members to voice their perspectives: a central component, we argue, in knowledge co‐production. Based on a participatory study of care quality in elder care institutions, we examine in detail how participatory organizational research can enable voice and explore some of the structural limitations particularly in respect of research ethics.     

Considering women's experience

Conclusion All views of power, as Lukes points out, are both contested and ideological. The view I present here was developed through efforts to construct a theory of power grounded in the central themes of feminist research, especially its focus on the social construction of reality. The most salient realities addressed in this context are the ethics and social structure of obligation, relationship, and care, especially as these affect differential identities, social rankings, and asymmetries in power. These inequalities are socially constructed. They stabilize power contests of the past in prescribed relationships of the present.Though power differentials between women and men have a long history, the particular configuration we find in the contemporary United States was shaped in large part through the social and ideological transformations of the nineteenth century, when market relationships, economic and social, were ascendant. Exaggerations of that transformation, which presume older social orders were overtaken by a new order modelled on the market, are not only analyses but ideologies as well. They serve the market and those men whose success is focused there; but they render invisible much of women's experience. The theory presented here proposes a tripartite approach as a corrective to single-order market-based theories. I argue that power has different characteristics in the three orders.Briefly, power in the exchange order is individualistic and competitive. Power in the placing order is derived by incumbents from the social places they fill. Here is where the definition of social types critically structures power differentials and where care, service, and deference are made obligatory. Power in the pooling order is collective, the capacity of a multitude to act as one.This examination of power in its three guises suggests some avenues that syntheses of theories of power might take. For example, conceptions of power that stress its competitive and oppositional aspects focus on the exchange order, while conceptions that stress the communal aspects of power focus on the pooling order and its capacity to generate power through consensus. In addition, the several discussions of resources for power tend to combine resources generated and used in all three orders. Much analytical clarity might be gained by separating out the different ways in which resources are generated, used, and transferred from one social order to another. Finally, several implications that can only be suggested here follow from this view of power. Because it focuses attention on the placing order, a sector generally neglected in sociology, it can make us attentive to the powers of the weak and the claims of future generations on current ones. Because those claims are made most heavily against women, they account in large part for women's higher rates of poverty and their disadvantages against men in the world of exchange. But, more important, because this social order is neglected in practice as well as in theory, its powers, especially its powers of social control, are eroding, leaving the claims of those who need care to go unheeded. The growing isolation of the elderly is one case in point. Poverty rates among children, which are fast approaching the one-quarter mark in the United States, present another.These can be interpreted at least partly as the society's increasing incapacity to enforce obligations of protection and care. More than the other two social orders, the placing order answers a society's need for a succession of generations by empowering the young, the infirm, and the aged with claims. In the nineteenth century, societies solved the problems of disintegration in the placing sector associated with an ascendant market by assigning claims for care almost exclusively to women, backing up those claims with powerful normative sanctions, and leaving men free to compete in the market. Now that the sanctions have lost their sting and the market is attracting women, too, a reallocation of claims amounting to a restructuring of the placing sector - especially its service ranks - is necessary.If the market with its freedoms was the major social accomplishment of the nineteenth century, an egalitarian redistribution of obligations and responsibilities might be the twentieth century's answer to contemporary difficulties in caring. There are other possibilities. One is a further weakening of the claims that succor the weak, with disastrous results for future generations. Another is the imposition of claims upon some new group - biologically adult but socially stunted by definition, as women have been. Currently the women's movement and its counter movement are struggling to determine the future construction of reality.     

Differentials in Adult Mortality and Activity Limitation by Years of Education in the United States at the End of the 1990s

This study examines mortality differentials and health disparities between educational groups within the 1998 adult population (ages 25 and older) in the United States. Mortality differentials are measured using average life expectancy and health disparities by expected years without activity limitation. The results indicate that for both sexes, higher education is associated with higher life expectancy. Those with higher levels of education also have higher life expectancy without activity limitation. Adults with higher education can also expect to enjoy a greater percentage of their expected lives free of any form of activity limitation. At each level of education, adult females have a higher level of activity limitation compared to adult males. At the same level of education, adult females expect to enjoy smaller percentages of their remaining lives free of activity limitation compared to adult males of the same age.