Past analysis of social movements and social movement organizations has normally assumed a close link between the frustrations or grievances of a collectivity of actors and the growth and decline of movement activity. Questioning the theoretical centrality of this assumption directs social movement analysis away from its heavy emphasis upon the social psychology of social movement participants; it can then be more easily integrated with structural theories of social process. This essay presents a set of concepts and related propositions drawn from a resource mobilization perspective. It emphasizes the variety and sources of resources; the relationship of social movements to the media, authorities, and other parties; and the interaction among movement organizations. Propositions are developed to explain social movement activity at several levels of inclusiveness-the social movement sector, the social movement industry, and social movement organization.

Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

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

▪ Abstract Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. Several ways of measuring SES have been proposed, but most include some quantification of family income, parental education, and occupational status. Research shows that SES is associated with a wide array of health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children, with effects beginning prior to birth and continuing into adulthood. A variety of mechanisms linking SES to child well-being have been proposed, with most involving differences in access to material and social resources or reactions to stress-inducing conditions by both the children themselves and their parents. For children, SES impacts well-being at multiple levels, including both family and neighborhood. Its effects are moderated by children's own characteristics, family characteristics, and external support systems.

Socioeconomic status and child development.

Recent research consistently reports that persistent poverty has more detrimental effects on IQ, school achievement, and socioemotional functioning than transitory poverty, with children experiencing both types of poverty generally doing less well than never-poor children. Higher rates of perinatal complications, reduced access to resources that buffer the negative effects of perinatal complications, increased exposure to lead, and less home-based cognitive stimulation partly account for diminished cognitive functioning in poor children. These factors, along with lower teacher expectancies and poorer academic-readiness skills, also appear to contribute to lower levels of school achievement among poor children. The link between socioeconomic disadvantage and children's socioemotional functioning appears to be mediated partly by harsh, inconsistent parenting and elevated exposure to acute and chronic stressors. The implications of research findings for practice and policy are considered.

Socioeconomic disadvantage and child development

In the area of labor market policy, the 1970s have seen a major redirection of policy away from programs designed to change the productivity of individual workers and toward direct job-creation policies For fiscal year 1980, nearly $4 billion was obligated for direct job-creation efforts, three- fourths of it for public sector job creation This outlay reflects a major change of emphasis from the earlier training-education-placement efforts in the manpower field, and an expansion of income support policy in the transfer program area The effort to provide jobs directly to the unemployed would appear to reflect dissatisfaction — perhaps, frustration — with policies to increase income and employment via increasing earnings capacity, and to maintain the income of those for whom work is unavailable

Direct Job Creation

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/181/4101/723.full.pdf

Evaluating Federal Water Projects: A Critique of Proposed Standards.

Education and Economic Well-Being: The Role of Non-Market Effects.

The 1996 U.S. welfare reform legislation established the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF represents the ascendance of the view that market work should be substituted for benefit recipiency. We describe the problems inherent in U.S. social welfare policy prior to TANF (emphasizing its serious labor supply disincentives), catalogue the wide variety of economic changes implicit in TANF, and describe the policies undertaken by the state of Wisconsin, a leader in implementing the new federal policy. We conclude by asking if this U.S. reform can serve as a model for other nations.

Robert Haveman

Papers

Direct Job Creation

Evaluating Federal Water Projects: A Critique of Proposed Standards.

Education and Economic Well-Being: The Role of Non-Market Effects.

Welfare to Work in the U.S.: A Model for Other Developed Nations?

Policy Analysis and the Congress: An Economist's View.