Modernization and the Demographic Transition: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses of a Revised Model

Abstract

We specify a revised model of the demographic transition which accounts for national fertility levels and changes over the past two decades. The model includes cultural, geographic, demographic and family planning program variables, in addition to a measure of national socio-economic modernization. Using crude birth rates for 117 countries, we operationalize and then apply the revised model to 1974 rates, and then test a longitudinal model of 1955–59 to 1974 change in rates. A final model for 81 less developed nations from the original set of 117 countries includes a measure of family planning program effort. Including this highly significant measure in a model of 1955–59 to 1974 change results in further evidence favoring modification of the traditional demographic transition model. Implications for the future course of fertility in underdeveloped countries are discussed.     

Old Structures,New Relations: How Community Development Credit Unions Define Organizational Boundaries

Studies of organizational dynamics examine the manner in which an organization's immediate environment defines the rules and requirements to which individual organizations must conform in order to receive legitimacy and support (Scott, 1992:132). In this paper we consider the question of how an organization can achieve legitimacy and support without necessarily compromising its organizational forms or practices to isomorphic pressures. We frame the question in terms of the boundaries between organizations and their environments. Where the population ecology studies show the survival value of adopting known organizational forms and practices, and neoinstitutionalism addresses the need to display compliance with accepted forms, our case study demonstrates the possibility of removing an organization or set of organizations from the familiar interaction by naming it as a subfield of the organizational field, sharing the environment, but out of the way of predefined norms and practices.     

Readiness for Career Choices: Planning,Exploring, and Deciding

One of Super's most important contributions has been in explicating those developmental tasks that involve planning, exploring, and deciding, processes known collectively as readiness for career choices. The authors review existing means of conceptualizing and operationalizing the various aspects of readiness, as well as innovative practice applications that have emerged from this work. Next, selected elaborations and extensions of the readiness construct are described. Finally, future directions for theory and research on readiness are presented with a particular emphasis on the promise of considering contextual issues, motivational factors, and an expanded measurement perspective in subsequent inquiry and practice.     

Determinants of fertility levels and change among developed countries: 1958–1978

This article provides a multivariate cross-national test of the hypothesis that national population/family planning policies have effected levels, and changes in fertility in developed nations over the past two decades. Variation is assessed in the total fertility rates (TFR) in 1978, and in the change in these rates between 1958 and 1978, among thirty developed countries. Measures include socioeconomic development, divorce, percent in consensual unions, female labor force participation, abortion policy, and level of contraceptive use by married couples and, government population/family planning policy. Seventy percent of the variation in 1978 TFR is related to the percent contracepting, female labor force, and the population/family planning policy measures. These are the only measures with significant direct effects. A longitudinal analysis of 1958 to 1978 change in TFRs is also conducted. This model increases R² to 75%, and the three independent variables remain significant. Implications of these findings for policy makers interested in increasing or decreasing fertility rates are noted.     

Identity processes and the positive youth development of African Americans: an explanatory framework

This chapter presents Spencer's phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory, or PVEST (1995), as a conceptual framework for examining positive youth development. Contextual factors affecting racial and gender identity of African American youth are discussed, with the focus on the influence of schools and religious institutions.     

Counter-geographies: The campaign against rationalisation of agricultural research stations in New South Wales, Australia

This paper discusses an example of community action mounted in a rural region of New South Wales, Australia, in response to proposals by the State Government to rationalise agricultural research stations operated by the Department of Primary Industries. Informed by a Foucaultian understanding of power and the concept of governmentality, neoliberalism is theorised as being the broad governmental context in which rationalisation proposals were put forward. Recent literature drawing on this theoretical perspective has emphasised that neoliberalism is enacted through a relationship of power, and is not monolithic or inevitable. Neoliberalism is always negotiated by those seeking to govern and those who are the object of such governmental actions. This paper analyses how plans to rationalise publicly funded agricultural research stations were opposed by those seeking to keep research facilities open in the case study area. The paper discusses the methods and scope of community action and, drawing on interviews, identifies a series of discourses articulated by campaigners. Non-local actors were depicted as uncaring and insensitive. In contrast, campaigners discussed the emergence of a ‘city-country divide’ in domestic politics; the need for specialist agricultural knowledge given the region's unique geographical location; and local impacts of an economic, social and emotional nature. Central were discourses of maintaining community, tradition, and continuity in unique local places defined by their climate, biophysical environment and economy. These were ‘counter-geographies’ that sought (successfully, it would transpire) to disrupt the state's imagined geography of a homogenous and flexible administrative space in which research services could be relocated wherever most efficient. Important too were embodied resistances to the way rural industries and people were subjected. Campaigners refused to accept preferred codes of neoliberal behaviour (particularly mobility and rationality) and instead demanded respect for their careers, families and communities. Important considerations are suggested for further research on impacts and negotiations of neoliberalism. This study particularly highlights the successes—as well as contradictions and limitations—of arguments that construct rural places as socialised, unique and unfairly treated (by governments), in opposition to metropolitan dominance and ‘placeless’ neoliberalism.     

Reviews

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Assessing outcomes in an English authority (The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea)

The local authority has used the Looking After Children materials to develop needs-led and outcome-oriented services at both individual and strategic planning levels. A specific study used data from the Assessment and Action Records to identify priority needs and desired outcomes for young people leaving care.