Subjective Well-Being, Income and Relative Concerns in the UK

We present an empirical model aimed at testing the relative income hypothesis and the effect of deprivation relative to mean income on subjective well-being. The main concern is to deal with subjective panel data in an ordered response model where error homoskedasticity is not assumed. A heteroskedastic pooled panel ordered probit model with unobserved individual-specific effects is applied to micro-data available in the British Household Panel Survey for 1996–2007. In this framework, absolute income impacts negatively on both completely satisfied and dissatisfied individuals, while relative income affects positively the most satisfied ones. Such an effect is asymmetric, impacting more severely on the relatively poor in the reference group. We argue that our results buttress the validity of the relative income hypothesis as an explanation of the happiness paradox.     

Small Is Beautiful? Emerging Organizational Strategies among Italian Professionals

The traditional debate about professional groups has mainly focused on conflicts between professions and organizations, reinforcing dualisms and dichotomies. Few scholars have investigated the extent to which professionalism and organizations are intertwined while focusing on the case of professionals integrated into large organizations, and even less attention has been paid to emerging forms of organization among self‐employed professionals. Taking as an example organizational trends among architects (liberal professionals) and management consultants (emerging professionals) in Italy, this article investigates how small, flexible, and (often) interprofessional organizations promoted by self‐employed professionals are increasingly instrumental in overcoming market pressures and responding to emerging social needs in times of crisis and austerity.     

Petropolis: a social history of urban animal companions

This essay provides an overview of the argument and scope of an exhibition, “Petropolis: A Social History of Urban Animal Companions” (15 July to 9 November 2003), curated by the authors for the New-York Historical Society. The visual history of pets in New York City from the 18th century to the present reveals a great deal about the changing relationships between humans and animals as the city became increasingly urbanized and industrialized and as the city came to have its dramatic mix of people drawn from many races, ethnicities and social classes. The exhibition shows a remarkable diversity of animals participating in domestic and in public city life, proving that the social history of New York City really cannot be told without including companion animals as actors and objects in that history.     

LITTLE BROTHER BREAKS THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT

In 1976 Antonio Negri wrote an introduction to the Italian translation of Jerry Rubin's Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven, the book that followed his iconic Yippie manifesto ‘Do it’ (Fallo! In Italian). Out of print for some time, the former (with Negri's introduction) was reprinted in 2009. Negri appears to be interested in the transformation of a culture that had flourished with the Yippies, advocating, and coagulating into, new forms of actions, notions of labour, sexuality and production of subjectivity through technological resistance (online and offline hacking), and later morphed into those young upwardly-mobile professionals known as Yuppies. What is the Italian equivalent of the American Yippies? Many participants in the Movement of 77 like the Metropolitan Indians engaged in a myriad of small illegalities quite similar to those technically described in Yippie newsletters (offline hacks). The new publication of this book, along with Negri's introduction, does not come as a surprise. In fact, it appears to establish a connection between those early years of struggles and social unrest and the global identity and political molecularization and dissipation that characterizes the later years. This text is comprised of two parts: the first is a translation of Negri's introduction to Rubin's book. The second critically examines that introduction, relocating it into the semiocapitalist context described by Franco Berardi (Bifo). We believe that this operation helps identify continuities between the underground movements that swept Italy in the mid-1970s, the rise and fall of the Yippies, and a number of dynamics that characterize today's social and political articulations. In particular, Negri's apparent interest in the Yippies and their transient passage tightening up a number of elements that characterize the current hybrid status of labour, the dispersed multiplicity of the political, and the formation of heterogeneous alliances among unlikely bedfellows. Finally, rereading Negri's Introduction allows us to reassess the relationship between himself and Bifo.     

‘Who is in Your Family?’ Italian Children with Non‐heterosexual Parents Talk about Growing Up in a Non‐conventional Household

The paper presents findings from explorative research conducted in Italy with seven 9‐ to 12‐year‐old children with non‐heterosexual parents. The aim was to find out how children describe their family structure, how they talk about their family with peers, and how they experience peers' attitudes towards non‐heterosexual families. Findings show that children have a flexible and inclusive representation of family and they disclose selectively with their peers who don't always consider homosexuality normal and homoparental families ‘real families’. The paper concludes by suggesting that institutional recognition for same‐sex parenting would support children in the everyday work of negotiating diversity.     

Participation of non-dominant students in argumentation in the mathematics classroom

This article focuses on argumentation in mathematics classrooms in two different geographic contexts, the US and New Zealand. Drawing on data from a case with immigrant students (Pāsifika) in NZ and a case with Mexican American students in the US, we argue for the need to study the concept of argumentation through a cultural and language lens. Our analysis across the two cases points to common features that supported students’ engagement in argumentation. Building relationships and encouraging and supporting students to be themselves are seen as resources for argumentation. The similarities across two very different contexts are striking. As we think of how to develop environments that support non-dominant students’ participation in mathematical argumentation, we may want to learn from and build on students’ cultural ways of being.     

Parents on the job market: Resources and strategies that help sociologists attain tenure-track jobs

Do women and men who have children during gradute school have access to the same institutional resources as non-parents? In the face of two gredy institutions, the academy and parenthood (especially motherhood), do they employ the same sorts of strategies in their quest to attain tenure-track jobs, and are those strategies successful? In this study we use a longitudinal survey of sociology Ph.D.s to investigate the availability and use of three types of resources and strategies during graduate school, and find that they all have important effects on the chances of obtaining a tenure-track position at a research or doctoral university. We find that someinstitutional resources are not equallydistributed in graduate school, with mother's least likely to obtain them, but are significant for attainment of tenure-track positions.Resource-based strategies, including presenting papers and publishing articles while in graduate school, have a positive and significant effect on all groups' attainment of tenure-track positions.Family-based strategies such as child-spacing strategies are also significant; women who have children during graduate school have lower odds of immediately obtaining tenure-track jobs at research and doctoral universities, although access to resources and the ability to use these resources helps significantly.