Racial/Ethnic Minority Community College Students' Critical Consciousness and Social Cognitive Career Outcomes

A need exists to better understand how racial/ethnic minority students' critical consciousness development in response to marginalization may be involved in their educational and career development. We therefore examined the link between critical consciousness development and career decision self-efficacy and career outcome expectations among racial/ethnic minority community college students. Following social cognitive career theory's conceptual pillars, we developed a testable model integrating critical consciousness and social cognitive variables. This model was tested with 135 racially and ethnically diverse community college students. Data analysis included path analyses and tests of model fit using structural equation modeling. Results suggested that (a) higher critical agency is linked to higher career decision self-efficacy and outcome expectations and (b) critical action and reflection have a bidirectional link and predict higher critical agency. Implications for research and practice aiming to close educational and career gaps among racial/ethnic minorities are discussed.     

Approximate Identifiability, Moments and Censored Data

It is well known that the joint distribution of a pair of random variables ( X,Y ) is not identifiable on the basis of the joint distribution of the function (min ( X,Y ), 1[ X < Y ]). This paper introduces the concept of approximate identifiability and studies its relevance to the function (min ( X,Y ), Y ). It shows that the distribution of ( X,Y ) is approximately identifiable on the basis of the distribution of (min ( X,Y ), Y ). The identification is explicitly executed by a method of moments. The method is applied to the analysis of censored distributions arising in the theory of clinical trials and is compared to the standard method of Kaplan and Meier.     

Choice of Money Transfer Methods in the Case of Albanian Immigrants in Greece

This paper investigates the choice of the method that immigrants use for the transfer of savings to their home country. The paper examines the example of Albanian immigrants in Greece using a sample of permanent and seasonal immigrants. Three methods were proposed to the immigrants: the banking network, money transfer companies and hand carried transfer by their or a relative’s return in Albania. Cost and quickness of transfer were considered as a parameter for the choice. The paper finds that despite the growth of remittances through the official network and the growth of this network in Albania, immigrants prefer to send money through the parallel market by their return or a relative’s in Albania. Within the official market, permanent immigrants are more likely to use the banking network while seasonal immigrants prefer to use the money transfer companies’ network.     

Political leadership – the key for explaining post-communist diversity

This article focuses on the evaluation of recent research on post-communist political regime diversity in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It offers a snapshot of the literature which looks for explanations for this diversity in four sets of factors: pre-communist and communist legacies, transitional institutional choices, political leadership, and foreign influence. The findings are based on the political evolution of three countries: Slovakia, Belarus, and Macedonia. They are representative for all post-communist countries both in terms of regime trajectory and regional location. The author concludes that post-communist political regime diversity can best be explained when the political leadership in general and the top politicians’ ideology, in particular, are placed at the centre of the analysis. This explanation correlates well with all types of post-communist regime, whether democracy, dictatorship, or intermediate regime. The other factors – legacies, institutional choices, and foreign influence – at best, may act only as reinforcing variables in some cases.     

The Annual Demand for Seasonal Immigrant Labor in Greece and its Influence on the Entrance of Albanian Workers

The paper investigates the annual inflow of legal immigrants in Greece the last 6?years, 2005?C2010, on the basis of the demand of Greek employers for seasonal immigrant labor in provenance from non-European Union countries. This process is determined by the new legislative framework described by the Law 3386/2005 on the entrance, accommodation and social integration of third-country nationals in the Greek territory. Every year Greek authorities determine the maximum number of residence and work permits that will be given to non-EU immigrants. Permits concern mainly seasonal jobs and profited basically to Albanian workers. Local needs for work determine the number of immigrants on the local level. Local demand is expressed through prefectures (Greece is divided administratively in 54 prefectures). The local needs determine the national demand, and therefore the annual inflow, for legal economic immigrants from non-EU countries. The paper analyses the evolution of this demand and tries to explain the factors that influence this evolution; are they mainly structural or they are related to economic activity? The analysis is based on a prefectural level because it permits a more qualitative approach of the evolution since we can have a more specific result. It appears that some prefectures, especially at the region of Central Macedonia, concentrate the main part of the annual demand for seasonal workers from third countries, basically Albanian workers. This demand is oriented to land workers, mainly for agricultural work. It appears that unemployment has only limited influence on this demand.     

Demographic change and the labour share of income

Despite similar levels of per capita income, education and technology, the development of labour income shares in OECD countries has displayed different patterns since 1960. The paper examines the role of demography in this regard. We first use a standard overlapping generations model to derive the mechanisms by which demographic change can affect the labour share. It turns out that demographic change can affect the labour share either by altering the domestic capital intensity, by causing factor-biased technological change or in a small open economy framework by creating a gap between domestic savings and investments. The latter affects the country’s investments abroad and in return its net foreign asset income which directly leads to changes in the labour share. Empirical estimations based on these insights, provide evidence that an increases in the expected retirement durations and old-age dependency ratios as well as declines in labour force growth rates have indeed been major forces behind the decline in labour shares that took place in many countries. These effects tend to be larger in open economies and pension reforms towards a funded pension system seem to have accelerated the effects.     

UNDERSTANDING COMPUTER GAME CULTURES A situated approach

This article uses data and theory from psychological and sociological sources in order to examine computer gamers engagement with computer games. The article employs data from studies of gender difference in computer game interactions in order to theoretically open up the rich diversity of gamers interactions with games. The theoretical discussion employs a mix of psychological ideas, especially those of affordances, effectivities and attunement, with ideas from cultural studies, especially those of subject positions and preferred readings. The article argues that gaming needs to be viewed as an activity taking place in cultural niches that arise in the complex interaction between games, gamers and gaming cultures.