“Are We Afrikaners Getting too Rich?”1 Cornucopia and Change in Afrikanerdom in the 1960s

Abstract This article attempts to correlate the unprecedented economic growth of the 1960s in South Africa with shifts in patterns of consumption, attendant lifestyle changes and forms of status identification among Afrikaners. Moreover the subsequent divergences in Afrikaner nationalist politics and the demise of apartheid are explored in terms of the rise of the Afrikaner middle-class as one, hitherto largely unexamined, factor in the political transition in South Africa during the 1990s.     

BIASED PRESS OR BIASED PUBLIC? ATTITUDES TOWARD MEDIA COVERAGE OF SOCIAL GROUPS

Mass media credibility has been defined and studied largelyas an attribute of message sources. This article argues thattrust in media can be better understood as a relational variable—anaudience response to media content. In addition, audience assessmentsof credibility are commonly explained as the result of eachindividual's skeptical disposition, either toward mass mediain particular or as a general trait. The author dissents fromthis view as well, proposing that distrust is more likely tobe a situational response, stemming from involvement with issuesand groups. Using data from a national probability sample, thehypothesis was tested by analyzing the effect of numerous independentvariables on respondent ratings of newspaper and televisionnews coverage of social groups. As hypothesized, a respon dent'sown group identification proved to be the strongest predictor.The evidence was strengthened by replication across social groups,which provided built-in controls and demonstrated that an importantpart of the variance in trust of mass media news is within personsrather than between persons.     

PERCEIVED IMPACT OF DEFAMATION: AN EXPERIMENT ON THIRD-PERSON EFFECTS

This paper explores the intersection of libel law and communicationtheory that occurs when libel juries assess the effect of adefamatory communication on others. The third-person hypothesissuggests that people often assume others will be more affectedby potentially persuasive communications than they are themselves.An experiment was conducted in which students were exposed toa variety of defamatory newspaper articles. The results confirmedseveral predictions. First, readers estimated that others wouldbe more affected by defamatory messages than the readers themselveswould be. Second, this effect was magnified as the "others"became progressively more distant from these readers. Third,when the defamation was attributed to a negatively biased sourcethe effect was also accentuated: readers themselves discountedthe message, while assuming others would be even more influenced.It is suggested that courtroom assessments of the effects ofdefamatory communications on others may be influenced by suchthird-person perceptions.     

Paying the toll: a feminist post‐structural critique of the discourse bridging work and family

On the surface, the modern workplace and home life appear to stand in sharp contrast to one another. The workplace seems to epitomize the modern concern with bounded time and the necessity of effective ‘use time’ (e.g., efficiency, effort, organizational commitment, speed‐up). Home life, on the other hand, is characterized by idealized images of emotionality and relief from the pressures of work. Yet numerous reported experiences of working people seem to belie this supposed duality. For many, home life is experienced as an appendage of the workplace, with its demands on time‐effort balance. Nonetheless, we continue to act as if there are two separate spheres of life that can ultimately be balanced and reconciled. This has been reinforced over the years by a growing discourse of work‐family conflict. Deconstruction of the discourse suggests that far from unraveling the ‘problem’ its characterization as a ‘work‐family’ conflict serves to privilege the dominant themes of use‐time and speed.     

La formation en cours d'emploi en Europe: déterminants et effets sur les salaires

Partant des données du Panel communautaire de ménages (PCM) pour la période 1995–2001 dans six pays, les auteurs étudient les déterminants des activités de formation et les effets de celle‐ci sur les salaires. A partir de quatre indicateurs caractérisant la formation, ils montrent que, si les estimations par la méthode des moindres carrés ordinaires indiquent que, presque partout, la formation valorise substantiellement les salaires, les estimations avec effets fixes font apparaǐtre une incidence quasi nulle. Les effets sur les salaires seraient donc surestimés faute de prise en compte adéquate de la corrélation entre la formation et d'autres facteurs affectant les salaires.     

In Search of a Useable Past

The "voice of the people," the root meaning of public opinion,is an old idea. Early political thinkers struggled to definethe proper role of public opinion in government. The confluenceof developments in commercial opinion polling and social psychologicalstudies of attitudes in the 1930s gave the concept new meaning.An historical perspective is helpful in understanding how publicopinion research has progressed; it also allows us to identifyonce vital but now neglected issues. A concern with professionalstandards in opinion research links modern researchers withthe moral imperative contained in the earliest idea of publicopinion.     

On‐the‐job training in Europe: Determinants and wage returns

Using data from the European Community Household Panel on six countries over the period 1995–2001, this article investigates the determinants of workers’ participation in training activities and the effects of training on wages. Based on measures of four distinct training types, the authors find that while OLS estimates yield significant wage returns to training for nearly all of the countries, fixed‐effects estimations show returns to be not statistically different from zero. This suggests that wage returns to training might be overstated due to failure to take adequate account of the correlation of training with confounding factors that affect wages.     

An Optimal Retrospective Change Point Detection Policy

Abstract.  Since the middle of the twentieth century, the problem of making inferences about the point in a surveyed series of observations at which the underlying distribution changes has been extensively addressed in the economics, biostatistics and statistics literature. Cumulative sum-type statistics have commonly been thought to play a central role in non-sequential change point detections. Alternatively, we present and examine an approach based on the Shiryayev–Roberts scheme. We show that retrospective change point detection policies based on Shiryayev–Roberts statistics are non-asymptotically optimal in the context of most powerful testing.