Does Privatization Protect Natural Resources? Property Rights and Forests in Guatemala

Objectives . Property rights are central to debates about natural resource policy. Governments traditionally have been seen as the appropriate custodians of natural resources for their citizens. More recently, many argue the privatization of property rights will ensure that users have incentives to manage their resources well. Common property, to the extent it is discussed at all, is seen as leading to the tragedy of the commons. We evaluate these claims by assessing property rights and forest conditions in two private and three communal forests in Guatemala. Methods . Data on biological and social phenomena from five forests (151 plots) and their associated communities were collected using the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program protocols. Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze four models. We examined t -scores for differences in coefficients for the different models. Results . The models demonstrate that de jure property rights are not a powerful predictor of variations among the sampled forests. Conclusions . We argue that de facto institutions and their enforcement are much more important than de jure property rights to forest management. Communities holding a forest in common can, under certain circumstances, create institutions to manage their resources as successfully as—or more successfully than—private owners.     

Childbearing Strategies Among the Uighur Urban Educated Elite in Ürümqi

Uighur families in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in Northwest China, have undergone tremendous changes since 1949 and the start of People's Republic of China era. In the first decade of the PRC era Ürümqi experienced tremendous population growth among both the Han and Uighur population as well as going through an intense industrialisation process initiated by the central government. As urbanisation and industrialisation have continued until the present Uighur families have responded to these changes by initiating childbearing strategies that take into account government policy as well as their own interests. William Goode's convergence theory of family characteristics has helped conceptualise how families across diverse cultures change their decisionmaking strategies over the course of the transition to modernity. Uighur couples have had increasingly fewer children over the decades, based on factors they share in common with other modernising societies such as the late age of marriage, the increased power of women to regulate their births, the expense of raising children, and the difficulties of finding childcare. Goode's theory, however, does not account for the influence of a strong state which has proved to have a major influence in the decision of many Uighur couples to stop at one child.     

The health consequences of trafficking in women in Mexico: findings from Monterrey city

There has been little research on the health consequences of trafficking in women in Mexico and this study examines the effects of trafficking in women. Twenty internally trafficked women were interviewed in Monterrey city, Mexico, during the years 2007 and 2008. Although the study found that trafficking of women in Mexico results from multi-causal factors, we found that in general trafficked women suffer a wide range of physical and sexual violence. This has direct consequences on their physical and mental health and in particular their sexual health.     

Parental choice and the rural primary school: Lifestyle,locality and loyalty

This paper discusses the geography of parental choice in a rural locale and shows how a group of parents negotiated their way through the process of primary school choice. Using ethnographic data collected through interviews and observations with parents and staff from three rural primary schools in England, the research utilises Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus and field to show how the resources and values the parents held affected the school choices they made. The paper demonstrates that the longer-term resident local parents were influenced not only by their cultural capital but also by familial ties and an emotional commitment to the rural locale and these parents were therefore more inclined to support their local school. In contrast, the more recent newcomer parents used their cultural capital and spatial power to shop around to find what they believed to be the ‘right’ school. The paper argues that the newcomer parents had less allegiance to place and hence to the symbolic position that the school holds within the rural community within which they lived.     

Missing siblings: seeking more adequate social responses

Little is known about the experience of family and friends when a young adult goes missing, less is known about how siblings make sense of the experience. Police assistance to locate the missing person may be sought but there is little recognition of going missing or missingness as a social issue, and there is little or no adequate social response to the needs of those left behind. This paper links knowledge of siblings, loss and grief to an understanding of this phenomenon. It presents the methodology and findings of an exploratory, qualitative study into the experiences of nine adult siblings of long-term missing people in Australia and presents the themes drawn from their accounts. The themes are briefly elaborated using direct quotations from participants in the study and represented in a diagram. The paper seeks to develop greater understanding of the inter-relationship between missingness and other social issues, to give voice to the views of participants and to encourage practitioners to engage more purposefully in work with family and friends affected by this issue. Some implications for social work practice are presented.     

PARENTAL INFLUENCE ON GENDER AND MARITAL ROLE ATTITUDES: IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERVENTION

This study examined parental influence on specific attitudes toward marital and parental roles and nonspecific gender-role attitudes. Respondents included 173 young adults (127 women and 46 men) and their parents. Young adults' scores on the Role Orientation scale of the Marital Statisfaction Inventory and on masculinity and femininity scales from two self-report inventories (the MMPI-2 and the Personal Attributes Questionnarie) were correlated with their parents' scores on a subset of these same measures. Results indicated that (a) marital and parental role attitudes among young adults are strongly related to specific marital role attitudes of their parents but only modestly related (for women) or unrelated (for men) to nonspecific gender-role attitudes of their parents; (b) broader gender-role attitudes of young men are moderately correlated with their father's attitudes but generally uncorrelated with their mother's attitudes regarding gender roles; and (c) the relationship of young women's gender-role attitudes to both maternal and paternal attitudes is generally weaker and more complex than for young men. Clinical implications of these findings for assessment and intervention with distressed couples are discussed.     

The Good, the Bad, and the Regulator: An Experimental Test of Two Conditional Audit Schemes

Conditional audit rules are designed to achieve regulatory compliance with fewer inspections than required by random auditing. A regulator places individuals into audit pools that differ in probability of audit or severity of fine and specifies transition rules between pools. Future pool assignment is conditional on current audit results. We conduct an experiment to compare two specific schemes—Harrington's Past-Compliance Targeting and Friesen's Optimal Targeting—against random auditing. We find a production possibility frontier between compliance and minimizing inspections. Optimal targeting generates the lowest inspection rates as predicted, but random auditing the highest compliance. Past-compliance targeting is intermediate.     

The breakdown of class politics

This paper reviews debate in the 1990s over whether, why, and how much class is declining in its impact on politics. One position is the “null hypothesis” of many at Berkeley and Oxford: the impact of class has not changed. The other position is that “post-industrial society” is transforming politics and redefining class. To focus, the paper does not seek to inventory themes in abstract, but stresses core points made by actual proponents in the exchange. Over the decade many issues were resolved; others were not. Social inequality persists, and inequality of income has risen; but the motor of politics is less clearly jobs. Consumption and other post-industrial concerns have entered and transformed politics in many countries worldwide. How political parties have changed their appeals away from “class” is a key issue, as is the drop by about half in the size of the traditional working class in most Western countries since 1945. From this exchange lessons emerge for conceptualizing and measuring these dynamics in the future. He has taught at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, the Sorbonne, UCLA, and the University of Florence.     

How Fortune 500 companies used the Web for philanthropic and crisis communication following Hurricane Katrina

This study examined how Fortune 500 companies used their Web sites to provide philanthropic and crisis communication response following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Results showed that companies tended to use traditional means of communication versus new media tactics to disseminate information related to the disaster. Companies with holdings in Louisiana and Mississippi tended to use slightly more types of information than companies without a substantive presence in those two states.