‘We were fighting for our place’: Resisting gender knowledge regimes through feminist knowledge network formation

The transformative potential of feminist knowledge in the disciplines of entrepreneurship, business and management has arguably been hindered by persistent gender knowledge regimes that marginalize feminist scholarship and channel widely applicable gender expertise into niche streams, conferences and publication outlets. Whilst offering valuable spaces for feminist knowledge production, removing gender expertise from mainstream fora reduces its centrality to broader debates, maintaining its marginality and limiting its impact. Taking a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we explore the formation and development of a UK‐based organization for feminist entrepreneurship scholars, the Gender and Enterprise Network, as a means of collective resistance to this perpetuation of enforced marginality. Our network challenges extant gender knowledge regimes and offers transformative opportunities within and outside of our respective organizations, providing insights for others wishing to form similar networks and contributing to ongoing debates on the value and valuing of feminist knowledge.     

Current Publications Received

The Economics Across the Curriculum approach encourages the integration of economic concepts into various disciplines. This article features the essence of the approach built on best practices described in the literature. Several creative lesson ideas for teaching about money and inflation are showcased. These lessons were field-tested by high school teachers in algebra, American history, and Spanish language classes. The goal is to inspire teachers to try these ideas in their classrooms. Any subject area can be a fruitful ground for the infusion of some economic concepts and making lessons engaging and meaningful for students.     

“I don’t want to be selling my soul”: Two experiments in environmental economics

We conducted two experiments in the context of environmental protection. We found that profit considerations and personality traits are among the essential determinants of individual contributions to the solution of environmental problems. The results show that environmental considerations are powerful motivators and subjects are willing to forgo pecuniary profits for the sake of “doing-the-right-thing”. The study shows that the environmental groups can purchase carbon offsets directly from the providers at a lower-than market price and still obtain a relatively large market share.     

How the Risk of Displacement for Older Workers Has Changed

Using Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition and relying on the consistent design of the Displaced Worker Survey since 1996, this study analyses various factors contributing to the rising dislocation of older workers, such as changes in tenure, industry mix, educational attainment, and labor force participation. Although in the past older workers were less prone to displacement compared with prime‐age workers, this paper finds that older workers are now more likely to be displaced, conditional on education, manufacturing industry, and tenure. Declining tenure, a higher incidence of displacement in manufacturing, and a higher labor force participation among older workers largely explain the convergence of displacement rates among older and prime‐age workers.     

Are Baby Boomers Richer Than Their Parents? Intergenerational Patterns of Wealth Ownership in the United States

This study compares wealth ownership and mobility patterns among baby boomers and their parents to explore whether the baby boomers have fared as well during their working years and whether they will be as secure in retirement as their parents. Cohort comparisons using survey data indicate that baby boomers had accumulated more wealth as young adults than their parents had at a similar age. Estimates from a simulation model reveal that baby boomers had more wealth than their actual same‐sex parents at every stage of the life course. The simulation model also reveals that baby boomers were considerably more likely than their actual same‐sex parents to experience upward wealth mobility at each point in the life course. These results suggest that speculations that baby boomers may be the first generation to do worse than their parents are misleading.     

The quest for a general theory of aging and longevity

Extensive studies of phenomena related to aging have produced many diverse findings, which require a general theoretical framework to be organized into a comprehensive body of knowledge. As demonstrated by the success of evolutionary theories of aging, quite general theoretical considerations can be very useful when applied to research on aging. In this theoretical study, we attempt to gain insight into aging by applying a general theory of systems failure known as reliability theory. Considerations of this theory lead to the following conclusions: (i) Redundancy is a concept of crucial importance for understanding aging, particularly the systemic nature of aging. Systems that are redundant in numbers of irreplaceable elements deteriorate (that is, age) over time, even if they are built of elements that do not themselves age. (ii) An apparent aging rate or expression of aging is higher for systems that have higher levels of redundancy. (iii) Redundancy exhaustion over the life course explains a number of observations about mortality, including mortality convergence at later life (when death rates are becoming relatively similar at advanced ages for different populations of the same species) as well as late-life mortality deceleration, leveling off, and mortality plateaus. (iv) Living organisms apparently contain a high load of initial damage from the early stages of development, and therefore their life span and aging patterns may be sensitive to early-life conditions that determine this initial damage load. Thus, the reliability theory provides a parsimonious explanation for many important aging-related phenomena and suggests a number of interesting testable predictions. We therefore suggest adding the reliability theory to the arsenal of methodological approaches applied to research on aging.     

Boosting the input: 9-month-olds’ sensitivity to low-frequency phonotactic patterns in novel wordforms

To learn their first words, infants must attend to a variety of cues that signal word boundaries. One such cue infants might use is the language-specific phonotactics to track legal combinations and positions of segments within a word. Studies have demonstrated that, when tested across statistically high and low phonotactics, infants repeatedly reject the low-frequency wordforms. We explore whether the capacity to access low-frequency phonotactic combinations is available at 9 months when pre-exposed to wordforms containing statistically low combinations of segments. Using a modified head-turn procedure, one group of infants was presented with nonwords with low-frequency complex onsets (dr-), and another group was presented with zero-frequency onset nonwords (dl-). Following pre-exposure and familiarization, infants were then tested on their ability to segment nonwords that contained either the low- or the zero-frequency onsets. Only infants in the low-frequency condition were successful at the task, suggesting some experience with these onsets supports segmentation.