Class,place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.     

How do new members affect the relationship between principal investigator’s network position and academic output of granted funds?

The paper focuses on how to improve academic output of a granted fund when the adding of new members changes principal investigator’s network position. This objective is refined by exploring how new members affect the relationship between principal investigator’s network position and the academic output of granted funds, and whether this effect is similar in high-output and low-output collaboration networks. New members are divided into two groups, namely, international collaboration and inbound mobility. Using negative binomial regression on research funds supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the results indicate that new members indeed have moderating effects on the relationship between principal investigator’s network position and the academic output of granted funds. Moreover, we find that this moderating effect in high-output collaboration networks is larger than that in low-output collaboration networks. Our findings provide practical implications for the decision makers to design funding planning and for the principal investigators to improve academic output.     

Hand-Hygiene Mitigation Strategies Against Global Disease Spreading through the Air Transportation Network

The risk for a global transmission of flu-type viruses is strengthened by the physical contact between humans and accelerated through individual mobility patterns. The Air Transportation System plays a critical role in such transmissions because it is responsible for fast and long-range human travel, while its building components—the airports—are crowded, confined areas with usually poor hygiene. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) consider hand hygiene as the most efficient and cost-effective way to limit disease propagation. Results from clinical studies reveal the effect of hand washing on individual transmissibility of infectious diseases. However, its potential as a mitigation strategy against the global risk for a pandemic has not been fully explored. Here, we use epidemiological modeling and data-driven simulations to elucidate the role of individual engagement with hand hygiene inside airports in conjunction with human travel on the global spread of epidemics. We find that, by increasing travelers engagement with hand hygiene at all airports, a potential pandemic can be inhibited by 24% to 69%. In addition, we identify 10 airports at the core of a cost-optimal deployment of the hand-washing mitigation strategy. Increasing hand-washing rate at only those 10 influential locations, the risk of a pandemic could potentially drop by up to 37%. Our results provide evidence for the effectiveness of hand hygiene in airports on the global spread of infections that could shape the way public-health policy is implemented with respect to the overall objective of mitigating potential population health crises.     

Migration as a window to empowerment: Nepalese women's experiences in South Korea

ABSTRACT

Migrant women are often described as victims of the global economy: accounts of human rights abuses and economic exploitation have eclipsed more positive accounts of the impact of migrant work on women's lives. Some migrant women are positioned to make use of new opportunities which they see as empowering, in contrast to earlier experiences in their homes or sending countries. This study, based on qualitative interviews with 13 young Nepalese women working in manufacturing and agricultural sectors with Employment Permits in South Korea, highlights a rather positive window of women's empowerment. It shares the perspectives of young, mostly single women who gain self-confidence through their new ability to take care of their family (some becoming primary breadwinners). The women are also able to plan for their economic futures, and report their voices being heard more in important family decision-making. These material, relational, and perceptual improvements are all important dimensions of empowerment. In these experiences, gender intersects with age and other factors to produce a nuanced view of specific young women's experience of migrant work.     

发展中国家就业与经济发展

就业与经济增长之间存在着密切联系。在当代世界,大多数发展中国家的失业率要比就业率增长快的多,特别是20世纪八九十年代的失业危机比六七十年代更为严重。国际劳工组织《1999年世界就业报告》中认为越来越多的劳工被排斥社会之外,导致社会出现一系列社会弊端。本文首先阐述就业与劳动力充分利用问题,然后总结发展中国家劳动力运用的特点及对策,最后讨论了价格与就业之间的关系。     

Roles of Stock Price and Exchange Rate in Slovakia's Money Demand Function and Policy Implications

The demand for real M1 in Slovakia is positively influenced by real output and the stock price and negatively associated with the deposit rate, depreciation of the koruna, the euro interest rate, and the expected inflation rate. Considering the goods and the money market simultaneously, these results suggest that a higher stock price may or may not cause real output to rise and that a depreciation of the koruna or a higher euro interest rate would help raise Slovakia's real output. The coefficients of the deposit rate and the stock price in real M2 demand are insignificant at the 10% level. The likelihood ratio test in the extended Box–Cox model shows that the double-log form cannot be rejected at the 5% level while the linear form can be rejected at the 5% level. The CUSUM and CUSUMSQ tests show that the money demand function was relatively stable.      

Mobile locations: construction of home in a group of mobile transnational professionals

Abstract How do professionals constitute their homes under conditions of extensive mobility? The study is based on interviews with professionals working for an international organization who are chronically mobile. Despite their high mobility, they describe little difficulty constructing homes. Home can best be understood here not as a fixed location, but as a set of relationships, to both humans and non‐humans. There are elements of spatial proximity, but also of distance, and homes may be defined by both objects present and excluded. They may be a focal point, but at the same time part of a heterogeneous network that spans localities as well as binds past and present. Home is therefore territorially defined, but only as an extended network rather than as a bounded location.     

Assessing the bias due to non-coverage of residential movers in the German Microcensus Panel: an evaluation using data from the Socio-Economic Panel

The German Microcensus (MC) is a large scale rotating panel survey over three years. The MC is attractive for longitudinal analysis over the entire participation duration because of the mandatory participation and the very high case numbers (about 200000 respondents). However, as a consequence of the area sampling that is used for the MC, residential mobility is not covered and consequently statistical information at the new residence is lacking in the MC sample. This raises the question whether longitudinal analyses, like transitions between labour market states, are biased and how different methods perform that promise to reduce such a bias. Similar problems occur also for other national Labour Force Surveys (LFS) which are rotating panels and do not cover residential mobility, see Clarke and Tate (2002). Based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which covers residential mobility, we analysed the effects of missing data of residential movers by the estimation of labour force flows. By comparing the results from the complete SOEP sample and the results from the SOEP, restricted to the non-movers, we concluded that the non-coverage of the residential movers can not be ignored in Rubin’s sense. With respect to correction methods we analysed weighting by inverse mobility scores and log-linear models for partially observed contingency tables. Our results indicate that weighting by inverse mobility scores reduces the bias to about 60% whereas the official longitudinal weights obtained by calibration result in a bias reduction of about 80%. The estimation of log-linear models for non-ignorable non-response leads to very unstable results.     

西南民族地区乡城人口流动的推阻因素分析

本文根据人口流动的内在机理,从现阶段影响我国人口流动的大环境及西南民族地区的现实区情出发,分析了相关政策、经济发展水平、自然条件、人口特征等因素对西南民族地区当前乡城人口流动的推阻作用。     

Stuck in the Slow Lane: Reconceptualizing the Links between Gender,Transport and Employment

This article draws on primary research undertaken in the North East of England to explore the way in which inequalities in access to transport resources impact on women’s opportunities to enter the public domain of paid work. It advances the idea of spatiality as a social construction and, building on previous studies, it explores the way in which a gender division of transport operating in the home and at work limits women’s access to temporal, financial and personal and geographic travel resources; ultimately constraining women’s mobility and restricting their employment opportunities. Finally, the article will argue that, although some women can achieve ‘masculine’ levels of transport resources, the majority of women are stuck in the slow lane and their mobility deprivation often confines them to the private world of the family, or alternatively, to part‐time, low paid work on the periphery of the labour market. This leads to the conclusion that there is an urgent need to provide women with a range of mobility choices which enhance their access to the labour market and to challenge the socially constructed processes which underpin the discrimination women face when accessing the world of paid employment.