Three Women Writing/Riding Feminism's Third Wave

In this article the authors compare their own stories of developing a feminist consciousness in order to demonstrate how the distinction between feminist waves and feminist generations can be a productive one. They argue that the metaphor of waves must be delineated from the family metaphor of generation in order to maintain the fluidity that exists within a generational cohort of feminist scholars. Their narrative begins where they all meet, at the University of Minnesota in 2001, and interweaves stories of how they eventually come together in the same institution as feminist scholars. Their stories illustrate that although they each identify as feminists, and each fall into the category often referred to as third wave, their pursuit of a feminist agenda has followed different trajectories. Taken together, their personal narratives unpack and explore the wave metaphor for describing individuals, provide a critique of feminist generations, and illustrate the multiplicity of third wave feminism.     

Illicit use of prescribed stimulant medication among college students

The authors investigated illicit use of stimulant medications at a midwestern university. They used a questionnaire to (a) examine the extent to which university students illicitly used stimulant medications prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; (b) determine why college students abused such drugs; and (c) identify the factors that predicted illicit use of prescribed stimulant medication. Findings revealed that 17% of 179 surveyed men and 11% of 202 women reported illicit use of prescribed stimulant medication. Forty-four percent of surveyed students stated that they knew students who used stimulant medication illicitly for both academic and recreational reasons. Students reported they experienced time pressures associated with college life and that stimulants were said to increase alertness and energy. Regression analysis revealed that the factor that predicted men's use was knowing where to get easily acquired stimulant medication, whereas the main predictor for women was whether another student had offered the prescribed stimulants.     

Demography of the Firm: A Useful Metaphor?

Demography of the firm is an interdisciplinaryresearch field of economics, sociology andeconomic geography. Although the name suggestsotherwise, demographic input has been limiteduntil recently. This article argues that thedemographic viewpoint may lead to added value.The metaphor is relevant, not because firms aresimilar to biological creatures (they are not),but because there are significant parallels inthe mechanisms of population change, as aresult of selective processes of birth anddeath, as well as aging and internal change ofincumbent firms. The nature of these changeprocesses at the micro level has to be studiedusing theories from other disciplines, such aseconomics, sociology and geography; a situationquite similar to that of human demography. Thearticle compares similarities and discrepanciesbetween the processes of birth and death infirm and human populations, as well as the mostimportant dimensions of population structureand change, e.g. age, period, and cohort. Amain difference is that in addition to thesefamiliar variables in human demography, firmsize and growth, and economic activity are alsomajor dimensions of the structure of firmpopulations. Because there are stronginteractions between these variables, anydemographic analysis, for instance to determinethe age curve of mortality, should also takeinto account these variables.     

Maintenance of Urban Ethnic Boundaries: the French in St. Boniface*

The tendency to doom French Canadians outside Quebec to assimilation seems to be based on the premise that state boundaries with political and economic control over an ecological boundary are required in order for a population to be nationalized into a cohesive group. Although the French had early opportunities to dominate ecological, demographic, political and economic macro-structures in St. Boniface, they quickly lost out to the British. The French community has remained strong for 160 years by means of enclavic social factors such as residential segregation, institutional completeness, cultural identity, and social distance. French self-identification with social psychological factors such as a religious ideology, amidst rich historical symbols, is strongly supported by the status elite and a majority of French residents in St. Boniface. This enclave is changing to some extent but a distinct core of French identification remains. A resurgence of Franco-Manitoban identity is hardly taking place, but there is much evidence of reinterpretation and revitalization.     

Twilight for organized labor

Conclusion The Old Unionism, organized labor in the private economy, is in irreversible decline. Economic and market factors beyond its control are principally responsible. The absence of effective leadership and its emphasis on political, instead of trade union, goals do not help. The substitution has diverted much of organized labor’s large financial resources to advancing a political agenda which has brought no material gains in membership and market share, but stigmatizes the union movement as a “special interest” group and as the Luddites of the new century: “American labor organizations ... are shaped much more basically by events of the past century than by forces of the past fifteen years” (Dunlop, 1978, p. 79). I am indebted to Ka-Neng Au, librarian at the Dana Library of Rutgers University, Newark, for his accurate and timely assistance with research information and citations of various references.     

On the age-sex composition of the population that would result from given fertility and mortality conditions

This article presents new formulas for calculating the eventual sex-ratio and the eventual age-sea composition of the population that would result from given fertility and mortality conditions. These formulas provide more accurate methods and are more widely applicable than earlier methods. The application of the formulas is illustrated through the use of available data on fertility and mortality conditions in the United States in 1964.     

How to Analyze Survey Data Pertaining to the Time Bind, and How Not to Analyze Such Data

This note considers various ways of analyzing survey data pertaining to a central thesis of The Time Bind (Hochschild, 1997), and it comments on the particular analysis presented by Brown and Booth (2002). The following kinds of problems will be discussed here: (1) problems pertaining to the measurement of concepts, (2) problems pertaining to the selection of the data to be analyzed, and (3) problems pertaining to the selection of the statistical models to be used in the analysis. Appropriate methods for dealing with each of these three kinds of problems are introduced and described in the present note. When these appropriate methods are compared with the particular methods applied by Brown and Booth (2002), we find fault with the latter methods. Our attention in this note is focused on the analysis of data pertaining to a central thesis of The Time Bind , but the general approach presented here can also be applied more generally to study other theses of interest in the social sciences.