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.

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Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

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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

Drawing on inter-disciplinary research conducted across UK universities and with community-based groups, this book offers insights into how local initiatives can enhance sustainable development and engage people in creating better places in which to live. It illustrates imaginative, practical and accessible ways in which communities and built-environment professionals are working and learning together towards a more sustainable future. It shows how such learning can result in more inclusive and desirable places to live, both for the residents of today and for future generations. Drawing on the experiences of nine locally based examples from across the UK, it brings together elements as diverse as sustainable development, education, community coherence and confl ict resolution, planning and environmental management. The book will be of value to all those who have a stake in the formation of communities, whether in professions such as architecture, urban design, planning or geography or who are involved through community and local organisations; it will contribute to the narrowing of the perceived sustainable communities ‘skills gap’. The focus throughout is on the motivational aspects of learning and the different and often highly imaginative approaches which can be adopted to enable partnerships to work effectively. Key themes that emerge are the need for a new ‘transformational’ leadership style where enabling people to be responsible for their own development and effectiveness is the key, and also for a new attitude towards skills so that these are no longer expected to be embodied within a single ‘gatekeeper’ but collectively within a team. If successive governments continue to devolve ever greater responsibility onto local communities, then the skills and learning to support them in deriving practical visions of a sustainable future will be crucial.

Sustainable Communities: Skills and Learning for Place Making

The 2011/12 Jobcentre Plus delivery plan makes a commitment to develop and increase digital services1, enabling claimants to self-serve but also creating the potential for a more comprehensive rich media service.

Research shows there is a statistically significant association between the social disadvantages an individual faces and their inability to access and use digital services.

Qualitative research was commissioned to develop an actionable approach to encourage digitally excluded claimants to use Jobcentre Plus digital channels, by increasing Jobcentre Plus’ understanding of:

• how to address the barriers to digital service usage;
• the behavioural strategies required to encourage digitally excluded claimants online; • the types of services that claimants might value (which involved presenting claimants with examples of potential digital services); and
• the role of Jobcentre Plus staff and digital partners in supporting the migration of claimants to online services. 

For the purpose of this research, ‘digitally excluded’ claimants are defined as individuals who never access the internet, or do so no more than three times a month, and lack confidence in their internet skills.

Between April and June 2011, 80 face-to-face interviews with digitally excluded Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), Income Support (IS), Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and Incapacity Benefit (IB) claimants, 35 telephone interviews with Jobcentre Plus staff and five telephone interviews with external digital partners were undertaken and analysed thematically (further details are presented in Chapter 1).

Increasing digital channel use amongst digitally excluded Jobcentre Plus claimants

Hidden Unemployment in the East Midlands

Exploring the links between skills and productivity: final report

There is increasing concern about growing inequalities between the rich and poor in Britain. Some areas have become `marginalised as they have failed to take an equal share in some of the benefits of socioeconomic restructuring. In this article `proxy indicators from the Census of Population are used to explore continuities and changes in local concentrations of `poverty and `affluence between 1981 and 1991. The main findings are that `concentrated poverty districts and neighbourhoods are over-represented in the inner parts of the largest cities and metropolitan areas while `concentrated affluence areas are found disproportionately in those parts of Britain with a mixed urban-rural character. (EXCERPT)

Anne E. Green

Papers

Sustainable Communities: Skills and Learning for Place Making

Increasing digital channel use amongst digitally excluded Jobcentre Plus claimants

Hidden Unemployment in the East Midlands

Exploring the links between skills and productivity: final report

Changing local concentrations of "poverty" and "affluence" in Britain 1981-91.