Work/Care Regimes: Institutions,Culture and Behaviour and the Australian Case

Increasingly around the industrialized world, labour markets rely upon the paid work of women, many of whom have dependents. Such changing patterns of paid work by women — and by men — are located within work/care regimes that are more or less hostile to the needs of paid workers who care for others. This article sets out a model of work/care regimes and locates the Australian case within international and historical contexts. In Australia, the unchanging normative male worker archetype dominates institutions of work and care, while the cultures of motherhood and fatherhood remain stoically resistant to renovation. In the meantime, the behaviour of working women runs ahead of these unchanging cultures and institutions, creating a policy interest in ‘reconciling’ work and care, but a failure to provide it. The reasons for this failure are outlined.     

Progress and cumulation in the human sciences after the fall

What do we mean by progress and cumulation in the social and human sciences? Recent thinking in the philosophy and history of science has led to an abandonment of some versions of logical positivism and of verificationism that had a strong deductive and theory testing orientation. What is to replace them is less clear. This paper argues that progress and cumulation can be seen as a process of evaluation and retention within an epistemic community. Scholarly disciplines differ in their social structure and in their epistemic and normative commitments. Since sociology is a fragmented discipline, progress and cumulation differ within its multiple subdisciplines, which to varying extents represent epistemic communities. Brief sketches of progress (advance) and cumulation in several subdisciplines are offered.     

科技兴市:佛山跨世纪的战略选择

作者运用理论分析和实证分析相结合的方法对佛山市经济发展的实践予以深刻剖视后指出:佛山市经济建设处在从物质投入主导型向科技进步主导塑转变的转折点上,在跨世纪的经济发展与经济竞争中,佛山市必须实行科技兴市的新发展战略,作者对佛山市科技兴市战略的涵义,目标,条件作了深入分析,并进而设计了科技兴市战略的运行机制和政策落点。     

What to do with “I Don't Know:” Elicitation in Ethnographic & Survey Interviews

When a researcher enters an interview, she has already construed it as being a standard type of communicative event. This article considers how a researcher's construal of a communicative event as either an ethnographic or survey interview shapes the production of information. Interview standards entail epistemological assumptions that directly inform the type of information sought and produced. I consider this process through a comparison of the elicitation techniques I employed in survey and ethnographic interviews conducted during research in Mexico. I draw on theory in linguistic anthropology on the nature of meaning in language, examining how dialogicality and interaction are essential to understanding the construal of communicative events.     

Teachers' Reactions to Children's Aggression

Drawing on social schema theory ( Fiske & Taylor, 1991 ) and social identity theory ( Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ), this study examined the impact on teachers’ reactions to children's aggression of three variables, two of which were related to the aggressors and one was related to the teachers. Experienced female elementary school teachers (N =90) each read a scenario that described an aggressive episode committed by a group of boys against a boy from another class. The aggressors were either good or bad children, who were either popular or unpopular with their classroom peers. In addition, the scenario manipulated the teachers’ identification with, or commitment to, the class to be either high or low. Analysis of the teachers’ ratings of causal responsibility, liking, and recommended punishment revealed a consistent negative response from the teachers towards the aggressors versus the victim. However, the teachers’ responses were also interactively influenced by the aggressors’ goodness and popularity, as well as the teachers’ class identification. The results are discussed in relation to other findings on teachers’ responses to school aggression and bullying, as well as how their responses might best be explained.     

1917年京直水灾与赈济情况略述

1917年,京直地区出现了数十年未遇的大水灾,一百多个县被淹,几百万人口受灾,灾情十分严重。水灾发生后,北洋政府和社会各界予以高度重视,施行了一系列赈灾措施,使灾民的困苦得到一定程度的缓解。但是,在赈灾过程中也存在着不少的弊端,使赈灾效果大打折扣,这是由当时的社会政治环境所造成的。     

Making the Best of a Bad Job? Female Part‐Timers’ Orientations and Attitudes to Work

This article uses data from 50 qualitative interviews with female part‐time workers in low‐level jobs in Britain to illustrate their attitudes, orientations and aspirations towards paid work. The research reports two main findings. Firstly, even female part‐time workers at the bottom end of the occupational structure are not a homogeneous group of workers. Secondly, they are not all highly satisfied with their jobs. The article argues that many women (especially those in working‐class households) still do not have a genuine choice between ‘family work’ and ‘market work’. It concludes by presenting a theoretical model of orientations to work.     

Interfamily economic exchange: A function of culture or economics?

This study explores differences in inter-household exchange of goods and services in Anglo- and Mexican-American families controlling for income level and for ethnicity. The extent of such exchange, its perceived importance to the family's quality of life, satisfaction with the exchange, and the relation of persons in the exchange process are examined. Significant differences are found more often between higher income Anglo- and Mexican-Americans than between low-income families, both in the family providing goods and services for others and in the receipt of them. Higher income Mexican-American families are more likely than their Anglo- counterparts to exchange with relatives. Ethnic effects are more prevalent in higher income households than in low-income households. Economic effects are more predominant than ethnic effects.This study contributes to interregional Agricultural Experiment Station Research Project NC-128, Quality of Life as Influenced by Area of Residence. Cooperating states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas.Flora L. Williams' current research interests include income adequacy, financial problems, and indicators of change in economic well-being. She is an Associate Professor, Consumer Sciences and Retailing, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907.     

Assimilation vs. multiculturalism: Views from a community in France

A recent American survey of attitudes toward societal multiculturalism vs. assimilation has found surprisingly widespread support for maintaining heritage cultures not only among immigrant minority groups but also among most subsamples of majority host groups, black and white. Working-class whites are the one exception. This pilot study explores the same attitude domain in a contrasting European setting. Randomly selected samples of middle- and working-class families (a mother, father, and teenage son or daughter) from a small city in France were interviewed. As a group, they were neutral to slightly favorable to immigrants maintaining heritage cultures and languages rather than losing them through assimilation. On measures of attitudes toward specific immigrant groups, there were marked intergroup dyfferunces with Maghrebian Arabs rated leist favorably and Southeast Asians, the model immigrants, most favorably. Comparisons of subgroups of respondents who varied in terms of (a) political left-right orientation, (b) social class standing, (c) degree of religiosity, and (d) generational level provide the base for a more general discussion of cultural assimilation and multiculturalism.     

Origins and destinies: Immigration to the United States since World War II

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Today's immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an hourglass economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversity. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in—and consequences for—American society are considered.