The declining significance of race among American men during The latter half of the twentieth century

The extent to which racial minority groups face discrimination in the labor market is the subject of considerable debate. Using William J. Wilson's thesis of the declining significance of race as our theoretical context, we provide further empirical evidence about labor market discrimination by investigating wages among African American, American Indian, Chinese American, Hispanic white, Japanese American, and non-Hispanic white men. We find, during the period before the civil rights movement, that a substantively significant wage disadvantage is evident for these minority groups with controls for observed labor force characteristics. In recent data, these net disadvantages are reduced substantially for each of these groups except Hispanics. With the exception of Hispanics, the results support Wilson's thesis.     

Implemented as intended? Recording family worker activities in a Families First program

In evaluating family preservation services, it is important not only to study the service outcomes and the family characteristics, but also what actually happens during the treatment. This requires a program model. This article describes how a program model works, prescribes how workers should carry it out, and describes how researchers should measure the program's characteristics. The authors use data from Families First in The Netherlands to test the model. Results show that the method of the program meets the specified characteristics. The results are important for treatment, policy, education, and evaluation research.     

Cultivate your core competencies

Your core competencies make you much more valuable to your organization. Find out ways to nurture and promote those competencies.     

Determinants of Perceived Interfirm Dependence in Industrial Supplier Relations

Studies of industrial buyer-supplier relations mostly focus on structural characteristics of the transactions between parties, and assume a direct relation between these factors and characteristics of the relationships. This paper focuses on the psychological dimension of transaction relations, reflected in perceptions of dependence, from the perspective of an industrial supplier. In the first step of the analysis, three groups of structural determinants of perceived supplier dependence are explored: factors related to goal mediation, factors related to relation-specific assets, and factors related to network embeddedness. After that, the influence of these structural factors and of perceived supplier dependence on the ordering of buyer-supplier relations is investigated. Data come from a study of the micro-electronics assembly industry in the Netherlands. The findings show that sales to a particular buyer as a percentage of the total sales of the supplier and the growth of sales to a particular buyer (two forms of goal mediation) are important determinants of perceived supplier dependence. Human asset specificity is also related to perceived supplier dependence. Network embeddedness variables play only a minor role in explaining perceived supplier and buyer dependence in this study. The data further show that perceived dependence has an effect on the degree of ordering in the relationship, next to structural factors like the extendedness of the relationship beyond the focal transaction and physical asset specificity. The effects of human asset specificity and dedicated assets on ordering are contrary to what was expected on the basis of the literature.     

Natural Change in the Environment: A Challenge to the Pressure-State-Response Concept

The pressure-state-response framework is a powerful approach to environmental assessment. In many of its current expressions, however, it ignores the background natural processes that play a major role in determining environmental and ecosystem health. Clearly, policies must be focused on human actions that scar the landscape and harm the environment, but coping with environmental change also requires an assessment of the natural processes that take place whether or not human influences are at work. A newly-developed class of environmental indicators (geoindicators), presented here in brief, may be helpful in understanding the interaction of human and natural processes and impacts. Explicit recognition of the need to include natural conditions in the indicator system is essential in the transition from environmental reporting to sustainability reporting.     

Adolescent Immigrants in Search of Identity: Clingers, Eradicators, Vacillators and Integrators

This conceptual article explores mechanisms used by adolescent immigrants from the former Soviet Union to cope with issues of identity. Based on her experience in the Russian Adolescents Project of the Jewish Board of Services for Families and Children in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn New York, the writer identifies four patterns of coping with identity issues among immigrant adolescents and discusses individual and social factors that impact on the choice of a coping pattern.