Toward a scheduling congruity theory of family resource management

This article presents the elements of a theory to explain the dynamic construction and execution of production processes. The theory takes into account both the cognitive underpinnings and observable streams of purposive action necessary for managerial behavior. It attempts to explain both the consciously planned and executed action of individuals and the more routine, repetitive activities which dominate most resource allocation behavior. Further, it provides a framework within which goal directed actions of individuals may be translated into goal directed actions of groups of individuals.The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.Rosemary J. Avery is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Consumer Economics and Housing at Cornell University, 103 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. She received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1988. Her research areas include family management and time use, family decision making, and family formation via adoption.Kathryn Stafford is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Resource Management at The Ohio State University, Campbell Hall, Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210. Her research focuses upon management by families who generate income at home, and she has also done work in the areas of family time use and household production. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1978.     

The Ideologically Colonized Metropole: Dutch Racism and Racist Denial

Many in The Netherlands deny the existence of race and racism even as significant research strongly suggests otherwise. This paper synthesized existing literature to illuminate The Netherlands' unique form of racism, which is rooted in racial neoliberalism, anti‐racialism (i.e. the denial of race), racial Europeanization, and the particular Dutch history of colonial exploitation. This article summarizes existing scholarship addressing racism in wide array of social institutions in The Netherlands before addressing the historical roots of Dutch racism and how Dutch aphasia and racial Europeanization deny the links between contemporary and historical oppression before, finally, offering an explanation for this disconnect.     

Costs and Rewards of Children: The Effects of Becoming a Parent on Adults' Lives

How do new parents differ from their childless counterparts in social and psychological resources, daily strains, and psychological well‐being? Using a nationally representative panel of 1,933 adults who were childless at the first interview, we compare 6 indicators of adults' lives for those who became parents and those remaining childless several years later, controlling for earlier states. Becoming a parent is both detrimental and rewarding. With the exception of social integration, which is greater for all groups of new parents compared with their childless counterparts, the effects of parental status on adults' lives vary markedly by gender and marital status. Unmarried parents report lower self‐efficacy and higher depression than their childless counterparts. Married mothers' lives are marked by more housework and more marital conflict but less depression than their childless counterparts. Parental status has little influence on the lives of married men.     

How Does Public Management Affect Government Performance? Findings from International Research

Despite the growing importance of public management reform aroundthe world, relatively little scholarship evaluates the contributionsof public management to government performance, that is, tothe character and consequences of service provision by publicagencies. One study (Hill and Lynn 2005) evaluated over eighthundred American empirical studies that address issues of publicmanagement effectiveness in a wide variety of fields, subfields,and disciplines. In this article we employ the analytic frameworkof Hill and Lynn—a polycentric "logic of governance"—toevaluate 193 research articles published in English that usenon-American, or what we will term international, empiricalevidence. Our evaluation reveals more similarities in Americanand non-American public management research, and in the determinantsof government performance, than one might expect, given thedistinctiveness of the American politico-administrative system.These similarities may be deceptive, however. Internationalinvestigators exhibit somewhat different modeling strategies,tending, for example, to favor more linear managerialist hypotheses—changesin structure lead to changes outcomes, for example—thanAmerican research, which is more concerned with intragovernmentalcomplexities. The fact that the use of a polycentric logic ofgovernance revealed highly suggestive similarities and differencesin the determinants of performance in public organizations suggeststhe potential value of this kind of analytic strategy in bothsingle investigations and in meta-analyses of public managementreform.     

Rules Infants Look By: Testing the Assumption of Transitivity in Visual Salience

What drives infants’ attention in complex visual scenes? Early models of infant attention suggested that the degree to which different visual features were detectable determines their attentional priority. Here, we tested this by asking whether two targets—defined by different features, but each equally salient when evaluated independently—would drive attention equally when pitted head‐to‐head. In Experiment 1, we presented 6‐month‐old infants with an array of Gabor patches in which a target region varied either in color or spatial frequency from the background. Using a forced‐choice preferential‐looking method, we measured how readily infants fixated the target as its featural difference from the background was parametrically increased. Then, in Experiment 2, we used these psychometric preference functions to choose values for color and spatial frequency targets that were equally salient (preferred), and pitted them against each other within the same display. We reasoned that if salience is transitive, then the stimuli should be iso‐salient and infants should therefore show no systematic preference for either stimulus. On the contrary, we found that infants consistently preferred the color‐defined stimulus. This suggests that computing visual salience in more complex scenes needs to include factors above and beyond local salience values.     

The ecology of race and socioeconomic distress: infant and working-age mortality in Chicago

We examine the effects of education, unemployment, and racial segregation on age-, sex-, and race-specific mortality rates in racially defined Chicago community areas from 1989 to 1991. Community socioeconomic factors account for large observed areal variations in infant and working-age mortality, but especially working-age mortality for the black population. For black men, the mortality consequences of living in economically distressed communities are quite severe. Segregation effects on mortality are more modest and largely operate through neighborhood socioeconomic conditions, although some direct effects of segregation on mortality for blacks are apparent.     

Feminism,militarism, and attitudes toward the role of women in the military

Attitudes toward the role of women in the military require the reconciliation of two often conflicting beliefs: those toward the roles and rights of women and those toward the military. This article explores the relationships between positive attitudes toward women’s roles throughout society, or feminism, and positive attitudes toward defense spending, or militarism, both with each other and with attitudes toward gender integration in the military. Results of this analysis show there to be a negative relationship between feminism and militarism, a positive relationship between feminism and gender integration, and a negative relationship between militarism and gender integration. The results of multiple regression analysis show that feminism is the strongest predictor of attitudes toward gender integration, while militarism is weak in its predictive ability. The author argues that the issue of women in the military is more one of women’s equality than of national defense and that policy discussions should be structured accordingly. She is currently conducting research which examines how women in the United States military employ strategies to manage gender and sexuality. This research provides evidence for the claim that gender is not simply a role or an attribute, but that gender is created and recreated through our interactions with others.     

Engaging Indigeneity in Development Policy

This article explores how development programming in rural poverty and the environment can work with indigenous peoples. It draws on research conducted in Asia and Latin America to suggest how indigeneity can be understood as specific kinds of marginalisation intersecting with self‐identification and recognition as indigenous. Current obstacles to effective engagement with indigenous peoples are outlined, and suggestions are offered for pro‐actively addressing their experience. Two critical areas where there are opportunities for donors to support indigenous peoples' priorities include ‘FPIC’ (Free Prior and Informed Consent) and a careful consideration of the implications of niche‐market engagement.     

The Time Squeeze: Parental Statuses and Feelings About Time With Children

Policy makers, parents, and the public are concerned with perceived declines in parents’ time with children. Data from two national surveys (N = 1,159 and N = 821) used in this study show that nearly half of parents report feeling too little time with children. Work hours are strongly related to these feelings, even controlling for time spent with children, and explain why fathers more than mothers feel time strain. For fathers, those whose youngest child is an adolescent feel more strain than similarly situated mothers. Controlling for work hours, single parents are not more likely than married parents to feel that they spend insufficient time with children.