Values,decision-making,and the rich life

Young people increasingly take only one value seriously in making decisions about careers, that of salary levels. They should understand that there are many values which need to be weighed in making decisions about employment. Given the present milieu, it may prove effective to use language which describes these other, nonmonetary values as contributors to the “rich lifer”     

Loan performance and race

Recent studies find evidence of racial discrimination in mortgage markets. Although these studies explore loan approval rates for whites versus minorities, they do not specifically consider loan performance, either in the form of default rates or loan administration costs. This study considers discrimination in the used car credit market, where the collateral is not subject to location externalities, collateral value and quality do not vary as much as in real estate, and the loan terms are shorter. We find administration costs and default rates are higher for minorities than for whites, controlling for age, income, home ownership, wealth, occupation, loan terms, and geographic location.     

The appropriation of American war memories: a critical juxtaposition of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War

This article delineates and critically juxtaposes the differential public commemorations of the Vietnam War and the Holocaust in the US. We elucidate how the tragedies of the Holocaust have been integrated into US public memory as a central part of the American story, solidifying the image of the United States as a powerful and moral nation that rescues desperate people from tyranny. In contrast, public commemorations of the highly divisive Vietnam War are sparse, if at all, in great part because they would re-ignite questions about the role of the US in Vietnam and in the suffering of its victims. While the Holocaust enables the United States to re-narrate national glory, the Vietnam War calls attention to US defeat and upsets the narrative of rescue and liberation. Through a critical juxtaposition of these two public memories, we assert that the moral and political divisiveness of the Vietnam War constitutes one unacknowledged source of the ascendancy and centrality of the Holocaust in American memory. Through our relational analysis of differential public memories, we draw on and contribute to the field of memory studies.     

Structuring a multi-site evaluation for youth mentoring programs to prevent teen alcohol and drug use

Despite mentoring's rapidly increasing popularity as an intervention for the prevention of teen alcohol and drug abuse and associated problems, there is little research consensus on its overall effectiveness or on the core principles and components that define effective mentoring. To advance knowledge concerning this important prevention intervention, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention has designed and funded a multi-site cooperative agreement involving seven mentoring programs. The programs are designed to provide a rigorous outcome evaluation that allows comparisons of differing approaches to organizing and delivering mentoring services to adolescents at high risk for substance abuse. The cooperative agreement guidelines set service parameters and options that focus on issues that are grounded in past research on mentoring prevention interventions. The cooperative agreement includes a quasi-experimental, longitudinal multi-site evaluation that provides evidence-based recommendations to advance the effective use of mentoring as a prevention strategy.     

New business development in mature firms

New business development (NBD) is one of the main strategic options for the ‘mature’ company. The authors discuss the reasons why NBD should be considered and suggest a framework for developing new businesses. The results of a two year investigation of a sample of 14 UK companies' NBD initiatives are presented. Half of the sample have either abandoned or are reducing their new business activities. The reasons are manifold and relate to a failure to define specifically the role of the NBD initiatives; a lack of appreciation of the risks, long time spans for development and the high financial commitment associated with NBD; a weakening of the mainstream business (this in itself suggesting that companies often leave NBD ‘too late’); and a naive approach toward marketing. Some lessons for mature companies' future involvement in NBD are drawn.     

Native subjects on display: reviving the colonial exposition in Marcos' Philippines

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, 1100 Filipino ‘natives’ were used as human displays to argue for the colonial enterprise in the Philippines. Seventy years later, the Marcos regime staged Kasaysayan ng Lahi (History of the Race), a mass ceremony that reworked the visual, performative and commercial dynamics of the 1904 colonial exposition to promote heritage tourism in the Philippines. While the use of human displays in colonial expositions has been well documented and analyzed as a constitutive element of a Eurocentric ‘exhibitionary complex’, its uptake in developing nations seeking entry into an emergent cultural economy has yet to be explored. This article places critical analyses of colonial expositions, human displays and heritage tourism in productive dialogue, and examines the continuities and discontinuities between the Philippine exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the 1974 staging of Kasaysayan ng Lahi by the Marcos regime. Against established views of ‘staged authenticities’ as either exploitative or socially empowering, this case study advances a more complex framework for critical histories of the exhibitionary complex, and foregrounds the internal contradictions that inhere within the staging of indigenous heritage for purposes of cultural revitalization and economic development.