Cohabitation and commitment: partnership plans of young men and women

Popular commentators on marriage and the family often interpret the increase in heterosexual couples living together without marrying as reduced willingness to create and honour life‐long partnerships. Survey and in‐depth interviews with samples of 20–29 year olds living in an urban area of Scotland finds little support for the postulated link between growing cohabitation and a weakened sense of commitment to long‐term arrangements. Most of the cohabiting couples strongly stressed their ‘commitment’. Socially acceptable vocabularies of motive undoubtedly influenced answers but interviews helped to explore deeper meanings. Many respondents’ views were consistent with previous research predictions of a weakening sense of any added value of marriage. At the same time, some respondents continued to stress the social significance of the distinction between marriage and cohabitation, consistent with research interpreting cohabitation as a ‘try and see’ strategy part‐way to the perceived full commitment of marriage. The notion that ‘marriage is better for children’ continued to have support among respondents. While, on average, cohabiting couples had lower incomes and poorer employment situations than married couples, only very extreme adverse circumstances were presented as making marriage ‘too risky’. Pregnancy‐provoked cohabitation was not always in this category. Cohabitation was maintained because marriage would ‘make no difference’ or because they ‘had not yet got round to’ marriage. Most respondents were more wary of attempting to schedule or plan in their personal life than in other domains and cohabitees’ attitudes to partnership, including their generally ‘committed’ approach, do not explain the known greater vulnerability of this group to dissolution.     

Frontier spaces of vulnerability: Regional change,urbanization, drought and fire hazard in Santarém,Pará, Brazil

Fire hazard is a mounting concern in tropical rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon and has raised awareness within the science community of the links between agricultural fire use, drought and accidental fire. As a result, fire is being addressed as a crisis event with mitigation focused on those who light fires, particularly smallholder agriculturalists. Little attention is paid to the historical and ongoing ways in which Amazon landscapes and peoples have been made more susceptible to fire. Frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon serve a variety of functions within the larger Brazilian society, including as extractive reserves for economic development, as social safety valves to reduce population pressures, and as areas to support urban regional integration. Each of these functions has impacted frontier environments in ways that create more flammable landscapes and/or shape the vulnerability of people to fire hazard. This paper uses a case study inthe Brazilian Lower Amazon to understand how vulnerability to fire hazard develops. It argues that if fire mitigation remains centered on fire as a crisis event, an understanding of what constitutes frontier spaces of vulnerability, both in landscape and in populations, will be limited.     

Frustration in Infancy: Implications for Emotion Regulation,Physiological Processes,and Temperament

A study sample of 162 six‐month‐old children was selected from a larger sample of 346 infants on the basis of parents' report of their infants' temperament and a laboratory assessment of temperament. Infants were classified as easily frustrated and less easily frustrated and compared on a number of emotion regulation, physiology, and temperament measures. Results indicated that male and female infants were equally likely to be classified as frustrated and less easily frustrated; however, male infants were less able to regulate physiologically. Easily frustrated infants used different emotion regulation strategies and were observed to be less attentive and more active than less easily frustrated infants when observed in the laboratory. These infants were also characterized by their parents as more active, less attentive, and more distressed to novelty. Infants classified as easily frustrated were more reactive physiologically and less able to regulate physiological reactivity than their less easily frustrated counterparts. It is hypothesized that this cluster of characteristics may constitute a unique temperamental type that may have implications for other types of behavioral functioning. Limitations of the study are that observations are based on a single brief assessment of the infant, modest effect sizes were found, and the study is cross‐sectional.     

Worlds come apart: Systems theory versus critical theory. Drama in the history of sociology in the twentieth century

This article places an episode in the history of sociological theory into intellectual history in the twentieth century. The perspective is chronological as well as contextual. The themes are two theoretical approaches, both embedded in both American and German history, Parsonian Systems Theory and “Frankfurt School” Critical Theory. The chronology shown spanned mainly from the 1940s to the 1960s. The context of the two theories is a period that is crucial in twentieth century history. The protagonists of the two approaches were, in the 1940s, Americans and Germans exiled in the United States. In the 1950s, both approaches were affected by McCarthyism in different ways. The 1960s, however, were the culmination. The dynamics of the two approaches led into a schism which came into the open on the occasion of the 1964 German Sociology Conference in Heidelberg celebrating Max Weber. The article shows the stages in the evolution of the schism, emulating three acts in a drama. The final split was over whether Weber or Marx should be the classic whose oeuvre was to influence sociological thinking today. My aim is to exemplify how these two authoritative approaches in sociological theory, far from escaping the vagaries and vicissitudes of their times, were embedded in twentieth-century history.     

Partial strikes under the railway labor act: The need for a doctrine of unprotected concerted activity

In light of use by airline unions of partial-strike tactics, such as concerted refusals to bid for overtime work and so-called ” CHAOS” tactics involving unannounced refusals to fly after passengers have been ticketed and are ready to board, the authors examine whether the Railway Labor Act (RLA) should be interpreted to permit employers to discipline employees for engaging in such tactics, or whether these are a protected form of economic pressure. Although in many respects bargaining duties and economic weapons under the RLA are read consonant with precedents under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) (which governs all industries other than rail and air transport), there are a few decisions suggesting that during the period when self-help may be resorted to, employees can engage in partial strike activities as long as they violate no court order but are subject to permanent replacement in limited circumstances. These decisions, the authors submit, fail to take account of Supreme Court decsions since the 1930s that some economic pressures by unions, such as slowdowns and sitins, may not violate the labor laws but nor are they protected by those laws so as to immunize partial strikers from employer discipline. These decisions are not based on unique features of the NLRA. Rather, they give recognition to the background assumptions of Congress that employers may act to protect their property interests as long as they do not run afoul of NLRA or RLA protections and that employees who engage in partial-strike activities are subject to employer discipline even where not strictly necessary to maintain operations. Moreover, these tactics skew the bargaining process by giving employees an essentially risk-free gambit to pressure their economic position through planned disruption of carrier operations. Professor Estreicher is also labor and employment counsel to O’Melveny & Myers, LLP. The views expressed herein are the authors’ and should not be attributed to any organization. Hannah Breshin and Tom Jerman of O’Melveny & Myers, assisted the authors with this article. We also thank Professor Herbert Northrup for his helpful comments.     

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Editorial