Neither ‘family’ nor ‘corporate’ farming: Australian tomato growers as farm family entrepreneurs

For the past two decades there has been much debate about the future of family farming. The basic question on which this debate has turned is whether current pressures on family farm systems should be understood as symptomatic of a terminal condition, in which farmers are replaced progressively by corporate ownership; or whether family farms will persist as a social formation, albeit increasingly subsumed by off-farm interests. Using evidence from the Australian processing tomato sector, this article documents the changing social and economic formation of ‘family farming’. We argue that in this industry, the appropriate way to describe farmers is through the deployment of that a new category of farming; farm family entrepreneurs. This phrase is coined to describe the situation where family units remain at the social and economic heart of farm ownership and operation, but in the context where they relate to their land-based assets through legal and financial structures characteristic of the wider economy. As this article explores, this formation seems to represent an accommodating modus operandi for farm units within neo-liberal agricultural governance. Nevertheless, however, this duality of family-based structures and capitalist entrepreneurialism inevitably provokes a series of tensions, whose resolution requires a variety of organizational strategies to be put in place.     

Verbal and nonverbal communication of warmth to children,foreigners, and retarded adults

The verbal and nonverbal communication of warmth was examined in a study in which undergraduate women taught a block design task to a listener who was either a six-year-old child, a retarded adult, a peer who spoke English as a second language (foreigner), or a peer who was a native speaker of English. The degree of warmth conveyed by the speakers differed only minimally across different categories of listeners. However, these communications did vary systematically within each category, in accord with the levels of cognitive and linguistic sophistication of each particular listener. Speakers tended to fine-tune communications by conveying more warmth to the more sophisticated children and foreigners than to the less sophisticated members of these categories. To the more sophisticated retarded persons, however, they conveyed—nonverbally—less warmth than to the less sophisticated retarded persons. The relevance of these findings to the communication of expectancy effects and to the social psychology of stigma is discussed.This paper was written while the first author was visiting at the University of Florida. We thank John Neil Bohannon, Linda Caporael, Margaret Clark, William Cooper, Monica Harris, Harry Levin, and Carol Sigelman for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For their help in conducting this research, we thank Ann Ashworth, Pamela Brown, Linda Douglas, Susan Finkelstein, Tamara Harper, Robin Johnson, Susan Kirdendol, Sheila Larkin, Sue Limber, Jose Macaranas, Ashook Nimgade, Maria Papetti, Maurice Perry, Lester Pretlow, Carissa Smith, Laura Taswell, Tina Tedeschi, Charles Valadez, and all of our listener-subjects. We also thank the students, faculty, and administration of Dunmore High School, Dunmore, Pennslyvania, for their participation and cooperation. Support from NSF, NIMH, the National Academy of Education, and a Rackham Faculty Grant was invaluable. Most importantly, we thank Roger Brown and Robert Rosenthal for their wisdom and inspiration.     

International migration: demographic and socioeconomic consequences in the United Kingdom and Europe

"This article evaluates the consequences of international migration since World War II, with particular reference to Great Britain. It emphasizes the substantial differences between the origins and responses to immigration in the United Kingdom and that of the rest of Western Europe." It is found that "people of non-European origin from Commonwealth countries have predominated in postwar immigration to the United Kingdom. That migration neutralized the previously dominant pattern of emigration and increased U.K. population by about 3 million people through immigration and higher fertility, with only slight effects upon the age distribution."     

The design of organizations and the right to act

Recent innovations in the structure of formal organizations suggest possible directions for the design of schools to bring about high achievement. The structure of output-driven in contrast to administratively-driven schools is described, and designs are described which address both the goal of high achievement and the goal of reduced inequality.An earlier version of this paper was presented as the author's Sorokin Lecture at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, March 1993.     

The Expression of Victory and Loss: Estimating Who’s Leading or Trailing from Nonverbal Cues in Sports

The goal of the paper was to test if humans can detect whether athletes are trailing or leading in sports based on the perception of thin slices of athletes’ nonverbal behavior. In Experiment 1, participants who were unexperienced in the respective sports watched short videos depicting basketball and table tennis players and rated whether athletes were trailing or leading. Results indicated that participants could significantly differentiate between trailing and leading athletes in both team and individual sports. Experiment 2 showed that children were also able to distinguish between trailing and leading athletes based on nonverbal behavior. Comparison with the adult results from Experiment 1 revealed that the adult ratings corresponded to a higher degree with the actual scores during the game compared to the children’s. In Experiment 3, we replicated the findings from Experiment 1 with both expert and unexperienced participants and a different set of stimuli from team handball. Both experts and unexpert participants were able to differentiate between leading and trailing athletes. Our findings are in line with evolutionary accounts of nonverbal behavior and suggest that humans display nonverbal signals as a consequence of leading or trailing which are reliably interpreted by others. By comparing this effect as a function of different age groups we provide evidence that although even young children can differentiate between leading and trailing athletes, the decoding of subtle nonverbal cues continues to develop with increasing experience and maturation processes.     

(Re)constructing Family Images: Stepmotherhood Before Biological Motherhood

Strong cultural values and ideals attached to women in families deem the role of stepmother as inferior to that of biological mother. Although biological motherhood is celebrated, stepmotherhood is stigmatized, and women who wish to become mothers but become stepmothers prior to having biological children may grieve the loss of images surrounding normative ideals of creating a family. Using a feminist family science approach, the purpose of this grounded theory study was to explore the experiences of women without children in their transition to stepmotherhood. Interviews with 23 stepmothers (aged 26–47) revealed that women engaged in an internal process of creating and then adjusting personal images of family life to accommodate their new family circumstances. The process of (re)constructing family images had implications for later adjustment to stepmotherhood. Notions of the motherhood hierarchy emerged to depict the unique experiences of women who became stepmothers prior to having biological children.