Social Competence in Late Elementary School: Relationships to Parenting and Neighborhood Context

Despite evidence that neighborhoods confer both risk and resilience for youth development, the existing neighborhood research has a number of methodological limitations including lack of diversity in neighborhoods sampled and neighborhood characteristics assessed. The purpose of this study was to address these methodological limitations of existing research and to examine the relationship of neighborhood structural and social characteristics to family-level social processes and teacher-reported social competence during early adolescence. The study sample of 3,624 fifth graders (51?% girls) was ethnically diverse, including roughly even proportions of non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic youth. Neighborhood measures included economic disadvantage derived from the U.S. Census, physical and social disorder obtained by direct observation, and social capital from parental reports. Family-level social processes included parent reported family cohesion and youth reported maternal and paternal nurturance. We found that neighborhood factors significantly associated with youth social aggression and social competence but not social withdrawal, after controlling for individual demographic characteristics and parenting factors. There was limited evidence of moderation of family influences by neighborhood characteristics as well as the moderation of neighborhood effects by children’s gender. Neighborhood physical disorder was associated with increased social aggression among boys but with increased social withdrawal among girls. Implications of the study’s findings for research on neighborhoods and adolescent development and the development of preventive interventions are discussed.     

Integration or Black Power?

Integration politics experienced a postcolonial crisis in the late 1960s. This was a crisis driven by the simultaneous and inter‐related eruption of Powellism and Black Power. This article uses the crisis of integration politics to show the Powellite conjuncture from its other side, as it played out in the reconstitution of black British politics. It shows how black activists responded to the rise of Powellism by demanding that the politics of integration be either abandoned or reframed, to more fully shake out the colonial inheritances that lurked within it. The integration proposed by the postwar project of race relations was problematic from its inception; Black Power used Powell's intervention to expose these problems and demand change.     

Saving Strong Neighborhoods From the Destruction of Mortgage Foreclosures: The Impact of Community-Based Efforts in Detroit,Michigan

Mortgage foreclosures hit Detroit, Michigan hard between 2005 and 2014, especially in what we define as strong neighborhoods; there, more than one third of homes experienced foreclosure. Before the crisis hit, these selected tracts had largely intact physical environments and higher owner occupancy, household income and property value than the citywide median. In some of them residents worked intensely to abate the neighborhood effects of mortgage foreclosures. This study examines those efforts’ effectiveness. We selected neighborhoods with the most extensive efforts, as measured, for instance, by creation of community-based plans and applications for grants, and we conducted interviews and field observations to examine those efforts. To assess strengthening of neighborhood housing markets, we applied a modified adjusted interrupted time-series approach to evaluate changes in prices as one measure of neighborhood change. We found that strong resident initiative supported by community development organizations and external assistance led to increased neighborhood housing prices, compared with comparable neighborhoods. However, when initiative, context, and support were weaker, community-based efforts could not prevent considerable decline.     

‘Policies that Fail – Words that Succeed’: The Politics of Accessible Housing in Australia

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate over the efficacy of voluntary agreements versus regulation, and uses a study of the Livable Housing Design initiative to deliver voluntarily new‐built accessible housing in Australia. We first probe why regulation has become such a significant component of government policy making, and then ask why political campaigns focus on this issue as a strategy for reform. We refer to research by disability activists, which claims that the voluntary approach has failed and regulation is necessary. Amongst our conclusions are: (1) that the disjuncture between policy rhetoric and outcome can be attributed to the power of lobbyists, reliance on the private market to address inequality, and antipathy to regulatory enforcement; and (2) that there is a need for greater interrogation of the language deployed in policy texts to identify whether they are crafted to maintain the government's legitimacy or to deliver purposeful change.     

China's Hybrid Adaptive Bureaucracy: The Case of the 863 Program for Science and Technology

Portrayals of China's bureaucratic behavior tend to emphasize either streamlined central control via top‐down directives emanating from a Leninist system, or a highly fragmented organization characterized by continuous horizontal bargaining. While both views have merit, they miss important but little‐recognized dynamics of Chinese bureaucratic behavior. Examination of the 30‐year evolution of a single organization, China's 863 Program, allows us a unique look inside the “black box” of decision making. First, we highlight a largely unrecognized mechanism of top‐down control: a signal‐response process that fosters substantial uncertainty for officials in the system. Second, our case highlights a circumstance in which reformers made radical moves—deployed as a “band‐aid” layer of rational‐instrumentalism—to meet a perceived external security threat. These moves demonstrate efforts to incorporate Weberian norms, and suggest sources of dynamism and learning in a “hybrid adaptive” bureaucracy.     

Gendering the union: imperial feminism and the ladies’ land league

The Act of Union of 1800, establishing Westminster control over Irish affairs, had important repercussions for the development of feminism within nineteenth-century Ireland, as well as contributing towards adifferentiation of Irish from British feminism. Feminism within Ireland was shaped by class, religion and racial identification: one strand followed theBritish model of Protestant philanthropy, while the other was concerned with asserting women's right to take part in nationalist political struggle. ‘Imperial’ feminists in Britain and Ireland, concerned with establishing their right to take part in the affairs of the ‘nation’, perceived those Irish who rejected British imperial rule as uncivilised, reserving sympathy for those whose economic position was threatened by the activities of those who campaigned against the landlord system. The period of the Land War of 1879–82 illustrates these conflicting discourses. The subsequent decline of imperial power in Ireland can be traced through a gradual change within Irish feminism from an initial support for the Union to a later embrace of nationalism, as young middle-class women, many from Catholic backgrounds, became involved in the movement     

The Emergence of Feminism in Fiji 1

This article traces the etymology of Indo‐Fijian (Fiji Indian) feminisms in Fiji. In the first section, the resistances of female indentured laborers (for example, Sukhrania, Naraini and Kunti) are recovered as reflections of early forms of individualized feminisms in the early 1900s. In the second section, it is proposed that the informal and organic, yet socially significant movement of Indian women laborers in Fiji in the 1920s comprised one of the first collective intersections of gendered, classed and ethnicized relationships in Fiji. The 1930 (post‐indenture) women's movement, with its main emphasis on economic empowerment, is included in the discussion of Indo‐Fijian feminisms in the third section. The conclusion highlights that while each phase of the early feminist movement in Fiji focused on a different set of concerns that impacted on the lives of Indo‐Fijian women, this group of women have played and continue to play a prominent role in furthering the rights of women nationally and regionally.     

Using the mass-observation archive as a source for women's studies

Playing the violin in Japan was pioneered by women. The first Japanese to study the violin abroad were Kôda Nobu (1870–1946) and Andô Kô (née Kôda, 1878–1963). Both taught at the Tokyo Academy of Music (now Tokyo University of the Arts) after their return. Kôda later opened a piano studio. The article describes their lives and careers and shows how their Western expertise gave them unprecedented opportunities while their gender imposed limitations. It discusses the sisters' role in the transmission of Western music to Japan in the context of Western as well as Japanese preconceptions about appropriate musical roles for women.