Democratizing Rural Economy: Institutional Friction,Sustainable Struggle and the Cooperative Movement*

Abstract Sustainable development demands institutions manage the conflicts and struggles that inevitably arise over material and ideal interests. While current cooperative theory privileges the economic element, a political economy of cooperation emphasizes cooperatives' tentative bridging of economic and political spheres with a democratic ethos. The cooperatives' democratic political structure exists in tension with a capitalist economic structure and other sites of friction. These contradictions are: in the realm of social relations, between production and consumption; in the realm of spatial relations, between the local and the global; and in the realm of collective action, between cooperatives as both traditional as well as new social movements. Where neo‐classical economic models seek to eliminate or reduce these tensions, political economy views these tensions as functional to sustainability by creating an “institutional friction” that facilitates innovation, flexibility and long‐term adaptability. This political economy of cooperation is intended as a step toward the development of a multidimensional sociology of cooperation.     

HIERARCHICAL BAYESIAN MODELLING OF SOCIAL VARIATION IN THE AGE DEPENDENCE OF DISABILITY PREVALENCE

Motivated by a study of social variation in the relationship of functional limitation prevalence to age, this paper examines methods for modelling social variation in health outcomes. It is argued that, from a Bayesian perspective, modelling the dependence of functional limitation prevalence on age separately for each social group, corresponds to an implausible prior model, in addition to leading to imprecise estimates for some groups. The alternative strategy of fitting a single model, perhaps including some age‐by‐group interactions but omitting higher‐order interactions, requires a strong prior commitment to the absence of such effects. Hierarchical Bayesian modelling is proposed as a compromise between these two analytical approaches. Under all hierarchical Bayes analyses there is strong evidence for an ethnic group difference in limitation prevalence in early‐ to mid‐adulthood among tertiary‐qualified males. In contrast, the single‐model approach largely misses this effect, while the group‐specific analyses exhibit an unrealistically large degree of heterogeneity in gender‐education‐specific ethnicity effects. The sensitivity of posterior inferences to prior specifications is studied.     

The Risk of MTBE Relative to Other VOCs in Public Drinking Water in California

Ongoing publicity about methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) suggests that this chemical is of greater concern than other contaminants commonly found in drinking water. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the available MTBE data in context with other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are detected in public drinking water sources in California. We find that of the 28 VOCs with a primary maximum contaminant level (MCL) in California, 21 were found in 50 or more drinking water sources from 1985 to 2002. Over the last 10 years, the most frequently detected VOCs were chloroform, tetrachloroethylene (PCE), and trichloroethylene (TCE), which were found in about 9-15% of all sampled drinking water sources. These same chemicals were found to have the highest mean detected concentrations over the last 5 years, ranging from 13 to 15 microg/L. Many VOCs were also found to routinely exceed state and federal drinking water standards, including benzene and carbon tetrachloride. By comparison, MTBE was found in approximately 1% of sampled drinking water sources for most years, and of those drinking water sources found to contain MTBE from 1998 to 2002, over 90% had detected concentrations below California's primary MCL of 13 microg/L. Relative to the other VOCs evaluated, MTBE has the lowest estimated California cancer potency value, and was found to pose one of the least cancer risks from household exposures to contaminated drinking water. These findings suggest that MTBE poses an insignificant threat to public drinking water supplies and public health in California, particularly when compared to other common drinking water contaminants.     

Young Children's Rights and Public Policy: Practices and Possibilities for Citizenship in the Early Years

There is a growing belief that young children should be involved in decisions that affect them. This belief has its foundations in a new model of the young child, in a new concern with young children's rights as citizens and in new knowledge about the significance of young children's early experiences. This article examines the increasing interest in involving young children in policy‐making and its rationale. It then presents two case studies from Australia of consulting young children in policy‐making, to show what consulting young children can offer children, policy‐makers and the wider community.     

France and the Unknown Second Generation: Preliminary Results on Social Mobility

The growing concern about the future of the offspring of immigrants in France has prompted the rise of a “second generation question.” Access of “new second generations” (i.e., those born from the waves of immigration of the 1950s and 1960s) to the job market and their visibility in social and cultural life have challenged the “French model of integration.” Moreover, the ebbing of social mobility in the France of the 1970s led to a process of social downgrading which may affect significantly the second generation due to their social background and the persistence of ethnic and racial discrimination. It is thus important to investigate what kind of social mobility is actually experienced by people of immigrant ancestry, and what could hinder their mobility. This article uses the data from a new survey, the Enquête Histoire Familiale (family history survey) conducted in 1999 and based on 380,000 individuals, which analyzes the positions of second generations of Turkish, Moroccan and Portuguese origin. We argue that they follow different paths: a reproduction of the positions of the first generation; a successful social mobility through education; or a mobility hindered by discrimination.     

Religion and Fertility in Contemporary Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has been and continues to be deeply divided on the basis of religion. This paper examines and compares contemporary fertility in the two communities given the sharp declines that have occurred in recent decades. The data are drawn from the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study and cover 108,000 women aged 16–44 in the period 1997–2007. A logit analysis of births in the period is undertaken based on individual demographic data and also the characteristics of the locality in which the woman is resident. The effect of religion is measured by its individual marginal effect averaged over the total sample, over time and by the age of the woman. The estimated average marginal effect is 4 % of the probability of a woman having a birth over the entire period. The effect peaks when the woman is between 29 and 30 years and is stable over time. When the fertility behaviour of each religious group is compared separately with those women that came from the same background but had lost their religion, it is found to differ substantially. Thus, community background is rejected as a possible explanation of the difference in fertility between declared Catholics and Protestants. Although the fertility rates of former Catholics and Protestants appear to be converging, the size of these groups is relatively small. There is no evidence to suggest that the small but distinct difference in the fertility rates of the two religious communities is likely to change in the immediate future.