Migration Narratives: Expanding Methods to Examine the Interaction of Person and Environment Among Aging Gay Men

As they age, gay and bisexual men are embedded in multiple environments and communities. This article reanalyzes data collected as part of a larger qualitative study of crystal methamphetamine use in New York City. Focusing on the migration narratives of 30 racially/ethnically diverse men, age 40 years old and older, recruited from multiple venues several key areas emerged: ostracization, lack of affirmation as well as movement activities. Interactively they transformed social practices and increased spaces to explore sexuality, build community engagements and exchange resources. This study suggests that assessment of gay men (and other marginalized groups) may be enhanced through application of migration narratives.     

The cultural currency of a 'good' sense of humour: British comedy and new forms of distinction

Traditionally considered lowbrow art par excellence, British comedy has grown steadily in legitimacy since the 'Alternative Comedy Movement' of the early 1980s. Yet while there might be evidence of a transformation in British comic production, there is little understanding of how this has been reflected in patterns of consumption. Indeed, there is a remarkable absence of studies probing comedy taste in British cultural sociology, most notably in Bennett et al's (2009) recent and otherwise exhaustive mapping of cultural taste and participation. This paper aims to plug this gap in the literature by examining contemporary comedy taste cultures in Britain. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it argues that comedy now represents an emerging field for the culturally privileged to activate their cultural capital resources. However, unlike previous studies on cultural capital and taste, this research finds that field-specific 'comic cultural capital' is mobilized less through taste for certain legitimate 'objects' of comedy and more through the expression of rarefied and somewhat 'disinterested'styles of comic appreciation. In short, it is 'embodied' rather than 'objectified' forms of cultural capital that largely distinguish the privileged in the field of comedy.     

Pay-as-you-go social security in a changing environment

In this paper, we examine the optimal pay-as-you-go social security scheme which reallocates resources across generations in a changing environment, that is, with fluctuations in population growth rates and in productivity levels. We use an overlapping generations model along with a social welfare function consisting of the sum of generational utilities either unweighted or weighted by population size and a discount factor. We show how intergenerational resource sharing can be used to improve social welfare even though the extent of intergenerational redistribution is hampered by payroll tax deadweight losses in the spirit of the optimal taxation literature. Also it appears that resource sharing is much more restricted in a closed economy that in an open economy, which is not subject to a national resource constraint at each period of time. This paper was presented at the 1990 ISPE-Conference on the Fiscal Implications of an Ageing Population, Vaalsbroek Castle, Netherlands. The authors wish to thank the participants and particularly B. van Praag and W. Peters for their comments. They also thank the two referees and Philippe Michel for very helpful comments and discussions. The financial support of CIM during his sabbatical year is greatly acknowledged by the second author.     

On the underestimation of migration’s income and poverty impact

In estimating the impact of migration on income and poverty, most existing studies have overlooked the fact that migration changes the size of the household. The ‘corrected’ impact that accounts for changes in household size is presented analytically and is estimated on the basis of data from nationally representative household surveys in Albania and Ghana. The analysis considers three poverty measures and four groups of migrant households: those with internal, international, internal and international, and internal and/or international migrants. The ratio of the corrected to the uncorrected impact on per capita income for Ghana (Albania) averages from 2.7 to 4.5 (2.5–3.8), and the ratio for the poverty impact averages from 2.6 to 4.4 (2.1–6.4). Thus, abstracting from changes in household size may result in a substantial underestimate of the impact of migration on income and poverty.

Exploration of Racial Enactments in an Interracial Therapeutic Dyad to Foster the Strengthening of Voice and Identity in African American Male Adolescents

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of systemic racism on an interracial therapeutic dyad between a white therapist and an African American adolescent male. Leary (2000 Leary, K. (2000). Racial enactments in dynamic treatment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4), 639–653. doi:10.1080/10481881009348573[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) operationalized the term “racial enactments” and made the important point that its “most common” manifestation “has been our relative silence about racial issues” (p. 647). It is the premise of this paper that the youth of color’s subjective experience of racial microaggressions and assaults experienced on a daily basis must be validated and explored prior to a meaningful intersubjective exploration in the clinical encounter. The emphasis in this paper is on the racial enactment that precedes the clinical encounter. A treatment vignette is used to highlight the intersection of social and psychic spheres of human experience and how an awareness of unconscious bias in the therapist can facilitate a more meaningful dialogue in which priority is given to the emergence of a powerful client narrative voice.     

The Work Profiler: Revision and maintenance of a profiling tool for the recently unemployed in the Netherlands

For the public employment services of many Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the importance of using profiling tools for job seekers is increasing rapidly in importance. With this trend, there is also widening concern about the risks of an over reliance on such tools. Part of the concern lies with a lack of transparency concerning how such tools work. This article aims to address this by offering a detailed investigation of the Work Profiler – the instrument used in the Netherlands by the Institute for Employee Benefits (Uitvoeringsinstituut Werknemersverzekeringen – UWV) to predict re-employment success and provide a diagnosis of key factors hindering job seekers’ return to work. Professionals use these insights to deepen their understanding of the situation of job seekers and decide together with job seekers how to support their return to work. UWV decided to maintain and revise the Work Profiler through a large-scale study involving a sample of 53,238 people. Work Profiler 1.0 was developed in 2007–2010 and has been in use on a regional basis since 2011 and nationwide since 2015. This article explains how the new tool (version 2.0; implemented in 2018) works and, most importantly, demonstrates the choices made to ensure that it functions well and is used effectively by professionals. These latter two aspects are rarely discussed in the literature.