Origins and destinies: Immigration to the United States since World War II

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Today's immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an hourglass economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversity. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in—and consequences for—American society are considered.     

Composition-consistent tournament solutions and social choice functions

This paper introduces a new axiom for choice in preference profiles and tournaments, called composition-consistency. A social choice function is composition-consistent if it is non-sensitive to the cloning of one or several outcomes. The key feature of the composition consistency property is an operation concept called multiple composition product of profiles. The paper provides a brief overview of some social choice functions studied in the literature. Concerning the tournament solutions, it is proved that the Top Cycle, the Slater and the Copeland solutions are not composition-consistent, whereas the Banks, Uncovered Set, TEQ, Minimal Covering Set are composition-consistent. Moreover, we define the composition-consistent hull of a solution as the smallest composition-consistent solution containing . The composition-consistent hulls of the Top cycle and Copeland solutions are specified, and we give some hints about the location of the hull of the Slater set. Concerning social choice functions, it is shown that Kemeny, Borda and Minimax social choice functions are not composition-consistent, whereas the Paretian one is composition-consistent. Moreover, we prove that the latter is the composition-consistent hull of the Borda and Minimax functions.     

Going to Pieces: Paul Monette and the Fragments of the Tribe

Author of the highly acclaimed Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and winner of the 1992 National Book Award for his autobiography Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette died of complications from AIDS in Los Angeles on February 12, 1995. His most recent work, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994), is his third volume in a trilogy of autobiographical writing on growing up gay, coming-out, and living with AIDS. A graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale University, Monette received a number of awards for his writing and his work as an outspoken voice in the battle against AIDS, including the National Book Award, three Lambda Literary awards, the PEN Center West Freedom to Write Award, and three honorary doctorate degrees, from Wesleyan University, the City University of New York, and the State University of New York at Oswego. A memorial service was held for Monette on Sunday, February 19, 1995, at the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Paul Monette was 49.     

International and internal migration decision making: a value-expectancy based analytical framework of intentions to move from a rural Philippine province

"The study compares determinants of internal and international migration intentions, drawing upon interview data from a sample of adults in Ilocos Norte, a largely rural province in the Philippines. A regression model is applied to test the relative determinants of intentions to migrate to Manila and to Hawaii. The study is based on a value-expectancy model of migration decision making. The results document the importance of subjective expectations related to the attainment of different values and goals in Manila and Hawaii."     

Changes in the social definition of early childhood and the new forms of symbolic violence

Conclusion The nursery school may be considered an institution and a market where the habits produced by the family are moulded, developed and standardized; thus, it is confronted with an objective definition of early childhood embedded in pedagogical practices. The proper objective of a sociology of nursery-school practice is the analysis of the lag between the functions delegated to the school by the different social classes and the functions which it objectively tends to fulfill. Here we have the best test of the lag between the pedagogic demands of the different classes and what the schools supply-which is very abstract, with results that are only visible at a later stage in the school career. It is not so much a question of learning to read or of preparing to do so (the acquisition of certain logical operations or a developed sensitivity, of acquiring a few I.Q. points). This learning takes place through many varied activities which apppear to be far from the learning function.All told, the conditions for understanding nursery-school exercises flow from the conditions for inventing these exercises. For instance, in games of manipulation, construction, classifying various objects, is not some knowledge of Piaget (at least in the sense of some psychologikal knowledge) needed to understand that practical manipulation is also logical manipulation, to see in cube games the learning of logic? Similarly, the language naïveté cultivated in language games is a clever naïveté, which supposes for example a cultured re-discovery of popular archaic language or of child talk. p ]Is it not likely to appear as pure childishness to those who, without the ncessary cultural knowledge, do not have the keys to decipher these ostensibly naïve exercises? Similarly, the conditions for understanding children's drawings as artistic learning (and the nursery school as an educational institution) are the very conditions for understanding modern art as art.It is not just a matter of perception and understanding; as the objective definition of early childhood proper to the different social classes becomes pervasive both in the relationship with school and in the socialization practices of the family, it patterns the children's habitus (as long-lasting internalized dispositions), which in turn influence the child's behavior and attitude towards school.The perception categories and the different forms of treatment of young children appropriate to each social class are not simply the result of the diffusion of definitions of early childhood produced by the autonomous evolution of scientific and artistic disciplines. They are the products of all the social and cultural conditions which define the class situation. We may also wonder whether at least some pedagogy and certain types of exercises do not presume that the child has socially marked attitudes, produced in some classes by family inculcation. For instance, a general attitude of disinterested interest is required by a pedagogy offering multiple activities and open to an attitude of active research and exploration. Does not this attitude suppose as an existential possibility the condition of social classes protected from economic pressure and from the urgency of immediate life, a general attitude towards life nearer to leisure than to the constraints of work?Thus, in confronting supply with demand—here even less than elsewhere-there is no question of comparing the expectations arising from users' opinions with the program offered in the official definition of the institution. The expectations are those which arise from objective determinations inherent in each social group, the forms of treatment and perception of early childhood. To analyze the program-and therefore to ascertain the social conditions governing the use of the nursery school—the dominant definition of early childhood on which the institution is founded must be brought to light. Moreover, the way in which this definition is written into the curriculum (and, subsequently, into pedagogical practice) must also be studied. This implies that the preliminary condition for a sociological analysis of the functions performed by the nursery school for the different social classes would be an analysis of a) the components of this dominant definition of early childhood and b) of the social conditions in those groups which make it possible to identify these components.We wish to thank P. Bourdieu for his advice during our research. R. Collins provided useful suggestions after reading the first version of this paper.     

Sensitivity of the Optimum to Perturbations of the Profit or Weight of an Item in the Binary Knapsack Problem

In the binary single constraint Knapsack Problem, denoted KP, we are given a knapsack of fixed capacity c and a set of n items. Each item j, j = 1,...,n, has an associated size or weight w_j and a profit p_j. The goal is to determine whether or not item j, j = 1,...,n, should be included in the knapsack. The objective is to maximize the total profit without exceeding the capacity c of the knapsack. In this paper, we study the sensitivity of the optimum of the KP to perturbations of either the profit or the weight of an item. We give approximate and exact interval limits for both cases (profit and weight) and propose several polynomial time algorithms able to reach these interval limits. The performance of the proposed algorithms are evaluated on a large number of problem instances.     

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Dual Career Couples als eine Variante von Work-Life-Integration

Dual Career Couples as a form of work-life-integrationThe author discusses the situation of dual career couples, when both are university graduates following an own career. Basing on a respective publication she delineates the current, mostly American research and reports on several German research projects, which endeavour to analyse the relation between gender and inequality in dual career couples.