Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization,the State and The Extra‐Territorial Conduct of Mexican Politics1

How should we conceptualize membership, citizenship and political community in a world where migrants and their home states increasingly maintain and cultivate their formal and informal ties? This study analyzes the extra‐territorial conduct of Mexican. politics and the emergence of new migrant membership practices and relations between migrants and home states. Standard globalist, transnationalist or citizenship theories cannot properly contextualize and analyze such practices. I propose that we rethink the concept of membership in a political community not only as a Marshallian status granted by states, but also as an instituted process embedded within four other institutions and processes: home state domestic politics; the home state's relationship to the world system; a semi‐autonomous transnational civil society created in part by migration; and the context of reception of migrants in the United States. A main conclusion is that the state itself plays a key role in creating transnational political action by migrants and new migrant membership practices. The article draws on printed sources and interviews and ethnography done since 1990.     

The effect of OSHA records-check inspections on reported occupational injuries in manufacturing establishments

In late 1981 Federal workplace safety officers, and those of several states, began on-site checks of plants' injury records to determine which establishments to inspect. Critics claim incentives for underreporting were thus created, and that published injury rates could be biased downward. Because the records-check procedure is not applied in all states or industries, this research (using four different statistical models) compares pre- to post-1981 changes in reported injury rates across states and industries. Data on 3059 uninspected plants suggests a 5–14% decline (cet. par.) in reported rates among plants potentially subject to the records-check procedure.     

Charpy Impact Energy Data: a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Analysis

To assess radiation damage in steel for reactor pressure vessels in the nuclear industry, specimens are subjected to the Charpy test, which measures how much energy a specimen can absorb at a given test temperature before cracking. The resulting Charpy impact energy data are well represented by a three-parameter Burr curve as a function of test temperature, in which the parameters of the Burr curve are themselves dependent on irradiation dose. The resulting non-linear model function, combined with heteroscedastic random errors, gives rise to complicated likelihood surfaces that make conventional statistical techniques difficult to implement. To compute estimates of parameters of practical interest, Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling-based techniques are implemented. The approach is applied to 40 data sets from specimens subjected to no irradiation or one or two doses of irradiation. The influence of irradiation dose on the amount of energy absorbed is investigated.     

Renovating inverval-censored responses

In this note we provide a general framework for describing interval-censored samples including estimation of the magnitude and rank positions of data that have been interval-censored so as to counteract the effect of censoring. This process of sample adjustment, or renovation, allows samples to be compared graphically, using diagrams (such as boxplots) which are based on ranks. The renovation process is based on Buckley-James regression estimators for linear regression with censored data.     

Claire Philip's poems and the “art of dying”

Through a study of the poems Claire Philip wrote while dying of cancer, the author develops the hypothesis that in writing poems, a patient reveals thoughts and feelings that might not be evident in a clinical situation. The thoughts and feelings disclosed in Philip's poems are less about pain and more about grief over separation from loved ones, dread of loss of identity, and doubts about death's meaning. In these disclosures and in the selection of images and stanza forms used to convey the disclosures, Philip is in the tradition of ars moriendi poets, more concerned about how to live and write about living while dying than in what happens to the body in the last moments.     

Combining census and registration data to estimate detailed elderly migration flows in England and Wales

Summary.  A log-linear model is developed to estimate detailed elderly migration flows by combining data from the 2001 UK census and National Health Services patient register. After showing that the census and National Health Service migration flows can be reasonably combined, elderly migration flows between groupings of local authority districts by age, sex and health status for the 2000–2001 and 2003–2004 periods are estimated and then analysed to show how the patterns have changed. By combining registration data with census data, we can provide recent estimates of detailed elderly migration flows, which can be used for improvements in social planning or policy.     

Social and Ecological Dimensions of the Alternative‐Conventional Agricultural Paradigm Scale

Abstract This paper is an empirical test of the dimensionality and predictive value of the alternative‐conventional agricultural paradigm (ACAP) scale developed by Beus and Dunlap. While recognizing that this scale may be appropriate and useful in studies of the agricultural intelligentsia (agricultural scientists, farm policy makers, organization leaders, and farm people actively following and participating in policy deliberations), our data suggest several shortcomings of this scale among a more general sample of farm operators. Initially, the scale is not satisfactorily unidimensional; instead, relatively clear‐cut environmental and family‐farmist dimensions emerged in our analysis of farmer attitudes. Separate environmental and family‐farmist subscales performed better than an omnibus (or paradigmatic) scale in predicting farm operator behaviors.     

Women and plant closings: Unemployment,re-employment,and job training enrollment following dislocation

Major changes in the U.S. economy are leaving blue collar women vulnerable to extended unemployment, permanent job loss, or re-employment at lower wage and benefit levels. Consequently, retraining for other jobs may be a virtual necessity. Information about factors associated with women's employment status after job loss may be useful to policy makers and program planners providing assistance or training to dislocated women. This study of women workers, who are dislocated from jobs in textile and apparel plants in Georgia, identifies the differences between women who are unemployed, re-employed, or enrolled in job training programs following job loss. Findings suggest that stage of the family life cycle and the demands of combining production work and family responsibilities contribute to women's experience of unemployment and their labor market participation.     

On 'class exploitation' in Canada†

Two things make Carl Cuneo's recent (1978) paper on 'rates of exploitation' in Canada remarkable. The first is the magnitudes involved. Cuneo's preferred measure of surplus value (RSV₇), for instance, shows a more than seven-fold increase from 1917 to 1971, indicating a quite spectacular shift in favour of capital in relative income shares in Canadian manufacturing industry. The second thing that makes Cuneo's paper remarkable is the extent to which his findings are inconsistent with findings on income shares reported by 'bourgeois' economists. In a survey of the literature Pen (1971: 164 ff.), for example, reports that in the advanced capitalist economies, the share of income accruing to labour in the economy as a whole has increased substantially and that even if one confines one's attention to the private sector the share of manual workers has not decreased but remained more or less constant in spite of the relative decline in their numbers.¹ Now, it is true that the studies reviewed by Pen approach the problem of income shares with the categories of 'bourgeois' economics while Cuneo approaches the problem with what he regards as Marxist categories, and it is conceivable that this might have accounted for the radical difference in the findings. But still, differences of such magnitude in the trends reported in the shares of capital and labour both give pause and urge a close scrutiny.