Understanding households’ livelihood choices,wealth, and poverty in Accra,Ghana

This article reports on a study that aimed to deepen understanding of the factors which influence livelihood choices, and perceptions of wealth and poverty, in Accra, Ghana. Focus group discussions and household surveys were held in ten selected communities. Although parents are able to influence their households’ livelihood choices, the prevailing socio-economic circumstances are more likely to determine what household members are likely to do. Perceptions of wealth and poverty are influenced by factors both internal and external to households, indicating the complexity and variety of interrelated assets which the poor depend on for their livelihoods.     

Just Transitions for the Miners: Labor Environmentalism in the Ruhr and Appalachian Coalfields

As environmental legislation threatens energy-related jobs, unions may seek to assure just transitions for their workers. Just transitions are programs to guarantee decent, well-paying new jobs or early retirement for workers displaced by environmental regulations. Militant unions with a tradition of neo-corporatism will be best positioned to demand just transitions for their members. This article provides two comparative case studies of coal miners’ unions in areas where environmental reform threatens coal workers’ livelihoods. Workers in Germany’s IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie/Industrial Guild Mining, Chemical, Energy (IG BCE) have applied sustained militancy to force the German government and employers to accept increasingly comprehensive and democratic worker input into the energy sector’s policy-making. Possessing a good deal of control over their industry, IG BCE was prepared to demand a just transition for their miners by the time the German government began phasing out underground mining. The UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) miners have a long tradition of militancy and have, at various junctures in their history, forced their employers and union bureaucrats to accept some degree of industrial democracy. However, the UMWA’s corporatism was a limited corporatism that was never as democratic as German neo-corporatism. The UMWA’s commitment to environmentalism increased as they won an expanded level of input into the coal industry’s decision-making. Nevertheless, since the late 1970s the UMWA’s militancy has waned and they have come to reject just transitions and other environmentalist policies.     

On the strategy of social planning

Social planning deals centrally with human values—values which are important even though they do not appear as explicit factors in the classical problems of social welfare.The philosophical question as to whether facts can provide a logical basis for values need not be considered by the planner. He focuses, rather, on the specific interplay of values and facts in the concrete context of his concern.In the analysis of this interplay we can distinguish a number ofprinciples, criteria for the specification of social ends; for instance, the maximin principle, that improvements in a value distribution consisting in cutting off the bottom of the distribution have priority over raising the top.Social ends, in turn, are analysable intoideals, goals, andobjectives—directions, regions and points, respectively, in the value space.Cutting across these are the desiredqualities of the experience of pursuing those ends, qualities allowing for the assessment of planned alternatives by configurational judgment, rather than by a presumed summation of component values.A report submitted to the Social Planning Group of the Planning Board of Puerto Rico in 1958, not previously published.     

Now You See Them, Now You Don't: The Legal Field and Newspaper Desegregation of Sex-Segregated Help Wanted Ads 1965–75

We analyze the timing and extent to which major newspapers in the United States ceased publishing sex-segregated help wanted columns. We situate our study within a specific scholarly literature in organizational sociology and the sociology of law interested in patterns of organizational compliance with U.S. employment law. More specifically, this article is conceptually and theoretically organized around the concept of the "legal field," defined as the dynamic and emergent interactions among formal law and legal rules, legal officials, self-interested organizations, and the broader political and cultural environment. Content analysis of major U.S. newspapers between 1966 and 1975 indicates that, for nearly five years (1966–70), newspapers collectively refused to desegregate their help wanted columns, despite clear legal rules prohibiting their use. Then, in a comparatively condensed period between 1971 and 1973, virtually all newspapers abruptly abandoned the traditional practice of sorting job ads explicitly by sex.     

21世纪初的美国和拉美关系

从第二次世界大战到20世纪70年代,美国和拉美国家的关系可以归结为美国的“霸权主义推论”。也就是说,美国有权在整个西半球坚持政治、思想、外交和经济的“一致性”,但却不用“附庸”这个字眼。为了确保亲美的政党和领袖掌控整个拉丁美洲和加勒比地区,美国采取一切必要手段,包括海军陆战队和第82空降师的军事实力威慑,中央情报局的秘密干预,陆军武官的建议咨询,美国国际开发署的对外援助和不时的强加于人,糖产品配额、关税优惠等其他方式的经济渗透,国务院的积极外交,对政党的资金援助和建议咨询,美国新闻署的公共宣传和信息传播等。那段时…