‘Repertoires of Contention’ in Movements Against Hydropower Projects in India

Applying Charles Tilly's notion of ‘repertoires of contention’, this paper discusses strategies and modes of protest carried out by the movements against hydropower projects in India. It compares the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save Narmada Movement) in Madhya Pradesh and the Shramik Mukthi Dal (SMD; Labour Liberation Party) led mobilisations against hydropower projects in Maharashtra. It explains the more dramatic repertoires deployed by NBA as opposed to moderate and pragmatic movement repertoires of SMD. The paper concludes that the differences in ideology, organisation and cultural–historical legacy of the two organisations, as well as their different modes of interaction with the state, are the causes behind different contentious repertoires deployed by them, which resulted in different trajectories and outcomes.     

Gender Jokes/Sexual Politics

Two classes of jokes—about women as whores and women as avengers—are analyzed in terms of conscious and unconscious intrapsychic and intergender conflicts. Interrelated issues of power, mutual exploitation, self-esteem, and material interests are given special consideration. The effectiveness of these and other such jokes is related to the theory of the comic put forth by Ernst Kris, according to which the jokes allow a temporary remastery of incompletely mastered anxieties. In this context, these anxieties pertain especially to gender identity and relations between the sexes.     

Book Review: Jeffrey M. Berry and David F. Arons,A Voice for Nonprofits,The Brookings Institution,Washington, DC, 2003, 210 pp., appendix,notes, index, $26.95

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

ECONOMIC ROULETTE

Complementing previous literature on welfare reform and the character of jobs in the low-wage labour market, we illustrate the lack of regularity and security that mark the jobs held by many low-income mothers. To do so, we present a typology of mothers’ work patterns and illustrate their experiences through case examples. Our qualitative analysis of longitudinal pathways-to-work in three cities involved an examination of the experiences of 99 diverse, low-income working mothers with a young child. The work patterns that emerged from this analysis include: continuous duration of a single job; multiple job spells; underemployment; and churning in and out of employment. Findings indicate that a complicated ‘coming together’ of well-paying stable jobs, consistent aid from public systems and stable family networks are necessary for mothers to take even the first steps into stable employment.     

Sex Differentials in Childhood Feeding,Health Care,and Nutritional Status in India

Strong preference for sons in South Asia is well documented, but evidence on female disadvantage in childhood feeding, health care, and nutritional status is inconclusive. This article examines sex differentials in indicators of childhood feeding, health care, and nutritional status of children under age 3 by birth order and sex composition of older living siblings. Data are from India's 1992–93 and 1998–99 National Family Health Surveys. The analysis finds three reasons for inconclusive evidence on female disadvantage in aggregate analyses. First, discrimination against girls is limited to the relatively small fraction of children of certain birth orders and sex compositions of older siblings. Second, discrimination against girls when boys are in short supply and discrimination against boys when girls are in short supply cancel each other to some extent. Third, some discrimination against girls (e.g., in exclusive breastfeeding at 6–9 months) is nutritionally beneficial to girls. Separate analyses for North and South India find that gender discrimination is as common in the South as in the North, where son preference is generally much stronger.     

A sequential discrimination procedure for two almost identically shaped wrapped distributions

The way of investigating a distribution knowing its interesting properties might be often inadequate when the shapes of two distributions are almost similar. In each of these circumstances, the accurate decision about the genesis of a random sample from any of the two parent distributions will be very much ambiguous even with the availability of the existing testing procedure of the circular data. A sequential discrimination procedure has been suggested which is also invariant to the sample size. The performance of the proposed discrimination procedure has been evaluated by checking its capability of detecting the genesis of the known samples from the two identically shaped wrapped distributions.     

Techniques for nonlinear least squares and robust regression

Recently, the authors and others have made considerable progress in developing algorithms for solving certain large-residual nonlinear least-squares problems where Gauss-Newton (GN) methods can be expected to perform poorly. These methods take account of the term in the Hessian ignored by the GN methods and use quasi-Newton procedures to update this term explicitly. This paper reviews these new approaches and discusses how they can be modified to give good performance on nonlinear models with robust loss functions where lack of scale invariance causes several new problems to arise.     

Federal nutrition programs and childhood obesity: inside the black box

In response to the dramatic rise in childhood obesity, particularly among low income individuals, federal nutrition assistance programs have come under scrutiny. However, the vast majority of this research focuses on the direct relationship between these programs and child health, while little is known about the mechanisms by which such relationships arise. Using the 2007 American Time Use Survey and the Eating and Health Module, we explore differences in time use—albeit in a non-causal framework—across families that participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the School Breakfast Program, and the National School Lunch Program to better understand behavioral differences across participants and non-participants. These differences have important implications for future research and policy.     

An approximation to the distribution of the ratio of two general quadratic forms with application

Based on mixed cumulants up to order six, this paper provides a four moment approximation to the distribution of a ratio of two general quadratic forms in normal variables. The approximation is applied to calculate the percentile points of modified F-test statistics for testing treatment effects when standard F-ratio test is misleading because of dependence among observations. For the special case, when data is generated by an AR(1) process, the approximation is evaluated by a simulation study. For the general SARMA (p,q)(P,Q)_s process, a modified F-test statistic Is given, and its distribution for the (0,1)(0,l)₁₂ process, is approximated by the moment approximation technique.