The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

This paper reviews the concept of adaptation of human communities to global changes, especially climate change, in the context of adaptive capacity and vulnerability. It focuses on scholarship that contributes to practical implementation of adaptations at the community scale. In numerous social science fields, adaptations are considered as responses to risks associated with the interaction of environmental hazards and human vulnerability or adaptive capacity. In the climate change field, adaptation analyses have been undertaken for several distinct purposes. Impact assessments assume adaptations to estimate damages to longer term climate scenarios with and without adjustments. Evaluations of specified adaptation options aim to identify preferred measures. Vulnerability indices seek to provide relative vulnerability scores for countries, regions or communities. The main purpose of participatory vulnerability assessments is to identify adaptation strategies that are feasible and practical in communities. The distinctive features of adaptation analyses with this purpose are outlined, and common elements of this approach are described. Practical adaptation initiatives tend to focus on risks that are already problematic, climate is considered together with other environmental and social stresses, and adaptations are mostly integrated or mainstreamed into other resource management, disaster preparedness and sustainable development programs. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

/pdf/adaptation-adaptive-capacity-and-vulnerability-3txg5bpzf9.pdf

Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

/pdf/the-precariat-the-new-dangerous-class-3tq7b7h7fg.pdf

The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

Thank you very much for reading input output analysis foundations and extensions. As you may know, people have search hundreds times for their chosen readings like this input output analysis foundations and extensions, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they are facing with some malicious virus inside their desktop computer.

Input Output Analysis Foundations And Extensions

Geographic disparities in economic and social outcomes, from the broad regional to the community level, have been a concern to those seeking social justice for centuries. The heavy geographic imbalance associated with the early 1980s’ recession and subsequent recovery only heightened these concerns ahead of the Commission on Social Justice’s report (1994). In essence, the concerns have two components. The first is a simple sense of territorial equity, namely that people should not be disadvantaged by where they live. The second, deeper, concern is that spatial imbalances can have substantial economic and social costs.

Is Britain pulling apart?: area disparities in employment, education and crime

The concept of employability has provided a foundation for much current labour market policy. It has also provided a useful framework for analyzing national and urban labour markets and related policies in a variety of different circumstances both for those in and out of work.

The papers in this book help progress the concept of employability, demonstrating the importance of the geographic and spatial context, and showing its flexibility and usefulness as a basis for theory, analysis and policy. The papers are divided into two main sections:


understanding the concept of employability 
lessons for labour market policy in changing labour markets.
The chapters also provide general insights into many current labour market policy debates. As employability continues to be the foundation of many labour market policies, this volume considers the economic and geographical dimensions of employability in local labour market analysis and policy.


This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Urban Studies

Employability and local labour market policy

The BBC Domesday disc contains an impressive range of socio-economic variables for small geographical areas. This paper outlines the process by which the variables for inclusion on the disc were selected, and the difficulties of obtaining data which provides a comprehensive reflection of the British economy and society. Attention is drawn to the uniquely geographical character of the data contained on the disc--and the fact that information for the 21 major types of data collection area is stored thus permitting scale effects to be investigated by the user. The difficulties of using data obtained from government sources and the facilities available for interpreting data available on the disc are discussed.

Using the social and economic data on the BBC domesday disc

The purpose of this study is to:

 develop further understanding of whether and why demand for migrant labour persists in low skilled sectors of the UK economy; and
 provide further evidence on the factors that affect the supply of labour to low skilled sectors

Following an initial literature review, the study adopted a case study approach, focusing on low-skilled roles in the construction and accommodation and food services sectors in the West Midlands. It involved interviews with employers, recruitment agencies, migrant workers, British workers in low-skilled roles, British born job seekers on out-of-work benefits with no/ low qualifications and stakeholders.

Anne E. Green

Papers

Is Britain pulling apart?: area disparities in employment, education and crime

Employability and local labour market policy

Using the social and economic data on the BBC domesday disc

Determinants of the composition of the workforce in low skilled sectors of the UK economy : Lot 2 : Qualitative research - final report

A Job in Itself: The Thankless Task for Young Unemployed People Looking for Work | Joseph Rowntree Foundation