Restructuring of the Financial Industry: The Disappearance of Locally Owned Traditional Financial Services in Rural America

Restructuring in the financial services industry has altered the relationship between small business owners and capital. In the past small businesses have relied on relational, or soft data, lending from locally owned banks for capital. The proliferation of absentee‐owned local branch networks brought standardized practices, thus eliminating the autonomy of local loan officers to utilize soft data in loan decisions. In this article we examine the changes in the percentage of traditional financial services that are locally owned in three county types: metropolitan, micropolitan, and noncore. We utilize the Longitudinal Business Database at the U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies. We examine changes in local ownership of traditional financial services between 1976 and 2007. We find that the rate of decline of local ownership has been greatest in the noncore (most rural) counties. We also explore to what extent these patterns are related to the emergence of alternative financial services during the same period. We find that such alternative services are growing in all three county types, but at rates not significantly different than the population growth for these county types. We supplement our analysis with data from qualitative interviews with small business owners throughout rural Texas. We conclude with a discussion of implications and plans for future research.     

‘Subjects,Participants, Collaborators’

Existing accounts of new war have not actively engaged with feminist analysis. Protest masculinity is suggested as an alternative explanatory framework to conventional explanations of violence in new war. To explore the intersection between masculinity and new wars the example of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front has been investigated. The article concludes that masculinity is an essential cause to the creation of new war and to the form that new war takes once it has originated.     

Family Structure, Gender, and the Work–Family Interface: Work-to-Family Conflict Among Single and Partnered Parents

This study examined whether single parents experience greater reductions in work-to-family conflict from using resources than partnered parents do. The question of whether single mothers, single fathers, partnered mothers, or partnered fathers experienced differing levels of work-to-family conflict was also addressed. Data were from the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce, and only those respondents with at least one child under the age of 18 living in the household were included in the analysis (N = 1325). Findings indicated that single-parent status was not directly related to work-to-family conflict. Rather single-parent status interacted with other variables, including gender, control over work hours, and the number of other adults in the home, in predicting work-to-family conflict.     

Optimizing out-of-school time: the role of free-choice learning

Free-choice learning, a new paradigm for the learning that youth and their families engage in outside school, can play an important role in the healthy development of youth, their families, and communities.     

How Does Public Management Affect Government Performance? Findings from International Research

Despite the growing importance of public management reform aroundthe world, relatively little scholarship evaluates the contributionsof public management to government performance, that is, tothe character and consequences of service provision by publicagencies. One study (Hill and Lynn 2005) evaluated over eighthundred American empirical studies that address issues of publicmanagement effectiveness in a wide variety of fields, subfields,and disciplines. In this article we employ the analytic frameworkof Hill and Lynn—a polycentric "logic of governance"—toevaluate 193 research articles published in English that usenon-American, or what we will term international, empiricalevidence. Our evaluation reveals more similarities in Americanand non-American public management research, and in the determinantsof government performance, than one might expect, given thedistinctiveness of the American politico-administrative system.These similarities may be deceptive, however. Internationalinvestigators exhibit somewhat different modeling strategies,tending, for example, to favor more linear managerialist hypotheses—changesin structure lead to changes outcomes, for example—thanAmerican research, which is more concerned with intragovernmentalcomplexities. The fact that the use of a polycentric logic ofgovernance revealed highly suggestive similarities and differencesin the determinants of performance in public organizations suggeststhe potential value of this kind of analytic strategy in bothsingle investigations and in meta-analyses of public managementreform.     

What Can Decision Analysis Do for Invasive Species Management?

Decisions about management of invasive species are difficult for all the reasons typically addressed by multiattribute decision analysis: uncertain outcomes, multiple and conflicting objectives, and many interested parties with differing views on both facts and values. This article illustrates how the tools of multiattribute analysis can improve management of invasive species, with an emphasis on making explicit the social values and preferences that must inform invasive species management. Risk assessment protocols developed previously for invasive species management typically suffer from two interacting flaws: (1) separating risk assessment from risk management, thus disrupting essential connections between the social values at stake in invasive species decisions and the scientific knowledge necessary to predict the likely impacts of management actions, and (2) relying on expert judgment about risk framed in qualitative and value-laden terms, inadvertently mixing the expert's judgment about what is likely to happen with personal preferences. Using the values structuring and probability-modeling elements of formal decision analysis can remedy these difficulties and make invasive species management responsive to both good science and public values. The management of feral pigs in Hawaiian ecosystems illustrates the need for such an integrated approach.     

The gendered division of labor and family outcomes in germany

The literature on the predictors of the division of household labor continues to expand, but the effect of this division on family outcomes has not been explored. Using the German SocioEconomic Panel (N= 628), I analyze the effect of men's participation in housework and child care on the likelihood of second birth and divorce. Fathers' greater relative child‐care time increases couples' odds of second birth, attenuating the negative effect of mothers' employment. Husbands' relative housework time is insignificant in predicting second birth or divorce among couples with at least one child, but increases the likelihood of divorce among childless couples. This is evidence that the division of domestic labor affects family outcomes, but effects differ depending on the outcome and presence of children.     

Hair loss and electability: The bald truth

This study probes one particular component of the well documented linkage between personal appearance and impression formation by investigating the extent to which and the mechanisms through which bald and balding men are underrepresented in high elective office. Study 1 compares the prevalence of hair loss among governors and members of Congress, on the one hand, and the general public, on the other, and concludes that officeholders are much more likely to have a full head of hair than would be expected of men of their age. Study 2 poses an experimental test of voter bias against bald and balding candidates by presenting voters in a simulated congressional race with materials depicting otherwise identical candidates in either their natural bald or balding condition or wearing a professionally fitted hairpiece. No voter bias against bald or balding candidates is apparent, a finding that suggests that the causal mechanism underlying underrepresentation of bald and balding men is not voter bias.Ugly is a field without grass, a plant without leaves, or a head without hair (Ovid, quoted by Klenhard, 1986, p. 11).Politics represents an area of public life in which the effects of appearance may lead to very important social consequences and in which the idea of special privilege for the pretty is particularly repellent (Efran and Patterson, 1975, p. 352).The authors thank Judee Burgoon, Michael Burgoon, and Carol Sigelman for useful comments and suggestions, and Brandt Baker, Henry Ewbank, Jeff Gardner, Henry Kenski, Dan Singer, and David Williams for their assistance with this project.     

Deviance,Rule-Breaking and Male Dominance in Conversation

Previous research on dyadic interaction indicates that cross-sex conversations (male-female) are characterized by more frequent interruptions than same-sex conversations. More specifically, males consistently tend to interrupt their female co-conversationalists. Survey data from three student samples suggest that normative definitions reflected in perceptions of interruption are inconsistent with the empirical distribution of rule-breaking observed by conversational researchers. These results provide some strategic insights into the problematic distinction between deviance and rule-breaking that has been central to labeling theory.