Immigrant Incorporation in Western Democracies1

How much variation is there in immigrant incorporation policies and practices across the Western democracies? Concluding that the effort to capture variation in typologies of incorporation schemes is likely to prove both futile and misleading, I propose a radically dis‐aggregated perspective that conceives of incorporation as the product of the intersection of migrant aspirations and strategies with regulatory frameworks in four domains — state, market, welfare, and culture. Because some but not all of the regulatory institutions in these domains were created with immigrant incorporation in mind, national incorporation frameworks are not fully cohesive, are constantly changing, and at best can be described as belonging to a handful of loosely connected syndromes.     

C. H. Patterson on Client-Centered Career Counseling: An Interview

C. H. Patterson discusses career counseling as it can be accomplished within the client-centered approach. He notes the importance of the core conditions, the relationship of career counseling to therapy, the difficulty of counselor or therapist role change, the use of interpretation of tests, and the role of the client in the process. Included at the end of this article is a list of relevant publications authored by C. H. Patterson.     

Importance of the National Career Development Guidelines to School Counselors

This study surveyed the opinions of a national random sample of school counselors toward the importance of the elementary, junior high/middle, and high school competencies in the National Career Development Guidelines. The results of the study indicated that school counselors consider the career development competencies in the guidelines to be important to very important across the three levels.     

Sociology at UCLA

In a discipline in which departments are often characterized by irreconcilable controversies and factional disputes, UCLA’s department stands out as a pluralistic community that fosters interaction, communication, and mutual understanding. At UCLA the micro and macro meet: leading ethnographers and survey researchers work side by side; noted Marxists, functionalists and phenomenologists participate in the same colloquia, and persons with a variety of outlooks share membership on the same student committees. Ambitious students committed to obtaining the Ph.D. experience a stimulating educational career in a department that prides itself on diversity, but whose faculty understands that its program must be structured and coherent. He has writtenTheoretical Logic in Sociology (4 volumes).Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War II, andStructure and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory. His most recent books includeEvaluation: A Systematic Approach (3rd edition, with Peter K. Rossi), and the forthcomingHandbook of Medical Sociology (4th edition) edited with Sol Levine.     

Systems thinking

Evaluation is one of many fields where “systems thinking” is popular and is said to hold great promise. However, there is disagreement about what constitutes systems thinking. Its meaning is ambiguous, and systems scholars have made diverse and divergent attempts to describe it. Alternative origins include: von Bertalanffy, Aristotle, Lao Tsu or multiple aperiodic “waves.” Some scholars describe it as synonymous with systems sciences (i.e., nonlinear dynamics, complexity, chaos). Others view it as taxonomy—a laundry list of systems approaches. Within so much noise, it is often difficult for evaluators to find the systems thinking signal. Recent work in systems thinking describes it as an emergent property of four simple conceptual patterns (rules). For an evaluator to become a “systems thinker”, he or she need not spend years learning many methods or nonlinear sciences. Instead, with some practice, one can learn to apply these four simple rules to existing evaluation knowledge with transformative results.     

Explaining the Surge in Citizenship Applications in the 1990s: Lawful Permanent Residents in Texas

Objective . We explore the increase in citizenship applications in the mid–1990s in order to test popular explanations for them, such as the consequences of IRCA legalization, fear of loss of public benefits, and effects of citizenship outreach programs. Methods . We rely on a nonrandom sample of 526 lawful permanent residents in four Texas cities. About half had applied for citizenship and all were taking affirmative steps via participation in citizenship or English–language classes. Results . Having received amnesty under IRCA predicts rapid application for citizenship upon eligibility but is not associated with greater mastery of the naturalization process or better English skills. Fear of losing eligibility for public benefits and campaigns promoting naturalization motivated about one–quarter of citizenship applicants. Much larger proportions cite their desire to participate fully in American life, to sponsor the immigration of relatives, and to ensure opportunities for their children. The main obstacle they identify is limited English proficiency. Conclusions . Although factors peculiar to the political environment of the 1990s affected many permanent residents, most cited traditional incentives having to do with investment in opportunities for themselves and their families. Our data suggest that the most effective way to facilitate naturalization is to devote more resources to English–language training.     

Indirect methods for valuing changes in environmental risks with nonexpected utility preferences

Theoretical models for estimating individuals' values for sure improvements in environmental quality are well developed. These models can be classified as being based on averting behavior, hedonic prices, or weak complementarity. Some of these models have also been applied to the task of valuing changes in risk based on expected utility theory. This article provides a systematic development of these models for changes in either the probability or the magnitude of an uncertain event and shows that the derived expressions for individual marginal willingness to pay can be generalized to nonexpected utility preferences as long as the index of preferences is continuous, convex, and twice differentiable.