Fringe benefits and income inequality

In this paper, we analyze the distribution of fringe benefits among workers and underline its implications for income inequality. To this end, we develop a positional approach to inequality based on the concept of rent as a potential link between positions and their rewards. We hypothesize that workers extract rent in the form of benefits in industries with worker leverage (in the form of unioniziation, internal labor market, and public employment) or share rent with firms in highly profitable industries that endure for efficiency wage reasons. On the basis of a unique dataset from Israel, we test these hypotheses by estimating the probabilities of obtaining benefits according to industries’ structural features while controlling for cross-industrial differences in workers’ demographic and human capital characteristics. The analyses reveal that benefits are determined by structural factors, representing a separate dimension of the rewards attached to positions, different from earnings. We further stress the importance of incorporating fringe benefits into inequality research, given that benefits together with earnings stratify workers and evidently signify structured positions in the economy.     

Latino Immigrants,Discrimination and Reception in Columbus,Ohio

Columbus, Ohio has witnessed rapid growth in its Latino population as immigrants settle in the city to access jobs and a generally low cost of living. Immigrants also face discrimination as they settle in Columbus and interact with the city's citizens. In this paper, we note how discrimination plays out in social and economic isolation; a lack of programmes to support the incorporation of Latinos in the city; and state laws that target immigrants. We present results of ongoing ethnographic work with the Latino community in Columbus.     

The political process of the revolutionary samurai: a comparative reconsideration of Japan’s Meiji Restoration

In the 1860s and 1870s, the feudal monarchy of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan for over two centuries, was overthrown, and the entire political order it had commanded was dismantled. This immense political transformation, comparable in its results to the great social revolutions of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in the West, was distinctive for lacking a major role for mass political mobilization. Since popular political action was decisive elsewhere for both providing the force for social revolutions to defeat old regimes and for pushing revolutionary leaders to more radical policies, the Meiji Restoration’s combination of revolutionary outcomes with conservative personnel and means is puzzling. This article argues that previous accounts fail to explain why a group of relatively low-status samurai—administrative functionaries with some hereditary political privileges but in fact little secure power within the old regime—was able to overcome far more deeply entrenched political actors. To explain this, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between two political processes: the long-standing political relations of feudal monarchy and magnate lords and the unprecedented emergence of independent samurai political action and organizations cutting across domain boundaries. It was the interaction of these two processes that produced the overthrow of the Tokugawa and enabled the revolutionary outcomes that followed it. This article’s revised explanation of the Meiji Restoration clearly places it within the same theoretical parameters as the major revolutions of the seventeenth century and later.     

Can Capitalism Solve Its Own Rural Problems? Japanese Lessons for the World Bank's Vision of Rural-Led Development

Recent research and policy advice by international development organizations have, by their own account, sought to reverse a prior neglect of conditions in agriculture and rural areas. In pursuit of this, they have developed a vision of dynamic but incremental development in rural areas, anchored in a smallholder-based and economically diversified market economy. This vision, articulated in the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report and continuing to animate research and policy advice today, presents itself as a solution to persistent poverty in the world's least developed countries. This paper adopts a historical sociological lens to use the case of Japan, in the period from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth, to assess how realistic this vision is. This analysis shows that the lessons of Japan's experience are chastening for this vision of rural development. The mechanisms of growth in Japan were remarkably similar to those advertised by the World Bank's vision. However, its rural economic dynamism was based on deep socioeconomic inequalities and brought improved material conditions and greater economic security to agricultural households only with excruciating slowness, if at all. Rather than demonstrating the potential of incremental, market-oriented rural development to offer a path towards widespread poverty reduction, Japan instead serves as a warning of this development model's limitations.     

How Dangerous Is Low Level Radiation?

Problems in the theoretical basis for the linear-no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis are reviewed, and it is shown that they very strongly suggest that the theory greatly overestimates the risk of low level radiation. A direct test of the theory, based on the radon—lung cancer relationship is described; it strongly reinforces that conclusion. However, it is shown that even if the linear-no threshold theory is valid, the public's fear of low level radiation, at least in some contexts, is grossly exaggerated.