Does consensus bargaining control labor costs in Japan? Evidence from the “bubble economy” and its aftermath

Japan’s system of labor negotiations provides an opportunity to see whether consensus bargaining restrains labor costs. The recent volatility of the Japanese economy affords a unique chance to observe how consensus-based labor settlements adjusted to sudden, sharp changes in market conditions. It is also possible to evaluate the role of bonus payments in amending labor settlements. With observations for 1986–1995,1 use measures of productivity gains to calculate the capacity for increasing worker pay and then analyze whether pay increases exceeded that capacity. I report the extent to which changes in labor earnings were scheduled or resulted from adjustments in bonus pay. During the boom years of the late 1980s, employers inflated bonuses so that workers’ pay increased more than had been scheduled, but not enough to exceed the capacity for growth. But during the sluggish years of the early 1990s, pay agreements were excessive. Employers cut workers’ bonuses to keep earnings growth in check. Thus, bonus pay provided a “degree of freedom” allowing employers to adjust labor costs following sudden upswings and downturns in the economy. I am grateful to Professor Hideo Kawada and Mr. Kenichi Matsuki, both of Senshu University, for their assistance in gathering the earnings data for this study. Thanks are also due to Craig MacPhee, Roger Riefler, and Hendrik Van den Berg for thoughtful comments and suggestions. I am responsible for any remaining shortcomings.     

Community Effects on Youth Sexual Activity

Using longitudinal data from the National Survey of Children, we examined the impact of community socioeconomic status on four dimensions of adolescent and young adult premarital sexual activity—the timing of first intercourse, the frequency of intercourse, the number of different sex partners, and the likelihood of engaging in unprotected intercourse. We found significant positive effects of a multiitem index of community socioeconomic disadvantage on all but the timing of first premarital intercourse, net of controls for the socioeconomic and demographic status of adolescents and their families. None of the most commonly cited explanations for neighborhood effects on adolescent behavior can fully explain these associations. Only the attitudes and behaviors of peers account for even a small portion of the observed impact of community disadvantage on youth sexual behavior. Adolescents' acceptance of premarital childbearing, educational aspirations and attachment to school, and parental supervision, although frequently associated with youth sexual behavior, do little to mediate the impact of community disadvantage on sexual activity.     

Raptor nesting locations along an urban density gradient in the Great Basin,USA

Raptors are the most prevalent group of urban apex predators, and the majority of raptor genera in North America have been recorded using urban areas. Prior research assessments along urban-wildland gradients show that urban habitat preference varies by raptor species and that raptor nesting preferences within urban settings may vary. Attempts to understand the intra- and inter-specific nesting patterns along an urban gradient would advance extant knowledge. Here we present the locations of individual nest sites of nine raptor species along an urban gradient in Reno-Sparks, NV. We developed an urban density model based on the number of residents, number of employees, and building footprints and number of floors for built structures within each land parcel at four spatial scales, representing nest site, macrohabitat, average nearest-nest, and landscape scales. Cooper’s Hawks (Accipiter cooperii), Sharp-shinned Hawks (Accipiter striatus), and Red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) nested across the widest range of the urban spectrum and closest to the urban core, whereas Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) and Swainson’s Hawks (Buteo swainsonii) nested on the urban fringe. Urban density for all nest locations was lowest at the nest-site scale, and the highest at the average nearest-nest and landscape scales. Raptors tended to occupy a wide range of the building-area density spectrum but not the building-height or employee density spectrums indicative of the attractiveness of suburban habitat.

     

Communities of Place? New Evidence for the Role of Distance and Population Size in Community Attachment

Historically, ecological features of a community, such as population size, were considered fundamental aspects of the community experience. Yet methodological advances and the rise of globalization have challenged many classical assumptions rooted in the ecological tradition. Using recent data—the Montana Health Matters Study 2010 (N = 3,508)—we explore whether community attachment links with distance and population size in Montana. Surprisingly, a statistically significant relationship to community attachment appears only when distance from urban centers and community population size are modeled together. Perceived quality of community services partly explains this relationship, but only for the distance measure. Altogether, as globalization is undoubtedly transforming rural life, we argue that “communities of place” may still endure when distance to urban centers and population size are simultaneously accounted for.     

Rule learning transfer across linguistic and visual modalities in 7-month-old infants

Rule learning (RL) refers to infants’ ability to extract high-order, repetition-based rules from a sequence of elements and to generalize them to new items. RL has been demonstrated in both the auditory and the visual modality, but no studies have investigated infants’ transfer of learning across these two modalities, a process that is fundamental for the development of many complex cognitive skills. Using a visual habituation procedure within a cross-modal RL task, we tested 7-month-old infants’ transfer of learning both from speech to vision (auditory-visual—AV—condition) and from vision to speech (visual-auditory—VA—condition). Results showed a transfer of learning in the AV condition, but only for those infants who were able to efficiently extract the rule during the learning (habituation) phase. In contrast, in the VA condition infants provided no evidence of RL. Overall, this study indicates that 7-month-old infants can transfers high-order rules across modalities with an advantage for transferring from speech to vision, and that this ability is constrained by infants’ individual differences in the way they process the to-be-learned rules.     

Gender discourses in academic mobility

Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalization, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied practices, we use discourse analysis based on interviews with academics in New Zealand to examine differences in language that create differing realities with regards to gender and obligations of care in academic mobility decisions. The findings reveal how academic mobility is discursively formulated as ‘essential’ to successful academic careers, with the need for frequent travel justified despite advances in virtual communication technologies. Heteronormative discourses are shown to disrupt and fragment the opportunities female academics have to engage in academic mobility. However, we also uncover ways in which these discourses are resisted, wherein fathers articulate emotional strain associated with academic mobility. The article shows how discourse works to constitute the essentialization of academic mobility, and the uneven gendered practices associated with it, whilst also giving voice to gender inequities in academic mobility from the southern hemisphere.