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

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

In this innovative approach to the practice of social science, Charles Ragin explores the use of fuzzy sets to bridge the divide between quantitative and qualitative methods. Paradoxically, the fuzzy set is a powerful tool because it replaces an unwieldy, "fuzzy" instrument—the variable, which establishes only the positions of cases relative to each other, with a precise one—degree of membership in a well-defined set. Ragin argues that fuzzy sets allow a far richer dialogue between ideas and evidence in social research than previously possible. They let quantitative researchers abandon "homogenizing assumptions" about cases and causes, they extend diversity-oriented research strategies, and they provide a powerful connection between theory and data analysis. Most important, fuzzy sets can be carefully tailored to fit evolving theoretical concepts, sharpening quantitative tools with in-depth knowledge gained through qualitative, case-oriented inquiry. This book will revolutionize research methods not only in sociology, political science, and anthropology but in any field of inquiry dealing with complex patterns of causation.

Fuzzy-Set Social Science

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

Redesigning Social Inquiry Fuzzy Sets And Beyond

Part I: Concept and Measurement 1. How We Grow Unequal Patrick Emmenegger, Silja Hausermann, Bruno Palier, and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser 2. Varieties of Dualization? Labor Market Segmentation and Insider-Outsider Divides Across Regimes Silja Hausermann and Hanna Schwander 3. Labor Market Disadvantage and the Experience of Recurrent Poverty Mark Tomlinson and Robert Walker Part II: Decomposing Dualization 4. Whatever Works: Dualization and the Service Economy in Bismarckian Welfare States Werner Eichhorst and Paul Marx 5. Dualization and Gender in Social Services: The Role of the State in Germany and France Daniela Kroos and Karin Gottschall 6. From Dilemma to Dualization: Social and Migration Policies in the 'Reluctant Countries of Immigration Patrick Emmenegger and Romana Careja Part III: Varieties of Dualization 7. Shifting the Public-Private Mix: A New Dualization of Welfare Martin Seeleib-Kaiser, Adam Saunders, and Marek Naczyk 8. Responses to Labor Market Divides in Small States Since the 1990s Herbert Obinger, Peter Starke, and Alexandra Kaasch 9. Dualization and Institutional Complementarities: Industrial Relations, Labor Market and Welfare State Changes in France and Germany Bruno Palier and Kathleen Thelen 10. Economic Dualization in Japan and South Korea Ito Peng Part IV: The Politics of Dualization 11. Solidarity or Dualization? Social Governance, Union Preferences and Unemployment Benefit Adjustment in Belgium and France Daniel Clegg 12. Insider-Outsider Politics: Party Strategies and Political Behavior in Sweden Johannes Lindvall and David Rueda 13. How Rich Countries Cope With Deindustrialization Patrick Emmenegger, Silja Hausermann, Bruno Palier, and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser Index

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The age of dualization : the changing face of inequality in deindustrializing societies

Summary Job security regulations, here understood as restrictions on hiring and firing, figure promi nently in the policy recommendations of international organizations or national reform programmes However, in contrast to the prominence of job security regulations in the current reform discourse, hardly any attention is paid to their determinants In this article, the insider/outsider theory of employment and unemployment is examined Advocates of this approach argue that job security reg ulations mainly benefit the labour market insiders As a consequence, insiders will fight all reforms that aim to dismantle these regulations The insiders are supported by Social Democratic parties, which only represent the interests of the insiders In this article it is maintained that this simple argu ment is wrong Labour market outsiders can be expected to be equally supportive of job security reg ulations and Social Democratic parties as labour market insiders This claim is supported by the empirical analysis using survey data

Barriers to Entry : Insider/Outsider Politics and the Political Determinants of Job Security Regulations

This article uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the determinants of job security regulations - here understood as restrictions on hiring and firing - in Western democracies Unlike previous studies, the analysis reveals three different paths to high levels of job security regulations The first path covers the Southern European state capitalist countries In these countries, conflicts between forces pushing for liberal democracy and groups alienated from modernisation have led to high levels of statism and crowded out other societal actors Job security regulations were enacted relatively early in order to provide social security by means available to the state Due to fragmented welfare states, job security regulations have remained one of the most important pillars of the social protection regime The second path covers the Continental European managed capitalist countries and is also characterised by high levels of statism In these countries, repressive governments employed a stick-and-carrot strategy to weaken the labour movement and tie the loyalties of the individual to the state After the Second World War, these countries developed corporatist intermediation systems and encompassing and generous welfare states Finally, the third path covers the Nordic managed capitalist countries This path is characterised by a high degree of non-market coordination, strong labour movements and few institutional veto points In the Nordic managed capitalist countries, job security regu- lations traditionally have been subject to collective agreements However, in the 1960s, labour movements succeeded in pushing through the public legislation of job security despite opposition from employers' associations Methodologically, this article demonstrates that cross-national differences in the level of job security regulations can only be explained if the methods used allow for complex causality In contrast, methods which focus on 'net effects' do not offer satisfactory explanations for the cross-national differences in the level of job security regulations There is a remarkable discrepancy between the number of theoretical argu- ments put forward to explain cross-national differences in the level of job security regulations and the amount of empirical research on their determi- nants Job security regulations are frequently cited as a major reason for the bad labour market performance of European countries (eg, Blanchard 2006) Several theoretical accounts have been developed to explain cross-national variation in the level of job security regulations In contrast, empirical litera- ture on the determinants of job security regulations is scarce This is especially the case for comparative empirical work This article fills this gap in the

Job security regulations in Western democracies: A fuzzy set analysis

The Age of Dualization

This article examines the effects of migration experience on political attitudes in Central and Eastern European countries. The rationale for this quest is the hypothesis that contact with democrat...

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Patrick Emmenegger

Papers

The age of dualization : the changing face of inequality in deindustrializing societies

Barriers to Entry : Insider/Outsider Politics and the Political Determinants of Job Security Regulations

Job security regulations in Western democracies: A fuzzy set analysis

The Age of Dualization

Making Democratic Citizens: The Effects of Migration Experience on Political Attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe