Social Work Intervention on a New Housing Estate

Summary Families moving into a new housing estate were the subject ofa controlled experiment. Half received social work assistance,half did not. The two groups showed little difference in levelsof health or satisfaction with their environment. The problemsidentified tended to be communal problems of the estate, relatedto its design and management.     

Ritual Dynamics: Mayor Making in Early Modern Norwich

Through a detailed analysis of a Guild Day ceremony in early modern England we demonstrate that liminal points in this ritual are interrelated to form a "pattern" or "dance" of liminal pulsations. We argue it is the felt necessity, on the part of participants, to complete that pattern that provides a dynamic to any ritual event. It impels participants to continue the ritual to its conclusion and leads them to resist any interference with the "flow" of the ritual. "Flow", we assert, is thus both an interior state of participants and an exterior social characteristic of a ritual. It is created by the structuring of liminal points in a ritual, the liminal pulsations, but it achieves its dynamic by affecting the interior states of participants so that they feel impelled to "close off" the ritual and complete it.     

Class consciousness and national contexts: Canada,Sweden and the United States in historical perspective

Dans cette communication, les auteurs examinent les différences, sur le plan de la conscience de classe, entre trois démocraties occidentales, soit le Canada, la Suède et les États-Unis. Leur principale conclusion est celle-ci: le degré d'identification des travailleurs avec la classe ouvrière, la conscience des conflits de classe et la capacité d'envisager une autre forme d'organisation sociale sont sensiblement plus grands en Suède qu'en Amérique du Nord. Une telle conclusion ne risque guère de surprendre les spécialistes de la sociologie comparée des systèmes politiques, mais elle a le mérite de poser la question des origines des différences observées. Les auteurs y répondent en les faisant remonter surtout à l'après-guerre et aux différences qui ont caractérisé les conflits sociaux de la Grande Dépression. Pour eux, les dénouements respectifs de ces conflits sociaux se sont répercutés sur la distribution du pouvoir politique et le sentiment de puissance collective au sein de la classe ouvrière, qui ont à leur tour profondément influé sur la consolidation et l'extension de la conscience de classe. This paper explores the variation in class consciousness in three Western democracies: Canada, Sweden and the United States. Its main empirical finding is that Swedish levels of working class identification, conflict consciousness and capacity to envisage an alternative form of social organization are considerably higher than their North American counterparts. While this finding is not surprising to comparative political sociologists, it does provide an occasion for an argument that the differences were basically established in the postwar period and are the product of the different outcomes of the social conflict that surrounded the Great Depression. In its reduced form, our argument is that outcomes of social conflict have had an impact on the distribution of social power and the working classes' sense of collective efficacy which, in turn, have profoundly influenced the consolidation and extension of class consciousness.     

THE PLACE OF ECONOMIC HISTORY IN THE DISCIPLINE OF ECONOMICS

Despite the dominance of the field of economic history by trained economists who use the tools of economics, the output and services of economic historians are declining in demand. The explanation advanced in this address is that economic historians have not proved their value to economics. To play an essential role in economics, we must broaden the questions we ask and concommittently devise a set of theoretical tools to provide meaningful and testable theories about the structure and performance of economies over time. This address suggests the direction that such theory should take in order to make the field an indispensable part of the discipline of economics.     

THE NONMONETARY EFFECTS OF FINANCIAL FACTORS DURING THE INTERWAR PERIOD

This paper employs vector autoregressions to estimate the nonmonetary effects of financial sector shocks on output and prices during the interwar period. Variance decompositions indicate that the nonmonetary financial proxies have significant and important effects. Impulse response functions indicate that most of the significant shocks to our financial crisis proxies have negative effects on output and prices. Focusing on the depressed conditions of the 1930s, historical decompositions indicate that the nonmonetay financial crisis variables are generally more important than the monetary base in explaining macro behavior. Our findings thus support theoretical models emphasizing the important nonmonetay effects of financial variables.     

THE REACTION OF EXCHANGE RATES TO ECONOMIC NEWS

This paper examines the short-run responses of spot exchange rates to several types of economic news. Survey data are used to divide economic announcements into expected and unexpected components with the latter measuring news. The results indicate that exchange rates are systematically related to unexpected money announcements after the October 1979 switch in Federal Reserve operating procedures but not before. This response does not appear to have changed, however, after the October 1982 Federal Reserve regime change. Short-run exchange rate movements are not systematically related to news on inflation or real activity.     

PARTY IDENTIFICATION, STATUS, AND RACE IN THE SOUTH: 1952-1972

This article describes the redistributions in political partyidentifications that have taken place in the South in the lasttwenty years and analyzes the changing relationships betweenstatus, race, and party in the South compared to the rest ofthe nation.     

THE DURATION OF THE SMOKING HABIT

I investigate the determinants of the hazard rates of both starting and quitting the cigarette smoking habit. The model is an ordered probit split-sample duration model with lagged duration dependence and time-varying covariates (cigarette price and regulation). Duration of the smoking habit is approximately unitary elastic with respect to cigarette price. The hazard rate of starting smoking peaks sharply and quickly declines before age 20. Both nonparametric and parametric results indicate that the quitting hazard rate rises with the habit's duration, a result at odds with survey data but consistent with the economic model of rational addiction. (JEL C41, 112)     

POSTED OFFER MARKETS IN NEAR-CONTINUOUS TIME: AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION

This paper reports an experiment conducted to evaluate a "near-continuous" variant of the posted offer trading institution, where the number of periods in a market session is increased by reducing sharply each period's maximum length. Experimental results suggest that although decisions in time-truncated periods are not equivalent to periods of longer duration, extensive repetition improves considerably the drawing power of equilibrium predictions in some challenging environments. Nevertheless, significant deviations remain in the near-continuous framework. We also observe that the extra data collected in the near-continuous framework allow new insights into price convergence and signaling . ( JEL C92, L12, L11)