Compulsory Income Management in the Northern Territory – evaluating its impact

Australia has been experimenting with constraining the ways in which welfare recipients can spend their income support payments, limiting their ability to access cash and purchase some products. The policy objectives include to reduce spending on alcohol, gambling, pornography and tobacco in favour of meeting ‘basic’ family needs, especially for children, to limit the scope for financial harassment, encourage pro‐social behaviours, and build financial capabilities. In the logic of the programs these outcomes are expected to be manifest at the individual, family and community levels. The policy has primarily impacted on Indigenous Australians as a result of its geographic targeting, although a recent report has recommended a more stringent version of the program be introduced universally to all welfare recipients other than the aged. The largest of these experiments is ‘New Income Management’ in the Northern Territory, which has had more than 35,000 participants since its introduction in 2010. This article reports on the key findings of the major independent evaluation of New Income Management commissioned by the Australian Government.     

“The Vital Force”: Visuality and the National Economy

Although it has often been conceived as a material or already‐existing kind of category, the “economy”, before it can be governed, must first be “made up” and constituted in particular ways. This paper seeks to contribute to recent genealogies of the “economy” by highlighting the role of one particular “cultural” technology–the techniques of visuality–in the making up of the national economy during the interwar and postwar periods. To develop this analysis, this paper reviews the ways in which private and public financial initiatives turned to visuality and advertising as a way to appeal more directly to and mobilize working class and everyday populations. In these appeals to “popular finance” visual techniques were used to diagram both a reworked conception of the national economy as well as the modes of citizenship key to this rationality of national economic space. This case also helps underscore the heterogeneity with which the national economy was assembled as a mode of economic governance constituted in multiple and never‐completed kinds of ways. Highlighting this heterogeneity, this paper concludes, is important especially in the context of discussions of “globalization” which are, once again, provoking questions relating to the very making of economic space, practice and identity.     

Premium differentiation in the Unemployment Insurance system and the demand for labor

We simulate the effect of the introduction of premium differentiation (experience rating) in the Dutch Unemployment Insurance system on the demand for labor for a variety of sectors in the Dutch economy. For the simulations we use the Bentolila and Bertola (1990) framework as a point of departure. In the simulations, the introduction of experience rating is modeled as expenditure neutral: in the absence of premium differentiation the cost of financing UI is modeled as a wage tax (independent of the number of workers fired by the firm), whereas in the presence of experience rating this cost is attributed to firing cost (affected by the firing action). Thus, the introduction of experience rating results in a shift from wage cost to firing cost. Following the political debate on the issue in the Netherlands, we assume that the introduction of experience rating does neither lead to a change in tax rates paid by workers nor to a change in eligibility rules or replacement rates of benefit claimants. Specific attention is paid to the distinction between young and old workers . In the model, labor adjustment costs (hiring and firing costs) are linear. The model allows for uncertainty in the business cycle.All correspondence to Hans Bloemen. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno     

Moving teenagers out of high-risk neighborhoods: how girls fare better than boys

Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several years later, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures of risk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls in the experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than control group girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing data from in-depth interviews conducted with 86 teens in Baltimore and Chicago. They find that daily routines, fitting in with neighborhood norms, neighborhood navigation strategies, interactions with peers, friendship making, and distance from father figures may contribute to how girls who moved via MTO benefited more than boys.     

Coparenting and Relationship Quality Effects on Father Engagement: Variations by Residence,Romance

We focused on coparenting support, partner relationship quality, and father engagement in families with young children that did not change structurally over 4 years of participation in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 1,756). There was a significantly stronger and more robust positive association between fathers' perceived coparenting support at age 1 and father engagement at age 3 among nonresidential nonromantic parents compared with residential (married or cohabiting) and nonresidential romantic parents. There was a significantly stronger and positive association between relationship quality at age 1 and father engagement at age 3 among nonresidential nonromantic parents compared with residential parents. The findings emphasize the importance of considering both family structure and romantic involvement contexts of fathering when tracking father engagement over time.     

Learning-project structures in different work types: an empirical analysis

This study demonstrates that work-related learning projects can be organized using different structural arrangements. Sixteen learning projects conducted by ninety-six participants in three different work types were analysed and compared both qualitatively and quantitatively. No evidence was found for the claim that learning-project structures necessarily depend on the type of work in which they are carried out. However, two distinct combinations of learning project structure and work type did not emerge. It is concluded that actors have organizational choice in organizing learning projects, but their options are less likely to be realized if the learning-project type is very different from the worktype.     

中文网络客户评论的产品特征挖掘方法研究

随着互联网的广泛应用,在Blog、BBS、Wiki等网络站点中出现了大量的针对商品或服务的客户评论,这些客户评论中所包含的丰富信息,对企业管理具有重要的价值.通过数据挖掘算法对客户针对某一产品的大量评论进行分析,可以挖掘出这些产品的主要特征,并有望进一步发现客户对这些特征的意见和态度.在英文世界中已经有学者开始对这一研究进行探索,然而由于语言结构等方面的差异,英文的研究成果尚无法直接应用于中文客户评论的挖掘中.本研究针对中文的特点,提出了面向中文的客户评论挖掘方法.该方法基于改进关联规则算法实现了针对中文产品评论的产品特征信息挖掘.本研究采用通过互联网获得的针对手机、数码相机、书籍等5种产品的评论语料,对该方法进行了数据实验,实验结果初步验证了该方法有效性.     

Correction to: Mixed methods research: what it is and what it could be

Theory and Society - Unfortunately, figure 2 was incorrectly published.