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

G REEN A. E. and O WEN D. (2003) Skill shortages: local perspectives from England, Reg. Studies 37 , 123-134. Skill shortages have important implications for economic competitiveness and social inclusion. This paper is concerned with examining contrasts in skill shortages between local areas in England, drawing on information from the 1999 Employers Skill Survey (ESS) . Analyses of the incidence of skill shortage vacancies at local level reveals both broad regional and intra-regional variations. The relationships between the incidence of skill shortage vacancies and local labour market conditions are explored and a typology of Local Learning and Skills Council areas is developed, distinguishing between areas on the basis of the incidence of skill shortages relative to the national average and their relative unemployment rates.

Skill Shortages: Local Perspectives from England

There were dramatic changes in working and family life in the 1980s and early 1990s. this comprehensive report details the results of research on the emergence of dual location households, looking at the stresses and strains of a long distance commuting life-style.As well as documenting the decision making within the household which leads to the formation of a dual location household and the impact of a long distance weekly commuting life-style on family life, the report also explores the extent to which employees who are faced with the problems of coordinating their place of work and the location of their home.The authors further highlight the rise in dual location households and the varying circumstances underlying their formation. The costs and benefits of a long distance weekly commuting life-style are summarised, along with the prospects for increased flexibility between employers and employers and employees.Long distance living is recommended reading for policy and decision makers concerned with housing, transport, planning and labour market issues, academics in the field and human resource managers.

Long distance living: Dual location households

Active job search is central to moving from benefits into work and its encouragement is a key component of Government policy. It is many years since jobsearch behaviour was examined in its own right, and in the intervening period there have been changes in the policy, economic and technological context. In policy terms there has been increased emphasis on labour market activation and conditionality, coinciding latterly with recession. In relation to technology, a key development has been the rise of the Internet and its impact on job-search methods and recruitment practices. These contextual changes mean that there is a need to update the knowledge base on job search.

Job search study : literature review and analysis of the labour force survey

Hyperphenylalaninaemia in parenterally fed newborn babies

In this paper the prevailing geography of the information economy in Great Britain is examined. Attention is focused on the 1981 labour-force share of information occupations at the level of standard regions. This occupation approach, as developed by Porat, is interrelated with Singlemann's sectoral classification in order to provide a new view of the information-based service economy in a regional context. The spatial division of information labour in Great Britain is identified and its theoretical and policy implications are discussed. It is shown that, despite regional differences in industrial specialisation, job prospects in all parts of the country are increasingly dependent on information-based services. There is, however, clear evidence of Greater London's dominance of the information economy, particularly in higher-order information occupations related to management and control functions and specialised producer-services activities. It is suggested that innovations in information technology (computer-communications networks) will reinforce this uneven geography of employment opportunities, particularly with the further integration of Britain into the global information economy. In this light, theoretical approaches to regional economic policy must embody an international dimension and address the transsectoral nature of information-based development in which the new technologies play a central role.

Anne E. Green

Papers

Skill Shortages: Local Perspectives from England

Long distance living: Dual location households

Job search study : literature review and analysis of the labour force survey

Hyperphenylalaninaemia in parenterally fed newborn babies

The Spatial Division of Information Labour in Great Britain