From shortage to longage: Forty years in the population vineyards

By popular demand, Dr. Hardin has the last word. Ed.     

Moving teenagers out of high-risk neighborhoods: how girls fare better than boys

Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several years later, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures of risk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls in the experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than control group girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing data from in-depth interviews conducted with 86 teens in Baltimore and Chicago. They find that daily routines, fitting in with neighborhood norms, neighborhood navigation strategies, interactions with peers, friendship making, and distance from father figures may contribute to how girls who moved via MTO benefited more than boys.     

Review Essay:Analyzing Slavery and the Slave Narrative

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, by Ira Berlin. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation, edited by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller.     

Domestic Division of Labor and Self/Organizationally Employed Differences in Job Attitudes and Earnings

This study analyzes the association between self-employment and work-related outcomes including negative spillover between work and home, earnings, and job attitudes. National Study of the Changing Work Force 1997 data support the idea that self-employment provides workers with more scope for matching work activities to their presumed roles in the domestic division of labor. Among married women, the self-employed experience is associated with less negative spillover from job-to-home, greater job satisfaction, and less job burnout. Where pre-school children are present, the earnings of self-employed women are much less than the earnings of the organizationally employed. Among men, self-employment is associated with more job-to-home spillover when there are small children in the family, and with greater job satisfaction.     

Power play: the use of space to control and signify power in the workplace

ABSTRACT

The findings of this article emerge from an eight-month study examining career identity practices amongst a select group of fitness professionals in the U.K. We examine how the inter-relationship between physical and social space can denote how power is acquired, displayed, and used by individuals interacting in a shared space. The findings show that power is signified through spatial practices as individuals negotiate through triadic space, creating an identity of space and place for both trainer and client that identifies power, and signifies who has power. Fitness professionals with high levels of symbolic power are able to subvert organizational spatial norms to better serve themselves and their clients, while those with lower levels of symbolic power are forced to, or choose to, negotiate or abdicate space to others. These findings are relevant to a wide range of occupations where self-employment and contract workers interact in shared space.     

Estimation of relative risk for events on a linear network

Motivated by the study of traffic accidents on a road network, we discuss the estimation of the relative risk, the ratio of rates of occurrence of different types of events occurring on a network of lines. Methods developed for two-dimensional spatial point patterns can be adapted to a linear network, but their requirements and performance are very different on a network. Computation is slow and we introduce new techniques to accelerate it. Intensities (occurrence rates) are estimated by kernel smoothing using the heat kernel on the network. The main methodological problem is bandwidth selection. Binary regression methods, such as likelihood cross-validation and least squares cross-validation, perform tolerably well in our simulation experiments, but the Kelsall–Diggle density-ratio cross-validation method does not. We find a theoretical explanation, and propose a modification of the Kelsall–Diggle method which has better performance. The methods are applied to traffic accidents in a regional city, and to protrusions on the dendritic tree of a neuron.

     

Networks,case managers,and the job-search experiences of unemployed people

Employment services are commonly provided in network settings, but it is rare to find social policy analyses of how unemployed people search for jobs through networks. In a germinal analysis of social networks and employment, Mark Granovetter argued that “weak ties” (less familiar contacts) are more important to finding employment than are “strong ties” (family and friends). This is because weak ties provide more novel job-relevant information. Scholarship since Granovetter has predominantly supported the opposite argument, namely, that strong ties are more important for the unemployed, because they are more plentiful and thus provide more information in aggregate. Findings are also generally coloured by the focus being on “informal” networks or personal contacts. “Formal” networks, as represented most cogently by employment service providers, are absent or underestimated in most social network studies. On the basis of a qualitative study of 80 long-term unemployed people in Australia, incorporating analysis of both informal and formal networks, we argue that although “strong informal” ties are vital to job search, it is also important to consider “weak formal” ties, which can be complementary if and where service organizations are able to supply positive case management experiences.     

Who joins unions in the public sector? The effects of individual characteristics and the law

Analysis of a large micro-data set shows that state public-sector bargaining laws significantly influence state and local government union membership in several ways. Membership probability is lowest where a right-to-work law is present; it is greatest when there are mandatory agency shop provisions. Compulsory arbitration leads to a significantly greater probability of membership than does the right-to-strike. Simulations based on model estimates indicate that policy changes along the lines of proposed national public bargaining laws could lead to major changes in public-sector union density. Among individual and demographic characteristics, membership probability is significantly affected by full-time/part-time status and the statewide extent of private-sector unionism. Although non-whites and males are more likely to be union members, race and gender membership differentials are shown to be relatively small. The author thanks Jack Fiorito, Paul Jarley, Joe Stone, and Rob Valletta for their helpful comments. Any remaining errors are his sole responsibility.