Union organizing effort and success in the U.S., 1948–2004

While union density in the public sector has increased in recent decades, private sector union density in the U.S. has declined steadily since the mid-1950s. Scholars have evoked a variety of explanations to account for the decline in union membership, but substantially less attention has been devoted to understanding the contribution of the union organizing process as governed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In this paper, we focus on two aspects of this process: union organizing effort (the effort to establish union representation elections to organize non-unionized workers) and union organizing success (success in winning union representation elections). Using annual time series data for the U.S. from 1948 to 2004, we show that there has been a long-term decline in both union organizing effort and union organizing success, which likely contributes to declining union density. We focus on three explanations for these changes: the political–legal environment for unions, deindustrialization and globalization, and employer opposition to unionization efforts. We find that each of these factors contributes to organizing effort and success and conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for future mobilization efforts.     

“Service” Municipal Administration as Part of the Development of Youth Entrepreneurship in Russia

The study offers a development of the social technologies of “service” municipal administration. The consumers’ opinions should be taken into consideration when determining the nomenclature and standards of their provision, which include the quality parameters that the consumers consider important. In addition, “service” relations imply the assessment of consumer satisfaction with the services and the correction of services based on the results of the assessment. Since this interaction implies communication between the municipal administration body and service users, it is necessary to focus on communicative technologies that are capable of providing a full cycle of service development and improvement for young entrepreneurs. Communications should help determine the expectations associated with a service, raise awareness thereof, and involve young people in the decisions related to the provision of services.     

The Role of Wilderness Protection and Societal Engagement as Indicators of Well-Being: An Examination of Change at the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

A societal decision to protect over 9 million acres of land and water for its wilderness character in the early 1960s reflected US wealth in natural resources, pride in the nation’s cultural history and our commitment to the well-being of future generations to both experience wild nature and enjoy benefits flowing from these natural ecosystems. There is no question that our relationship with wilderness has changed. Individually it is probably quite easy to examine differences in the role wilderness plays in the quality of our lives today compared to some previous time. But how the role of wilderness protection has changed for society is more difficult to describe. In only a few places do we have data across multiple decades that would allow us to even examine how users or their use may have changed over time. At the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota we are fortunate to have multiple studies that can give us some 40 years of insight into how some aspects of use have changed there. For example, an analysis of results of visitor studies at the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in 1969, 1991 and 2007 reveal some big differences in who is out there today, most notably the presence of a much older, more experienced and better educated user population, almost exclusively white and predominantly male. It is time to decide whether the best thing for wilderness and or society is to try to restore historic patterns of use (to include younger people, the less wealthy and lower educated) in greater numbers, to try to identify new markets within growing underrepresented populations, or adapt our perception of wilderness stewardship to better include planning for emerging social values of a new generation with other indicators of well-being. A growing population with greater dependence on ecosystem services provided by protected nature could lead to wilderness protection becoming an important quantitative and qualitative element of quality of life indices in the very near future.     

Personality and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from South Korea

Although the statistically significant relationship between personality traits and subjective well-being (i.e., self-reported happiness and life satisfaction) is well-known in the field of positive psychology, some scholars still cast doubt on the external validity of this finding and the strength of personality dimensions vis-à-vis other individual-level determinants of subjective well-being such as income, employment status, marital status, self-reported health, and so on. Using a nationally representative, face-to-face survey fielded in South Korea in 2009, we find that personality traits (measured by the Five-factor Model)—particularly, Emotional Stability and Extraversion—are positively associated with happiness and life satisfaction, after controlling for other covariates. The effects of personality traits are often on par with, and sometimes even greater than, those of other well-known determinants.     

Using Discrete-Time Event History Fertility Models to Simulate Total Fertility Rates and Other Fertility Measures

Event history models, also known as hazard models, are commonly used in analyses of fertility. One drawback of event history models is that the conditional probabilities (hazards) estimated by event history models do not readily translate into summary measures, particularly for models of repeatable events, like childbirth. In this paper, we describe how to translate the results of discrete-time event history models of all births into well-known summary fertility measures: simulated age- and parity-specific fertility rates, parity progression ratios, and the total fertility rate. The method incorporates all birth intervals, but permits the hazard functions to vary across parities. It can also simulate values for groups defined by both fixed and time-varying covariates, such as marital or employment life histories. We demonstrate the method using an example from the National Survey of Family Growth and provide an accompanying data file and Stata program.     

On the Measurement of Interpersonal Trust Transfer: Proposal of Indexes

This paper investigates the measurement of trust transfer in interpersonal contexts. Despite the importance of this topic, little evidence of comparable indicators exists to fill the current gap in knowledge regarding the measurement of interpersonal transference of trust and its reciprocal. We propose a modification of the classical structure of a widely accepted experimental setting for analyzing trust (i.e. a trust game) and build two indexes for the measurement of trust transfer and its reciprocation. Several properties of these indicators are investigated to examine their robustness and accuracy for measuring the transference of interpersonal trust. Furthermore, using data from our own modified trust game, we provide an empirical examination of both indexes. The results show that the existence of a mutually known third party fosters a stronger willingness to achieve cooperative behavior in an anonymous trust game; thus, the transference of interpersonal trust works in both directions of the dyad.