扩大中间阶层是构建和谐社会的必要条件

中间阶层实质上是一个经济地位、政治地位和社会地位等各方面介于上层精英阶层和下层大众阶层之间的、具有中等社会经济地位的阶层和群体的集合.扩大中间阶层是构建和谐社会的必要条件.通过运用财政税收政策,大力发展教育和科技,鼓励创业,建立顺畅的社会流动机制等方式壮大我国的中间阶层对促进构建社会主义和谐社会有重要的作用.     

试析中国与沙特阿拉伯的石油合作

沙特阿拉伯是世界第一大原油生产国和出口国,中国是世界第二大石油消费国和消费量增长最快的石油进口国.沙特需要为其巨大的能源储量寻找新的市场,中国需要海外能源满足经济增长的需要.因此,两国在能源领域存在着相互依赖关系.正是这种相互依赖关系推动着中沙关系的稳步发展,本文力图运用政治经济学的分析法对中沙石油合作做出理性分析与判断.     

试析语感研究的现状及存在的问题

从语感研究的现状看,关涉语感本身的理论问题得到了比较深入的研究,也取得了很多成果。同时,语感作为我国第八次课程改革《语文课程标准》的核心词汇之一,语感培养问题开始真正走进人们的思维视阈。由于现实上语感实践环节的研究相对薄弱,从而造成语感教学实践成为目前语感研究面临的最大问题,其中既包括语感教学实施也包括切合实际的语感评价指标体系建立。     

The belonging model of trust

Although we know that high‐quality employee–organization relationships are beneficial, these relationships are complex and not fully understood, especially among employees of nonprofit organizations. In particular, we know little about how these employees perceive trust, which may overlook an important contributor to effective management. We begin to address this issue by testing a new theoretical model that conceptualizes perceived insider status, psychological ownership, and organizational identification as foundations for the perception of justice and subsequent trust. Our results indicate that psychological ownership and perceived insider status relate to trust through procedural and interpersonal justice. These results contrast those typically found in for‐profit contexts in that organizational identification did not predict justice and that distributive and informational justice did not predict trust.     

‘Car Talk’: automobility and Chinese international students in Michigan

The apparent conspicuous consumption of luxury vehicles by Chinese international students attending a public Michigan University provides an opportunity to examine the convergence of different ideas about automobility. Upwardly mobile Chinese families send their children to Michigan, a state with a tradition of auto-production, for educational opportunities not available in China. The resulting ‘car talk’ of local residents about Chinese students and their cars speaks to broader anxieties about Michigan’s shifting relationship to the global economy. However, the paper focuses on the meanings of auto-owning created by Chinese students who make decisions about the purchase and use of their autos within a social world oriented primarily to other Chinese students and societal ideas about auto-owning circulating among friends, family and society in China. For Chinese students, car owning encompasses meanings of status, safety and sociability that are created within the context of study abroad.     

Semiparametric regression of clustered current status data

This paper discusses regression analysis of clustered current status data under semiparametric additive hazards models. In particular, we consider the situation when cluster sizes can be informative about correlated failure times from the same cluster. To address the problem, we present estimating equation-based estimation procedures and establish asymptotic properties of the resulting estimates. Finite sample performance of the proposed method is assessed through an extensive simulation study, which indicates the procedure works well. The method is applied to a motivating data set from a lung tumorigenicity study.     

Socioeconomic status and the dynamics of preferences for income inequality in the United States, 1978–2016

Although considerable evidence indicates that public preferences for income inequality and redistribution vary across socioeconomic groups (i.e., occupation and income), much less is known about the temporal dynamics of these preferences. The purpose of this study is (a) to examine whether the attitudinal distance between managerial/professional workers and unskilled manual workers has changed (converged or diverged) over time and to (b) explore the reasons for and implications of the dynamics of preferences in the past several decades. Using data from the General Social Survey 1978–2016 (23 time‐points; N = 27,211), this study finds that the influence of occupational class has lost some of its significance in shaping public preferences for income inequality and that the declining effect of occupation can be explained in part by the attitudinal convergence between better‐ and less‐educated citizens. Findings suggest that proequality coalitions across educational boundaries play a remedial role in bridging the occupational divide over government redistribution in the United States.     

The impact of managerial political ties on corporate governance and debt financing: Evidence from Ghana

In this study, we draw upon insights from agency theory to examine the impact of managerial political ties on cost of debt and also to explore whether corporate governance mediates this impact. We hypothesize that political ties reduce financial reporting quality, disclosure of non-financial information and board independence, and are therefore associated with higher interest rates. We also hypothesize that the negative effect of political ties on the cost of debt will be stronger if firms borrow from privately-owned banks versus government-owned banks. Using data from Ghana, we find support for our direct and moderation hypotheses; political ties are associated with high interest rates and poor corporate governance. However, we do not find evidence of mediation. Altogether, the findings reveal the dark side of political connections and highlight the cost of political embeddedness in emerging credit markets.     

Three notes on a political economy of youth

The paper seeks to makes a contribution to a recent debate in the Journal about what a political economy of youth might look like. The paper will take up aspects of Sukarieh and Tannock’s [2016. ‘On the political economy of youth: a comment.’ Journal of Youth Studies 19 (9): 1281–1289] response to the initial contributions by Côté [2014. ‘Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.’ Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543, 2016. ‘A New Political Economy of Youth Reprised: Rejoinder to France and Threadgold.’ Journal of Youth Studies.] And France and Threadgold [2015. ‘Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.’ Journal of Youth Studies], and will take the form of three ‘notes’: Capitalism: From the first industrial revolution to the third industrial revolution; Youth as an artefact of governmentalised expertise; The agency/structure problem in youth studies: Foucault’s dispositif and post-human exceptionalism.

These notes will suggest that twenty-first century capitalism is globalising, is largely neo-Liberal, and is being reconfigured in profound ways by the Anthropocene, bio-genetics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). A political economy of twenty-first century capitalism, let alone a political economy of young people, must be able to account for a capitalism that in many ways looks like the capitalism of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, but which is at the same time profoundly different as it enters what has often been described as the Third Industrial Revolution. It is these profound emergences that pose the greatest challenges for engaging with a political economy of youth.