Renegotiating family gender identities in a disadvantaged Atlantic Canadian working-class community: young adults' perspectives

Within a climate of reduced social welfare support, disadvantaged working-class communities in Canada are in transition as they consider their futures without the industries that were once the staples of their economies. In this paper, I examine how a group of young women and men living in Industrial Cape Breton – a disadvantaged Atlantic Canadian working-class community – negotiate the traditional gendered identities ascribed to them through local history with twenty-first-century conceptions of family and gender. Young adults in this study suggest that class-based and gender-based capital plays a significant role in how these changes are experienced by individuals, families, and communities. Furthermore, the social, economic, and psychological expenses for individuals attempting to secure economic comfort and gendered respectability in their disadvantaged communities leave little time and energy to critically reflect on the systemic social and economic conditions that enable class-based gender inequalities to thrive. As a result, traditional concepts of the masculine family ‘breadwinner’ and the feminine family ‘caregiver’ survive even as the societal basis for these roles is eroded by global capitalism.     

Darwinism, probability and complexity: market-based organizational transformation and change explained through the theories of evolution

The study of transformation and change is one of the most important areas of social science research. This paper synthesizes and critically reviews the emerging traditions in the study of change dynamics. Three mainstream theories of evolution are introduced to explain change: the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest, the Probability model and the Complexity approach. The literature review provides a basis for development of research questions that search for a more comprehensive understanding of organizational change. The paper concludes by arguing for the development of a complementary research tradition, which combines an evolutionary and organizational analysis of transformation and change.     

Embracing the Village and Tribe: Critical Thinking for Social Workers From an African-Centered Approach

The social work department at a small historically Black college implemented an African-centered approach to the course Critical Thinking for Social Workers for freshmen students who declared social work as their major. We firmly believe that knowing and understanding the history and legacy of people of African descent is extremely important in educating African American students. Various pedagogical techniques, assignments, and intentional lecture topics were used in the implementation of this unique teaching style. This article reports the findings from using the African-centered approach in pedagogy and offers implications for social work education in the 21st century for historically Black colleges and universities and other programs with minority student populations.     

Use of senior centers as a moderator of stress related distress among Latino elders

Little is known about the moderating effects of community services on psychological distress among Latino elders. This study explores the use of senior centers as an intervention strategy to moderate the harmful impact of stress on psychological distress. The study was conducted using data from the 1988 National Survey of Hispanic Elderly People (N=2,299). To examine the direct and moderating effects of the use of senior centers on the relationship between stress and psychological distress we applied multiple regression analysis to an initial model, a direct effect model, and a moderating model. The results indicated that, under stressful life situations, respondents who used senior centers experienced lower levels of psychological distress than those who did not. Implications of the findings for senior centers and for further research are discussed.     

Income Allocation in Marital and Cohabiting Unions: The Case of Mainland Puerto Ricans

The rise of cohabitation and the growing share of births to cohabiting couples have led to speculation that the boundary between marriage and cohabitation is blurring. We examine this issue with an analysis of the financial arrangements of fathers of mainland Puerto Rican children. The analysis shows that married fathers are more likely than cohabiting fathers to pool their income, but this difference does not result from socioeconomic and demographic factors that foster uncertainty. The analysis also demonstrates that income allocation methods are generally stable over time after differences in union dissolution by allocation method are considered. The discussion emphasizes the need for research on the ways that financial ties reflect and reinforce the bonds between partners.     

Beyond Parental Status: Psychological Well‐Being in Middle and Old Age

Surveys show little evidence of psychosocial disadvantage among childless middle‐aged and older adults, but less is known about the diverse experiences that influence subjective well‐being among parents and childless adults. In this article, the author uses the National Survey of Families and Households to test a parental‐status typology on the basis of attitudes among childless adults and parent‐child relationship quality and the connection of these factors with loneliness and depression. Poorer parent‐child relationships are linked to worse outcomes for both mothers and fathers, net of other factors. For childless adults, negative attitudes about childlessness are associated with greater distress for women than for men.     

Mexican Seasonal Migration to Canada and Development: A Community-based Comparison

The article explores development and migration. Based on a comparison of investment‐related behaviour of participants of the Canadian Mexican Seasonal Workers Programme from eleven Mexican villages, the article explores the impact of the nature of the migrants' community of origin on development. Contrary to the findings reported by the “new economics of labour migration” theorists, it was found that migrants from the least endowed communities, not from the best endowed communities, are likely to invest in agricultural land. This pattern is related to variable prices of land and the composition of the participants of the Canadian guest worker programme, most of whom are poor. The article draws attention to the importance of considering composition of migrant workers in an analysis of the impact of migration on community development. Development is analysed in the article from both the “growth” and the “quality of living” perspectives and it is found that regardless of the perspective used, the nature of the community does not affect the impact of migration on development.     

CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS OF GENDER AND THE CARIBBEAN: TAKING IT INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

ABSTRACT

In the years after the Greek Junta, activists who had been involved in anti-dictatorship movements abroad returned as the country’s new pool of left-leaning, well-educated political actors. Drawing on interviews with former activists and borrowing from recent developments in cultural sociology, I analyse these returns as political projects fraught with moral conundrums. I argue that the contemporary crisis structure accounts of returns by placing speakers within what Boltanski and Thévenot call a ‘situation subject to the imperative of justification’. I make two arguments regarding the critiques and valuations used in accounts: First, the idealized political subject put forward by former activists promotes withdrawal over participation and silence over speech. Second, failure is valorized as a principled mode of self-exoneration. This article further demonstrates the importance of theorizing return migration within an ethnographic treatment of the present.     

Racial and Ethnic Determinants of Interracial and Ethnic Trust

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to discern which individual factors are associated with interracial/ethnic trust among a national probability sample of African Americans, Latinos, and non-Hispanic whites. Using national data from the 2000 Community Benchmark Survey, the multiple regression results indicate that, even after controlling for education and income, African Americans and Latinos reported significantly lower levels of interracial/ethnic trust than did non-Hispanic whites. Additionally, separate regression equations indicate that predictors associated with interracial/ethnic trust varied by racial and ethnic group. Implications and future research are discussed.     

Majority Rules? The Effects of School Ethnic Composition on Substance Use by Mexican Heritage Adolescents

This article examines key aspects of the school environment - its composition by ethnicity and acculturation - as important social contexts for understanding Mexican immigrant and Mexican American adolescents' drug use norms and behaviors. Results are presented based on surveys completed by Mexican-background students from 35 Phoenix. Arizona middle schools, whose enrollment ranged from a numerical minority to an overwhelming majority. Multivariate mixed models tested for the influence of school ethnic composition measures on substance use outcomes, while accounting for individual level predictors and for the nesting of data at the school level. The proportional representation of Latinos in the school was not a factor in an individual's drug use norms or drug use for the sample overall. Once students were broken down by acculturation status, however, ethnic composition had an effect. Less acculturated Mexican heritage students in schools with higher proportions of Latino students reported less substance use and less adherence to pro-drug norms. Further investigation using other measures of ethnic composition suggested that these effects were attributable to the larger presence of less acculturated Latinos in the school rather than more acculturated Latino students. These school-level effects support the individual-level results indicating that less acculturated Mexican American students face less daunting substance use risks. The results suggest that ethnic group size, but not necessarily numerical predominance, matters and that within-group differences influence the effect of a particular ethnic group's presence in the school. In other words, the majority does not always rule. These findings are interpreted using the concepts of segmented assimilation and school level social capital.