The impact of union-sponsored boycotts on the stock prices of target firms

An empirical analysis of the impact of union-sponsored boycotts on the stock prices of target firms strongly suggests that union boycott announcements initially lead to economically and statistically significant losses in the stock prices of the target firms. However, this short-term price decline is almost completely erased by rebounds in stock prices over the ensuing 15 trading days.     

Ethnic Identity Among Mixed-Heritage People In Hawaii

In this study, intensive interviews were used to explore the identity of a sample of mixed-heritage Hawaiin college students from a variety of ethnic groups. The great majority of respondents listed at least one multiple-heritage identity (e.g., Chinese-Japanese). While cultural exposure and ethnic identity were strongly associated, cultural exposure is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for ethnic identity to occur. Differences in perceptions of ethnic identity between respondents with stable and situtionally changing identities were discussed. The conceptions of identity proposed by processual and structural symbolic interactionists both received some support in these data.     

Control via concentration?: Political and business evidence

This paper explores the relationship between concentration and control, in terms of both markets and hierarchies in economics and their analogues of polities and parties in politics. It is argued that the relationship is not always a positive one. In some cases the relationship is negative and in other cases there is no relationship at all. Insight into the determinants of the nature of this relationship can be gained by explaining apparent inconsistencies which appear when contrasting the economic and political spheres. For example, why is it that a market which meets the criteria for perfect competition—many small producers—is considered socially optimal but not so a polity comprised of many small parties? The two-party system, considered desirable in our national politics, corresponds to the much maligned duopoly in the economic sphere. This paper posits that there are three major types of systems found in both the economic and political spheres, which apply to both levels of aggregation—firms and markets, and parties and polities, respectively—and which have different implications for the relationship between concentration and control. It is also argued that these two levels of aggregation, however useful or necessary for purposes of discussion, are not analytically distinct.     

Internal migration in China, 1950–1988

This paper examines the long-term patterns of migration within China between 1950 and 1988. The analysis uses data from China S 1988 211,000 Fertility and Birth Control Survey, which asks respondents about their most recent interprovincial move. The results suggest that long-term migration patterns can be explained by political and economic changes in China. We argue that the approaches we introduce can offer significant insight into long-term migration patterns for countries where historical data on migration are unavailable or unreliable.     

Can Mathematics Be Social? Flexible Representations for Interaction Process and Its Sociocultural Constructions

Mathematics is needed especially and primarily for helping coax social phenomena sufficiently into view to permit the sorts of reconstruing, manipulation, and measurement on which productive insight depends. I develop this view in two themes, language use and social space-times, along with two morals, and several object lessons, all leading up to the Knotty Future. I conclude with a discussion of pitfalls in this view.     

Ethnic group and the British census: the search for a question

"The 1991 census contained, for the first time, a question on the ethnic group of each member of the population of Great Britain. This paper reports on how a question was developed which has a sufficiently high degree of acceptance from all the main ethnic groups, and which is answered sufficiently accurately, to justify inclusion in the census."     

Graph and semigroup homomorphisms on networks of relations

The algebraic definitions presented here are motivated by our search for an adequate formalization of the concepts of social roles as regularities in social network patterns. The theorems represent significant homomorphic reductions of social networks which are possible using these definitions to capture the role structure of a network. The concepts build directly on the pioneering work of S.F. Nadel (1957) and the pathbreaking approach to blockmodeling introduced by Lorrain and White (1971) and refined in subsequent years (White, Boorman and Breiger 1976;Boorman and White 1976; Arabie, Boorman and Levitt, 1978; Sailer, 1978).Blockmodeling is one of the predominant techniques for deriving structural models of social networks. When a network is represented by a directed multigraph, a blockmodel of the multigraph can be characterized as mapping points and edges onto their images in a reduced multigraph. The relations in a network or multigraph can also be composed to form a semigroup.In the first part of the paper we examine “graph” homomorphisms, or homomorphic mappings of the points or actors in a network. A family of basic concepts of role equivalence are introduced, and theorems presented to show the structure preserving properties of their various induced homomorphisms. This extends the “classic” approach to blockmodeling via the equivalence of positions.Lorrain and White (1971), Pattison (1980), Boyd, 1980, Boyd, 1982, and most recently Bonacich (1982) have explored the topic taken up in the second part of this paper, namely the homomorphic reduction of the semigroup of relations on a network, and the relation between semigroup and graph homomorphisms. Our approach allows us a significant beginning in reducing the complexity of a multigraph by collapsing relations which play a similar “role” in the network.