Contesting Benevolence: Market Orientations among Muslim Aid Providers in Egypt

This paper studies the pro-market and communitarian tendencies among Egypt’s khayr (benevolence) organizations based on interviews with and observation of managers, staff and volunteers. Can the conflicting market and community orientations in the field of benevolence be interpreted as an instance of the “double movement” of marketization and protection against the market? The analyses demonstrate a growing tendency of marketization and only weak tendencies to transform established communitarian ways of giving into more systematic ways of non-marketized giving. Due to an emergent state-business-civil society nexus, market-oriented voluntary associations hold the potential to undermine or absorb the actually more entrenched communitarian associations. Potentials for a double movement in the era of neoliberalism seem to be weaker than in the classical liberal era because of the deeper permeation of society by market ethics.     

THE APPEAL OF ISLAMIC POLITICS: Ritual and Dialogue in a Poor District of Turkey

The author explores the reasons underlying the growing effectiveness of Islamic movements by studying ethnographically the interaction between the religious movement and the people in a squatter district of Istanbul, Turkey. The empirical analysis examines how the state and the Islamists impact the lives of the residents, and how secularizing and ritualizing interventions are incorporated and resisted. These interventions and the resulting resistance generate hybrid subjects who embody traces of many conflicting discourses and practices. The Islamist party is widely supported, not because it expresses an Islamic essence or enacts strategic framing, but because it is able to reflect and refract the dialogic religious field produced by the interactions between the residents, the state, and Islamism.     

LABOR MARKET REGULATION AND THE WINNER'S CURSE

This paper analyzes the impact British Columbia's 1992 Skill Development and Fair Wage Policy (SDFWP) on bid price determination. Econometric analysis of the public school projects tendered between 1989 and 1995 shows that prior to the SDFWP, the common values auction model applied, and bidders facing higher competition surcharged cost estimates in order to avoid the winner s curse. After the SDFWP, collective uncertainty concerning wages declined, and the independent values model became relevant. During this period, bidders responded to rising competition by lowering their bids. This adjustment explains, at least in part, why wage regulation did not raise bid prices. ( JEL D44, J38, L74, H57)     

How unions affect minority representation in building trades apprenticeship programs

I use program-level data to compare the relative representation of blacks and Latinos in the construction industry apprenticeship programs organized with and without trade union participation. Econometric analysis shows that there are significant differences between the black and Latino experiences. The black share is higher in union-management joint programs, but the Latino share appears to be higher in the unilateral employer programs. Although both groups have lower representation in the higher status (electrical and mechanical) and higher paying occupations, the Latino share is more sensitive to earnings.     

Transforming everyday life: Islamism and social movement theory

The Islamist movement in Turkey bases its mobilization strategy on transforming everyday practices. Public challenges against the state do not form a central part of its repertoire. New Social Movement theory provides some tools for analyzing such an unconventional strategic choice. However, as Islamist mobilization also seeks to reshape the state in the long run, New Social Movement theory (with its focus on culture and society and its relative neglect of the state) needs to be complemented by more institutional analyses. A hegemonic account of mobilization, which incorporates tools from theories of everyday life and identity-formation, as well as from state-centered approaches, is offered as a way to grasp the complexity of Islamism.

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Interstate Variations in Private Sector Union Density in the U.S.

This paper uses union density variations across state and state-industry cells in 1985, 1995, and 2005 to examine the factors that contributed to the decline in private sector unionization in the U.S. In addition to the conventional variables, it develops two measures to gauge the effects of union-management strife. Estimations indicate that union density varied directly with union organizing efforts and inversely with the employer opposition to unionization. Decomposition analysis reveals, however, that these variables do not explain why union density declined because changes in their marginal effects were favorable to unionization. Declining union density instead is attributable mostly to the shift factors subsumed under the intercept term over 1985–1995, and shift factors cum negative changes in sensitivity of unionization to workforce characteristics over 1995–2005.