A nexus between labour movement and labour movement: the Knights of Labor and the financial side of global labour history

The rise of global and transnational labour history has revolutionised the study of working-class movements and individuals and the global forces that shaped them. Some of the more mundane considerations of these movements, however, have so far been neglected in this rapidly growing field. One of the most important of these considerations was money, or in other words the financial affairs of transnational movements such as trade unions and political parties. This article is a call to write the financial side of global labour history. It focuses on a global working-class movement that is itself often neglected in the historical literature, the Knights of Labor, and their outposts in Britain and Ireland. It examines the history of the British and Irish Knights through the prism of their financial history, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scanty sources that are available. This article argues that their financial ties with the United States and a series of embezzlement cases became major causes of their decline and, ultimately, their dissolution. Finally, this article draws conclusions from the financial misadventures of the British and Irish Knights of Labor that are relevant to the study of other international working-class movements and to the writing of global labour history in general.     

The Impact of Natural Resources: Survey of Recent Quantitative Evidence

Abstract

The cross-country empirical evidence for the natural resource curse is ample, but unfortunately fraught with econometric difficulties. A recent wave of studies on measuring the impact of natural resource windfalls on the economy exploits novel datasets such as giant oil discoveries to identify effects of windfalls, uses natural experiments and within-country econometric analysis, and estimates local impacts. These studies offer more hope in the search of quantitative evidence.     

Sleep Disturbance and Depressive Symptoms in Adolescence: The Role of Catastrophic Worry

Depression is a common and debilitating disorder in adolescence. Sleep disturbances and depression often co-occur with sleep disturbances frequently preceding depression. The current study investigated whether catastrophic worry, a potential cognitive vulnerability, mediates the relationship between adolescent sleep disturbances and depressive symptoms, as well as whether there are gender differences in this relationship. High school students, ages 16–18, n = 1,760, 49 % girls, completed annual health surveys including reports of sleep disturbance, catastrophic worry, and depressive symptoms. Sleep disturbances predicted depressive symptoms 1-year later. Catastrophic worry partially mediated the relationship. Girls reported more sleep disturbances, depressive symptoms, and catastrophic worry relative to boys. The results, however, were similar regardless of gender. Sleep disturbances and catastrophic worry may provide school nurses, psychologists, teachers, and parents with non-gender specific early indicators of risk for depression. Several potentially important practical implications, including suggestions for intervention and prevention programs, are highlighted.     

A minimax procedure for electing committees

A new voting procedure for electing committees, called the minimax procedure, is described. Based on approval balloting, it chooses the committee that minimizes the maximum Hamming distance to voters’ ballots, where these ballots are weighted by their proximity to other voters’ ballots. This minimax outcome may be diametrically opposed to the outcome obtained by aggregating approval votes in the usual manner, which minimizes the sum of the Hamming distances and is called the minisum outcome. The manipulability of these procedures, and their applicability when election outcomes are restricted in various ways, are also investigated. The minimax procedure is applied to the 2003 Game Theory Society election of a council of 12 new members from a list of 24 candidates. By rendering outlying voters less influential and not antagonizing any voters too much, it arguably would have produced a committee more representative of the interests of all voters than the minisum committee that was elected.     

Gender and developmental differences in adolescents' conceptions of moral reasoning

Eighth graders, 11th graders, and college sophomores wrote open-ended essays that characterized their own approaches to moral reasoning. Their essays were scored for the presence of various themes. Students also responded to three dilemmas from the Defining Issues Test (Rest, 1979). Students then rated their own use of justice and care orientations in moral reasoning, using a previously developed instrument (Ford and Lowery, 1986; Lyons, 1983). Characterizations of moral reasoning became more multifaceted and thorough with grade, and correlated with many traditional measures of moral reasoning. Males and females showed some, but relatively few, differences in characterizing their own moral reasoning, although females tended to respond more thoroughly to the open-ended task. Gender differences, when they occurred, were mostly found on measures that assessed so-called feminine issues or concerns, but not on traditional measures of moral reasoning. Characterizations of moral reasoning clustered into five dimensions, raising questions about the utility of the constructs of justice and care orientations.The first and third authors received financial support from a Ford-Mellon grant made to Carleton College. Results of this study were presented at the 1990 meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence.Received Ph.D. in Psychology and M.S.E. in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and has research interests in the development of reasoning skills, decision making, and conceptual development.Received Ph.D. in Counseling and Guidance from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has research interests in adolescent development and adolescent psychopathology.Received B.A. in Psychology from Carleton College in 1990. Has interests in adolescence and chemical dependence.     

The Employment Potential of Refugee Entrepreneurship: Soviet Jews and Vietnamese in California

Research concerning immigrant and ethnic business formation has focused almost exclusively upon the enterprises of economically motivated immigrants and long established refugees. Ignored are the businesses opened by recent refugees who, since 1975, account for 20% of the legal entrants to the United States. Because refugees have different social and demographic characteristics than economic immigrants and come to the U.S. for different reasons, they reveal distinct entrepreneurial behaviors. Relying on a sample of 67 Soviet Jewish and Vietnamese enterprises in California, this study explores the prospects for refugee self-employment. It considers the characteristics of self-employed refugees, their resources and motives for openingbusinesses, and their use of community-based sources of capital, labor, customers and information.     

Older adolescents' thinking about academic/vocational and interpersonal commitments

Sixty-eight college students listed the factors they consider or would consider when making the following commitments: choosing courses, choosing a major, choosing a career, choosing a friend, choosing a romantic partner, and choosing a lifelong partner. In addition, subjects provided their own definition ofcommitment in an unstructured essay. Subjects listed more factors, more distinct types of factors, and more original factors for interpersonal commitments than for academic/vocational commitments. There were few gender differences found in these measures, contradicting the idea that men and women think differently about different commitments. In addition, few gender or class year differences were found in the themes present in the essay definingcommitment. Conceptions of commitment, as described in essays, predicted thinking about specific commitments only slightly.Received Ph.D. in Psychology and M.S.E. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and has research interests in the areas of cognitive development and reasoning and decision making.Received Ph.D. in Counseling and Guidance from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has research interests in adolescent development and adolescent psychopathology.