The Role of Neighborhood in the Analysis of Spatial Economic Inequality

Social Indicators Research - Spatial inequality measures should take into account the geographical position of the data of reference if the focus is on the spatial aspects of territorial...     

Family Constellations and Life Satisfaction in Europe

Existing research on family and well-being has generally focused on the traditional family, and has largely ignored the increasing diversity in family forms and relations. Our aim in this paper is to help fill this gap by investigating the extent of the relationship between living arrangements and life satisfaction (LS) in Europe. We examined variations in life satisfaction by applying a multilevel approach (i.e., individuals nested in countries) to data from the 2007 European Quality of Life Survey. First, we found that levels of life satisfaction among families consisting of couples with children were significantly higher than among people in other (less typical) family arrangements. Second, our results illustrate that after the socioeconomic situation of the family was taken into account, the influence of family status on LS disappeared almost completely. Overall, our findings suggest that the lower levels of life satisfaction experienced by people living in atypical families can be largely attributed to their weaker socioeconomic position.     

Incorporating the environmental dimension in the assessment of automated warehouses

In today’s competitive context, the paradigm of sustainable development is becoming more and more significant, also in warehousing. Managers are progressively considering not only purely economic aspects but also environmental concerns. Despite such consciousness, the selection of automated warehousing solutions has been mainly based on operational and economic performance in both practice and theory so far, whereas energy consumption and environmental performance have not been adequately taken into account. To fill this lack, a model is proposed to evaluate the energy consumption and environmental impact of automated warehousing solutions. The model has been used to investigate whether and how the selection of automated solutions changes depending on the dimensions involved in the analysis (i.e. only economic, only environmental or both). The analysis has been performed considering autonomous vehicle storage and retrieval systems (AVS/RSs) and its natural alternative, i.e. automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RSs). Results confirm the importance of considering both dimensions in the assessment of automated warehouses, as depending on the scenario, the technology selection shifts from AS/RS to AVS/RS when considering not only the economic but also the environmental impact. Additionally, this study provides new insights on the suitability areas of AVS/RSs.     

The challenges of mathematics education for Indigenous teacher training

In this article, I outline research carried out on in an Ethnomathematics course designed to train Indigenous teachers in Costa Rica, in which the following ethnic groups participated: Ngabes, Bribris, and Cabecares. The challenge is to develop a mathematical education that provides equitable conditions for the different groups within innovative curricular proposals. This research is based on the construct of ‘Cultural Mathematical Knowledge' which serves to describe intrinsic characteristics of socially differentiated groups and thus propose a model for teacher education. The design of the course incorporates an empirical base, a theoretical base, and a methodological base. It is a multicultural and multidisciplinary proposal based on Indigenous mathematics and on the ideas of mathematical enculturation, to be developed through curricular microprojects in Indigenous schools. The course promotes preparing the teacher as a researcher to shape him or herself mathematically, as someone who carries out appropriate educational actions in an academic environment in accordance with an ethnolinguistic reality, a cultural worldview, and awareness of the potential of the students of Indigenous schools.     

The Role of Career Choice in Understanding Job Mobility

This paper presents a simple model that explains how the likelihood of job changes and their complexity changes over a worker's career, and the empirical work presented here uses the life cycle patterns of mobility and their complexity to infer the relative importance of firm‐specific versus career‐specific concerns as determinants of mobility decisions. The estimates of the model indicate that the contemporaneous presence of two quality matches, one career‐specific and one firm‐specific, is necessary to understand the patterns of the data. The model also predicts that the welfare losses implied by a disappearance of a career can be on average twice as large as the losses implied by a plant closure.     

Absorbing and generalized stable sets

Within the framework of an abstract system we establish the existing relationship between the following two solutions: The absorbing sets solution and the generalized stable sets solution.We are grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Financial support from the project 9/UPV-00035.321-13699/2001 is grateful acknowledged. Inarra gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of Brown University and the financial support from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, PR 2003-0287.     

The love bug and the melancholic drag queen or a reflection on the cultural/political “grounds” of subjects as sexual

The notion of the subject and its formation has long been at the centre of discussion in critical theory. Identity discourse constructed a passive subject made up of qualities such us gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and age. Poststructuralist thought on the other hand invested its critical mind in producing a mobile subject, one that is both the product and the producer of practices, power and processes. While identity discourse put qualities such as “sex” at the centre of its analysis of subject formation and produced a sexual subject, poststructuralist thought emphasised “bodies and pleasure” and produced the subject as sexual. This article addresses the formation of the subject as sexual through an everyday practice that forms a dominant part of our contemporary computerised era, namely that of the opening of an e‐mail. It reads the effects of the “Love Bug”, the e‐mail that infected millions of computer systems on the 4th of May 2000, so as to assess the extent it produces a different subject sexual than the one already promoted in poststructuralist thought. Butler’s notion of “gender performativity” (a dominant concept in relation to the subject as sexual) and her allegory of the melancholic drag queen are evaluated through ?i?ek’s critique and the example of the “Love Bug” e‐mail. This produces a different reading of the subject as sexual: one that understands sexual pleasure as being at the foundations of subject formation.