How Welfare Policies Affect Adolescents' School Outcomes: A Synthesis of Evidence From Experimental Studies

Using data from 8 random assignment studies and employing meta‐analytic techniques, this article provides systematic evidence that welfare and work policies targeted at low‐income parents have small adverse effects on some school outcomes among adolescents ages 12 to 18 years at follow‐up. These adverse effects were observed mostly for school performance outcomes and occurred in programs that required mothers to work or participate in employment‐related activities and those that encouraged mothers to work voluntarily. The most pronounced negative effects on school outcomes occurred for the group of adolescents who had a younger sibling, possibly because of the increased home and sibling care responsibilities they assumed as their mothers increased their employment.     

Inheritance,poverty, and disability

Inheritance is a significant means of transferring wealth from one generation to the next, and therefore increasingly attracts attention from researchers and policy-makers working on intergenerational and multidimensional poverty. However, until now disabled persons have been overlooked in these discussions. This oversight is particularly unfortunate because, as a group, the estimated one billion people with disabilities (some 15% of the world’s population) are among the poorest and most marginalized of the global population. Over the past decade, a small but growing literature has examined the recursive connections between poverty and disability throughout the developing world. In this paper, we argue that disabled individuals are routinely denied inheritance rights in many low-income and middle-income countries, and that this is a significant and largely unrecognized contributor to their indigence. The denial of inheritance is both a social justice issue and a practice that can no longer be overlooked if disabled persons are to be brought into the development mainstream.     

对神灵的殷勤与祭祀

仪式的流程是所有与神灵和祖先相关的中国仪式中最为基础的。这些仪式所涉及的是组织仪式活动的祭祀者以及接受祭祀并能够对祭祀活动作出反应的神灵之间的一种关系。在人类学中对仪式的描述有两种范式。一种是“殷勤”（hospitality）,另一种则是“祭祀”（sacrifice）。     

器物之用——物质性的人类学探究

当代学界对器物与物品的研究,总易建立在主体与客体、理性与感性的二分之上,从而或将器物视为社会关系或社会性的反映,或将物抽离于语境来研究。这也使得当代博物馆的建立与陈列中,器物被去除其灵性与意义,器物与其制造者、使用者、消费者,甚至博物馆参观者之间的生动联系被割裂,而成为死气沉沉之物。本文引入拉图尔的“事实拜物教”（factishism）一词,并不再局限于仅从器物的制造角度来看物,而是重新探讨器物之灵性,即器物何以通过仪式等方式而被激活,从而获得一种自主性。这样一种视角,也是对破除欧洲中心主义器物研究的有力反思。     

Instability in patchworks of child care when moving from welfare to work

We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women in Cleveland, Ohio to examine the factors driving instability in child‐care arrangements when women transitioned from welfare to work. Grounded theory analysis revealed that decisions about care were circumscribed by scarce social and economic resources, women went to extraordinary lengths to patch together arrangements that typically involved multiple providers, relative care was central to patchworks of care, and patchworks of child care were often highly unstable. These complex arrangements and their instability were influenced by mothers’ desires to find the most suitable arrangements for their children within resource and job constraints, dissatisfaction with providers, difficulties accessing subsidies, and changes in provider availability. Findings suggest that policymakers must consider instability in patchworks of multiple child‐care providers as they consider alternatives for meeting low‐wage working women's and children's needs for safe, affordable, accessible, and enriching nonmaternal child care.     

Relocation or dislocation?—A planned approach to location

The commercial success, or indeed the survival, of an enterprise depends on forward thinking. Whether planners use sophisticated planning and modelling techniques or simply rely on hunches the objective of their planning is to project the economic environment, the market for goods and services, technological developments, etc. It is a fact, however, that relatively few enterprises, except those engaged in physical distribution, appreciate the often critical strategic importance of the location of their operations. The author deals with the factors involved in any decision to relocate.