RACIAL PREJUDICE AMONG KOREAN MERCHANTS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOODS

Many Korean immigrants in the United States have established small retail businesses in black communities. Relations between these merchants and neighborhood residents and customers have been problematic in a number of cities. Using in-depth interview data on a sample of Korean merchants in Washington, D.C., this article examines merchants' racial attitudes and reported interactions with African Americans. Drawing on middleman minority theory, I show how Koreans' middleman role and immigrant status condition their daily experiences with and attitudes toward African Americans and how constructions of group differences are used to advance middleman interests.     

The Changing Institutional Context of Low Fertility

Using data for 1960–97 for 22 low fertility countries, we document a dramatic change in the association of fertility levels to women's levels of labor force participation. Until the 1980s, this association had been strongly negative. However, during the 1980s itbecame positive, and since 1990 strongly positive. We also document an emerging positive association of the country-level total fertility ratio (TFR) and nonmarital ratio (e.g., the proportion of births to unmarried women). We argue that these transformed associations reflect societal level responses that, in some contexts, have eased the incompatibility between mother and worker roles, and loosened the link betweenmarriage and childbearing. These arguments imply that societal responses to mother/worker incompatibility exert substantial influence on fertility levels in low fertility countries.     

‘Black card’ or rational bargaining strategies? On the difficulties involved in mastering technology effects by means of interactive processes

The present paper has two objectives in mind: On the one hand, it attempts to present and clarify the attitudes of the Austrian population on ecological issues. On the other hand, its second objective is to explicate, via a documentation and discourse analysis of a discussion on the ‘social compatibility’ of the location of radioactive waste disposal sites, how the notion of ‘social impact assessment’ ought to be interpreted as a strategic game among social actors, revolving around the poles of conflict and rational concensus‐building.     

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND THE LEGITIMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Reservatinos about qualitative research often center around contentions that, since qualitative methods are so subjective and uncontrolled, the results of qualitative research are not valid and reliable. While many qualitative researchers in education have attempted to improve the trustworthiness of their results by making their methods more systematic, we argue that qualitative researchers cannot establish the trustworhiness of their findings, regardles of the methods they use. Rather, the legitimization of knwoledge requires the judgement of an entire community of stakeholders. In the absence of certainty, knowledge is an ethical matter, one in which the judgement of each stakeholder must count.     

A Methodology for Grouping Source Terms for Consequence Calculations in Probabilistic Risk Assessments

The individual plant analyses in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's reassessment of the risk from commercial nuclear power plants (NUREG-1150) consist of four parts: systems analysis, accident-progression analysis, source-term analysis, and consequence analysis. Careful definition of the interfaces between these parts is necessary for both information flow and computational efficiency. This paper describes the procedure used to define the interface between the source-term analysis and the consequence analysis. This interface is accomplished by forming groups of source terms with similar properties and then performing one set of MACCS calculations for each group.     

Socio-economic Background, Ability, and the Allocation of Students

Postulant que l'école secon-daire effectue l'allocation de divers rôles sociaux, l'auteur met en rapport, au sein d'un groupe d'étudiants de 12e année, leurs antécédents socio-économiques et l'éventualité de leur persévérance scolaire ou de leur abandon de l'école lors du passage à la 13e année. Le quotient intellectuel de l'etudiant sert de variable-contrôle et l'analyse est faite séparément pour les garçons et les jeunes filles. Compte tenu du quotient intellectuel et du genre, plus les élèves sont de milieu soeio-éeonomique élevé, plus élevée est la probabilité qu'ils poursuivent leurs études en 13e. Plus l'élève est d'un milieu moins f avorisé, par ailleurs, moins élevée est la probabilité qu'il fréquente une école quelconque l'année suivante. Malgré l'existence en milieu éducatif d'une idéologie égalitaire s'appuyant sur le mérite personnel, les antécédents socio-économiques affectent de façon importante les chances d'aceès a l'éducation supérieure.