Contextualizing Welfare's Work Disincentive: The Case of Female-headed Family Poverty

The conventional model of the relationship between welfare incentives and poverty rates holds that welfare payments produce an income-enhancement effect that removes families from poverty until some threshold. Beyond this point increased payments engender a work-disincentive effect resulting in increased rates of poverty. We challenge the model's assumption that poverty levels are a simple and spatially invariant response to welfare incentives, contending instead that local employment conditions may substantially alter the relation. Our reformulation of the conventional modeling approach is based on the expansion method. Specifically, we extend the model to include the effects of local labor-market conditions on the response of poverty levels to welfare incentives. In contesting the invariance assumption, the expansion method allows us to determine where and in what contexts welfare is “work discouraging.” The empirical analysis, which is undertaken at the county level, indicates that welfare payments vary in their influence on poverty rates across different employment contexts. A national map portraying this parameter instability demonstrates that female-family poverty rates are most responsive to welfare assistance in the rural South and least responsive in the metropolitan Northeast. Finally, we examine two sharply contrasting locales to illustrate how poverty is governed by specific employment and welfare characteristics.     

Documenting Cultural and Historical Memory: Oral History in the National Park Service

"Documenting Cultural and Historical Memory: Oral History inthe National Park Service" provides an overview and assessmentof the current state of oral history projects and programs withinthe National Park Service. Oral history has long been a particularlyvaluable resource and tool for the Park Service in preservingcultural and historical memory. Its rangers, interpreters, historians,archaeologists, ethnographers, and cultural landscape specialistsuse oral history to document the history of individual parks,as well as the events and people the parks commemorate. Theyuse oral history to create interpretive exhibits, movies, andvideos and to record perspectives on major events, figures,and movements. The Service initiates and manages a large numberof unique and significant oral history projects and programs. However, too often the value of its oral history projects andcollections has been diminished because of funding shortages,poor equipment, insufficient training, inadequate preservationmeasures, or other problems.     

Did Organization Really Matter? Party Organization and Conservative Electoral Recovery, 1945-59

Organizational recovery has traditionally been considered animportant factor in any explanation of the Conservative Party'selectoral recovery during the fifteen years after 1945. Thisarticle examines the extent of this recovery in three marginalseats, which the Conservatives either held or regained to formtheir new parliamentary majority. It demonstrates that, in anumber of constituencies, whatever the wider community mighthave thought, the reality of local organization—whetherin terms of financial health, membership numbers, the deliveryof political education, election campaigning, the effectivenessof party agents, or level of activity—was considered tobe less than impressive to those involved intimately. The articleconcludes that although the value of the Conservative Party'sextensive grass roots should not be denied, the precise roleand effectiveness of local organization should be reconsidered.     

River meander behaviour and instability: a framework for analysis

Recent empirical and theoretical work on river meanders suggests that instability is inherent. Within this context, an occurrence of multiple cut-offs could be interpreted as a clustering associated with self-organized criticality. Types of meander behaviour ranging from stable to chaotic are examined as trajectories or attractors within the phase space of rate of meander movement and bend curvature and change to the system is explored as shift from one attractor to another. It is suggested that this new approach provides insights into meander dynamics and provides a basis to identify the conditions, limits and constraints under which different behaviour occurs. Basic controls of energy and resistance underlie planform behaviour, but need to be refined in relation to the morphology and stability of channel courses.