Examining the relationship between commuting patterns,employment growth and unemployment in the NSW Greater Metropolitan Region

This paper employs the Labour Market Accounts framework to explore how employment growth and commuting patterns interacted to determine changes in the spatial distribution of unemployment in Statistical Local Areas within the NSW GMR over the period 1996–2001. Separate regression models (including control variables) for men and women provide estimates of the relative strength of the relationships between these labour market adjustment responses and the percentage local employment change. The results show that employment growth between 1996 and 2001 has elicited substantial changes in commuting behaviour. Men reveal greater in‐commuting and migration responsiveness to employment growth. Unemployment changes in local areas of the Greater Metropolitan Sydney region have been swamped by commuting responses, potentially posing problems for locally targeted employment strategies.     

Markets,contingency and preferences: contemporary managers’ narrative identities1

We explore work identity amongst managers, a key group in the ‘new’ capitalism. Some existing accounts of such workplace identities emphasize new ‘cultures of control’, others focus on new requirements and possibilities of individual autonomy through reflective identity formation, while others identify a crisis in workplace identity formation. Focusing on these issues, we analyse the career narratives of 136 managers and show that our empirical data do not neatly fit any existing models. Managers’ career stories were dominated by a ‘market’ narrative, in which they placed themselves as strategic actors making choices in a social world constituted by market‐like interactions. We show that the market narrative frames how managers understand risks to their careers arising from the contingent actions of firms, and how it provides a space for managers to reflectively identify their preferences and pleasures. We consider the consequences of this analysis for contemporary understandings of work and identity.     

The Victorian Ethical Foundations of Social Work in England--Continuity and Contradiction

Correspondence to Bill Forsythe, Dean of Academic Partnerships, 261, Northcote House, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QJ, UK. E-mail: W.J.Forsythe{at}exeter.ac.uk Summary In this article we argue that during the Victorian era certainethical foundations of best practice were identified and werecentral to the work of particular individuals. We also arguethat there was a strongly discriminatory moralistic basis tosocial policy and mainstream charitable intervention that militatedagainst these ethical foundations. We suggest that this contradictionis replicated in New Labour's ‘Third Way’ and thatwe need to heed the tradition of social inclusion espoused bysome of the Victorian practitioners discussed if we genuinelymean to put into practice the ideas of social worth and communityespoused by New Labour rather than return to the Victorian distinctionbetween the ‘respectable’ or ‘deserving’poor and the ‘pauper’.     

Public Documents and Legislation: The South Australian Juvenile Courts Act, 1971, and Community Welfare Act, 1972

Abstract

This study of social work practice and disability follows the history of two fields of disability: mental illness and intellectual disability. Of particular interest are two key policy influences in the disability sector, deinstitutionalisation and normalisation. The extent to which deinstitutionalisation and normalisation have brought real benefit to people with disabilities is examined from social workers' perspectives. The implementation of these policies and practices on the daily work of social workers is discussed. This research indicates that social work practice in these two fields involves significantly different foci and approach. The study found that the similarities and differences between the two fields of practice are influenced by the historical and contemporary developments in the care and control of people with disabilities.     

"That's When the Neighborhood Went South": How Middle Class Blacks and Whites Police Racial Boundaries of Stigmatized Blackness

Drawing on evidence from a case study of a racially transitioning suburb of Chicago, we argue that both blacks and whites discursively form, maintain, protect, and navigate contradictory class and racial identities. The interactions between race and class are complex, but how do these complexities manifest themselves? We contend that racial groups utilize discursive storytelling to maintain boundaries, and that this is one of the ways in which racial and class inequalities are created and preserved. Furthermore, we explore the interworking of race and class, focusing on how class location helps mediate self-proclaimed middle class blacks’ and whites’ discourse on stigmatized forms of blackness. We conclude with a discussion of the sociological implications of this boundary maintenance, focusing on the ways in which whites and blacks in the middle class utilize various forms of capital to preserve status and power.     

Approximation for maximizing monotone non-decreasing set functions with a greedy method

We study the problem of maximizing a monotone non-decreasing function \(f\) subject to a matroid constraint. Fisher, Nemhauser and Wolsey have shown that, if \(f\) is submodular, the greedy algorithm will find a solution with value at least \(\frac{1}{2}\) of the optimal value under a general matroid constraint and at least \(1-\frac{1}{e}\) of the optimal value under a uniform matroid \((\mathcal {M} = (X,\mathcal {I})\), \(\mathcal {I} = \{ S \subseteq X: |S| \le k\}\)) constraint. In this paper, we show that the greedy algorithm can find a solution with value at least \(\frac{1}{1+\mu }\) of the optimum value for a general monotone non-decreasing function with a general matroid constraint, where \(\mu = \alpha \), if \(0 \le \alpha \le 1\); \(\mu = \frac{\alpha ^K(1-\alpha ^K)}{K(1-\alpha )}\) if \(\alpha > 1\); here \(\alpha \) is a constant representing the “elemental curvature” of \(f\), and \(K\) is the cardinality of the largest maximal independent sets. We also show that the greedy algorithm can achieve a \(1 - (\frac{\alpha + \cdots + \alpha ^{k-1}}{1+\alpha + \cdots + \alpha ^{k-1}})^k\) approximation under a uniform matroid constraint. Under this unified \(\alpha \)-classification, submodular functions arise as the special case \(0 \le \alpha \le 1\).     

Philosophes of the Conservative Nation: Burke, Macaulay, Disraeli

The argument here concerns the myths of the English, and of English history; it suggests that myths of providential England were powerful elements in twentieth-century British political life. Most of all, they powerfully informed Conservative conceptions of civilization, though they also exerted a wider political influence. The essay explores the invention of these myths in three pre-eminent writers: Burke, Macaulay, and Disraeli, and suggests that from their writings emerged a system of narration which came to be 'remembered' as the founding myth of the political nation — the conservative nation — in the twentieth century. By the time of mass democracy, the partisan divisions (between Whig and Tory) had been forgotten in favour of a wider cultural 'transformism,' which did much to cement the emerging coalition of landed and bourgeois politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, the very nature of politics itself came to be redefined.