Habitus: beyond sociology

This paper presents a contribution of a set of interrelated innovative thinking to revitalize the sociological understanding of the notion of the habitus. It discusses contributions by sociologists exploring the sources of Bourdieu's inspiration from psychology and psychoanalysis to the development of the concept, and brings in new thinking inspired by authors and frameworks that branch out of sociology to bring into sociology fresher thinking. Three areas of concern about habitus are focused on: firstly, the objectivism and subjectivism dichotomy; secondly, the plasticity or rigidity of the concept; and thirdly, the implications of intangibles attached to the notion. The paper introduces a Special Section including five articles on theoretical and empirical explorations bringing exciting perspectives to creative and critical sociology.     

Log-Weibull extended regression model: Estimation,sensitivity and residual analysis

The failure rate function commonly has a bathtub shape in practice. In this paper we discuss a regression model considering new Weibull extended distribution developed by Xie et al. (2002) that can be used to model this type of failure rate function. Assuming censored data, we discuss parameter estimation: maximum likelihood method and a Bayesian approach where Gibbs algorithms along with Metropolis steps are used to obtain the posterior summaries of interest. We derive the appropriate matrices for assessing the local influence on the parameter estimates under different perturbation schemes, and we also present some ways to perform global influence. Also, some discussions on case deletion influence diagnostics are developed for the joint posterior distribution based on the Kullback–Leibler divergence. Besides, for different parameter settings, sample sizes and censoring percentages, are performed various simulations and display and compare the empirical distribution of the Martingale-type residual with the standard normal distribution. These studies suggest that the residual analysis usually performed in normal linear regression models can be straightforwardly extended to the martingale-type residual in log-Weibull extended models with censored data. Finally, we analyze a real data set under a log-Weibull extended regression model. We perform diagnostic analysis and model check based on the martingale-type residual to select an appropriate model.     

A WEIGHTED RANK MEASURE OF CORRELATION

Spearman's rank correlation coefficient is not entirely suitable for measuring the correlation between two rankings in some applications because it treats all ranks equally. In 2000, Blest proposed an alternative measure of correlation that gives more importance to higher ranks but has some drawbacks. This paper proposes a weighted rank measure of correlation that weights the distance between two ranks using a linear function of those ranks, giving more importance to higher ranks than lower ones. It analyses its distribution and provides a table of critical values to test whether a given value of the coefficient is significantly different from zero. The paper also summarizes a number of applications for which the new measure is more suitable than Spearman's.     

Convergence of long-term care planning and retirement planning at the work place

There is an increasing expectation that the private-sector should provide needed solutions to pressing problems in long-term care. Long-term care insurance has figured prominently in recent discussions. Within the long-term care insurance market, the potential of the employer in making such insurance available to employees has been discussed extensively. This paper traces the increasing convergence of retirement planning and long-term care planning at the work place. The long-term care insurance market has come a long way, and the employer-sponsored segment of the market has recorded the highest rate of growth in recent times. Furthermore, the employer-sponsored market is beginning to diversify. Low take-up rates still remain a problem. Recent rapid growth of the market coupled with the federal government's involvement as an employer offering long-term care insurance is bound to expand the market further.     

Wage dynamics and promotions inside and between firms

We focus on the dynamic relation between wage increases, promotions and job changes. In the empirical analyses, we use the Portuguese-matched employer–employee data Quadros de Pessoal. We find substantial wage returns to both promotions and job-to-job transitions. Our results are not consistent with models of full information and symmetric learning in a competitive and frictionless market. This might suggest that there is asymmetric information. An alternative explanation is that workers might search for a good match. Finally, we show that employer-reported promotions differ to a large extent from changes in hierarchical levels.     

Temporal disaggregation and restricted forecasting of multiple population time series

This article presents some applications of time-series procedures to solve two typical problems that arise when analyzing demographic information in developing countries: (1) unavailability of annual time series of population growth rates (PGRs) and their corresponding population time series and (2) inappropriately defined population growth goals in official population programs. These problems are considered as situations that require combining information of population time series. Firstly, we suggest the use of temporal disaggregation techniques to combine census data with vital statistics information in order to estimate annual PGRs. Secondly, we apply multiple restricted forecasting to combine the official targets on future PGRs with the disaggregated series. Then, we propose a mechanism to evaluate the compatibility of the demographic goals with the annual data. We apply the aforementioned procedures to data of the Mexico City Metropolitan Zone divided by concentric rings and conclude that the targets established in the official program are not feasible. Hence, we derive future PGRs that are both in line with the official targets and with the historical demographic behavior. We conclude that growth population programs should be based on this kind of analysis to be supported empirically. So, through specialized multivariate time-series techniques, we propose to obtain first an optimal estimate of a disaggregate vector of population time series and then, produce restricted forecasts in agreement with some data-based population policies here derived.     

Wage differentials within a female‐dominated occupation: Domestic workers in informal and flexible jobs in Portugal

The authors use an original cross‐sectional data set to examine the impact of informal and flexible contractual arrangements on the wages of domestic workers hired by private employers in Portugal. OLS estimations suggest that formality benefits workers, whether they have a stable or a flexible contract. However, social and labour market processes help to shape and maintain inequality, especially for migrant workers. Although skills are undervalued and do not generate rewards, higher wages are identified for workers who are engaged in contingent work, work for multiple employers or provide care for the elderly. However, such workers are still subject to exploitation and insecurity.     

An optimization approach applied to the optimal stratification problem

A new optimization algorithm is presented to solve the stratification problem. Assuming the number L of strata and the total sample size n are fixed, we obtain strata boundaries by using an objective function associated with the variance. In this problem, strata boundaries must be determined so that the elements in each stratum are more homogeneous among themselves. To produce more homogeneous strata, this paper proposes a new algorithm that uses the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) methodology. Computational results are presented for a set of problems, with the application of the new algorithm and some algorithms from literature.