Ethnicity and adjustment: A study of the self-image of Anglo-, Greek-, and Italian-Australian working class adolescents

Two measures of adjustment, the Erikson Psychosocial Stage Inventory and the Offer Self-Image Questionnaire, were administered to a sample of 450 working class Anglo-, Greek-, and Italian-Australian adolescents in years 9 and 11 of 9 Melbourne high schools. Anglo- and Greek-Australian adolescents scored similarly and significantly higher than Italian-Australians on a number of subscales, suggesting that culture conflict may be an influential factor in the adjustment of Italian-Australians, but not Greek-Australians. Significant differences between the minority groups, in favor of Greek-Australians, were interpreted as resulting from the relative differences in institutional support for and press toward assimilation of the two groups.     

The theory of economic regulation and public choice and the determinants of public sector bargaining legislation

In this study we used the theory of economic regulation and public choice to derive a model to explain the pattern of public sector bargaining laws among the states. We find this type of legislation is influenced by the following demand factors: (1) the extent of public sector union membership, which represents the interest group hypothesis, has a positive influence on pro-union legislation; (2) the extent of employer opposition to unions, as measured by unfair labor practice charges against employers in representation elections, has a negative effect on bargaining laws; (3) two taste variables — the salaries of public employees and the percent of nonwhite employment in the state — have a positive influence on these laws. A result which will be surprising to many people is that the extent of private sector union membership has no significant influence on the passage of public sector bargaining legislation.Our empirical analysis indicates that supply factors are also important in explaining the pattern of public employee bargaining laws across the state. We find that states are more likely to enact pro-union legislation under the following conditions: (1) constituents appear to hold pro-labor views as represented by their Congressmen's voting record; (2) neighboring states have passed mandatory bargaining laws; and (3) when competition is greater among the political parties.     

The United States Supreme Court and the death penalty since Furman: The settlement of basic issues

In 1972 the United States Supreme Court in Furman V. Georgia found that the death penalty as it was then being applied was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Furman provided few constitutional guidelines, but states reinacted their death penalty statutes.In 1976 the Court began to receive appeals from death sentences imposed under the reinacted statutes. In its decisions the Court began to establish guidelines. It found the death penalty was not per se cruel and unusual punishment. Before the death penalty can be imposed the court must take into consideration any mitigating circumstances and the case must be reviewed by the state supreme court. A mandatory death sentence is unconstitutional.Other issues including proportionality, due process and finality of judgment will be examined in the next segment of this study.     

One size does not fit all: Matching breadth of stakeholder participation to watershed group accomplishments

The role of the public in US policy making has shifted substantially during the past several decades. This shift is particularly evident in environmental policy, where collaboration among multiple stakeholders is on the rise. Much of the literature on collaborative environmental management emphasizes the need for widespread community involvement, especially from private citizens. Many proponents of collaboration have argued that broad inclusion can lead to better environmental solutions while also establishing legitimacy, building social capital, and overcoming conflicts. Yet such broad inclusion may be costly in terms of time, energy, and resources, and it may not yield the desired results. Thus, a key question is how the breadth of public involvement is linked to collaborative group accomplishments. This study, using watershed groups in Ohio, demonstrates several links between group membership and results. Groups with a broader array of participants tend to excel in watershed plan creation, identifying/prioritizing issues, and group development and maintenance. In addition, groups comprised of a relatively balanced mix of governmental and non-governmental participants are more likely to list planning/research and group development and maintenance results than are groups comprised primarily of non-governmental participants. In contrast, groups with a narrower membership and groups that are composed primarily of non-governmental participants may focus more on pressuring government for policy change.     

A CROSS‐CULTURAL EXAMINATION OF THE LINK BETWEEN CORPORAL PUNISHMENT AND ADOLESCENT ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR*

Several studies with older children have reported a positive relationship between parental use of corporal punishment and child conduct problems. This has lead some social scientists to conclude that physical discipline fosters antisocial behavior. In an attempt to avoid the methodological difficulties that have plagued past research on this issue, the present study used a proportional measure of corporal punishment, controlled for earlier behavior problems and other dimensions of parenting, and tested for interaction and curvilinear effects. The analyses were performed using a sample of Iowa families that displayed moderate use of corporal punishment and a Taiwanese sample that demonstrated more frequent and severe use of physical discipline, especially by fathers. For both samples, level of parental warmth/control (i.e., support, monitoring, and inductive reasoning) was the strongest predictor of adolescent conduct problems. There was little evidence of a relationship between corporal punishment and conduct problems for the Iowa sample. For the Taiwanese families, corporal punishment was unrelated to conduct problems when mothers were high on warmth/control, but positively associated with conduct problems when they were low on warmtwcontrol, An interaction between corporal punishment and warmth/Wcontro1 was found for Taiwanese fathers as well. For these fathers, there was also evidence of a curvilinear relationship, with the association between corporal punishment and conduct problems becoming much stronger at extreme levels of corporal punishment. Overall, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that it is when parents engage in severe forms of corporal punishment, or administer physical discipline in the absence of parental warmth and involvement, that children feel angry and unjustly treated, defy parental authority, and engage in antisocial behavior.     

Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy

The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses.     

The Capitalocene,Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.