Divided we fall? The effect of manufacturing decline on the social capital of US communities

What happens to local communities when manufacturing disappears? I examine changes in associational density over nearly two decades as a proxy for social capital in US labor markets. Exploiting plausibly exogenous trade-induced shocks to local manufacturing activity, I test whether deindustrialization is associated with greater or lower organizational membership. I uncover a robust negative relationship between the two variables, particularly acute in rural and mostly-White areas. My findings, however, are sensitive to measurement: There are no clearly discernible effects of deindustrialization on social capital when I consider alternative proxies for the outcome. To reconcile these results, I present evidence suggesting that economic adversity may induce a qualitative, rather than quantitative, change in social capital.     

Reexamining transport poverty,job access,and gender issues in Central and Eastern Europe

Tirana, the Balkan capital examined in this study, displays patterns of gendered job search behavior and access, which are unique within contemporary Europe and even within post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Here, it is a rather spatially constricted job search range rather than transport poverty that prevents women living in first-ring suburbs from attaining satisfactory employment. Female commutes are extraordinarily short and most often on foot. While the city now has nearly one million inhabitants and a high car ownership rate, and is located in Europe, the employment and mobility choices and behaviors of its female residents resemble those in developing rather than developed countries, and in small rather than large cities. The reasons underpinning this situation have more to do with socio-cultural gender barriers and less with transport poverty or labor market weaknesses. This finding might apply to other Balkan capitals or cities outside Europe, which have recently experienced large waves of internal migration and where both existing residents and newcomers have not yet adjusted to ‘big city’ life.     

我国对外劳务输出现状与对策

对外劳务输出有利于增加外汇收入、缓解就业压力、培养锻炼人才 ,也有利于减轻我国环境和生态压力 ,减少非法移民。我国具有发展对外劳务输出的巨大潜力和广阔前景。在扩大对外劳务输出方面 ,除了要加强立法 ,规范管理 ,多渠道改善我国对外劳务输出环境和政策外 ,也要充分利用海外华侨华人的优势和世界华商网络的功能 ,并发挥地方及边境各少数民族在劳务输出方面的优势。     

20世纪50年代初期长江中下游地区乡村劳动力市场探微

从土改结束到集体化高潮前,从土地均分造成的土地和劳动力等生产要素的非均衡配置、农业生产的季节性特征以及国家政策的影响等这些劳动力市场的供给、需求因素来看,当时的确存在着一个广大的乡村劳动力市场——雇佣市场。与土改前不同的是,尽管这一时期雇工农户的数量较多、比重较大,但单位农户的雇工数量却很少。在雇佣形式上,长工数量、佣期急剧下降和短工数量显著增加是这段时期的一大特点。从阶层构成来看,雇佣关系主要发生在普通劳动者之间,并且雇工工资的涨落主要取决于各地乡村的劳动力实际供给和需求状况。     

青海农村剩余劳动力转移问题研究

文章通过对青海省农村剩余劳动力现状的分析,表明青海农村劳动力资源过剩严重,农村剩余劳动力行业和地域分布不合理,农村劳动力转移仍然处于无组织的自发状态,劳动力整体素质低下,同时,分析了青海农村剩余劳动力转移中存在的主要问题和难点,提出消除制度障碍,调整农业产业结构,大力发展农村第三产业,发挥乡镇企业吸纳农村剩余劳动力的功能,建立城乡统一的劳动力市场体系,大力推进农村城镇化进程,吸引农村剩余劳动力向小城镇聚集,加大教育投入,提高农村劳动者素质,搞好农民工技能鉴定工作等措施。     

Gender trouble: Women and the making of Italy's ‘active population’, 1861‐1936

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the complex sociocultural and ideological reasons that lay behind the well‐known fall in the number of women workers in the Italian population censuses from the post‐Unification period to Fascism. This was a time when the statisticians of the whole ‘civilized’ world were engaged in the definition of the modern statistical notion of ‘active population’. Through an examination of material published by Italian as well as non‐Italian statistical institutions and of the debates on women's work at the turn of the century, the article shows how the statisticians sought to make their data comparable to those of other, more modem countries and argues that an important turning point in the changing statistical representations of women's work in Italy occurred with the census of 1901. This coincided with growing interest in the question of women's work and the campaign for the introduction of legislation ‘protecting’ women workers. As state constructions, the censuses clearly contributed to the production of a more masculinized image of the labor force, an image which, however, eventually became too distant from reality even for the statisticians themselves.     

Technology and gay identity: the case of the pre-Second World War male flight attendant

This article examines 1930s aviation in the USA through an unconventional lens – the male flight attendant, a figure who served as a cultural touchstone for negotiating gender roles in the emerging business of commercial air transport. As aviation had broad resonance as a symbol of modern and cosmopolitan life, the male flight attendant, too, became bound to this larger context of technological development and the futuristic transformations of society it promised. My aim is to detail these connections between the flight attendant and technological innovation, but also to make a deeper claim: that the occupation of flight attendant, the place of gay men therein, and the cultural acceptance and resistance to this fact were constituent, not ancillary, to the history of the 1930s. In the process, I am arguing not only that gender serves as a fundamental category of historical analysis – via the assumptions and power relations through which historical actors make history – but also that issues of gay identity and homophobia are integral to such analysis     

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

The recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.     

The Implications of Analytic Philosophy of History for the Practicing Historian

An article by John O'Hagan and Elish Kelly in 2005 (see Historical Methods 38:118-25) discussed collecting information on visual artists that would allow a broad historical ranking based on "prominence." O'Hagan and Kelly collected these data to examine prominent artists' birth locations, work locations, and their consequential patterns of labor movement during several long periods. In this article, the authors examine artists' migration for four periods (based on their date of birth): Renaissance Italy, Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the Western world in general for the periods 1850-99 and 1900-49. The data show that important artists clustered in all periods at a remarkably high level. Florence and Rome dominated in Renaissance Italy, with significant clustering because of the artists' birthplaces and domestic migration. Paris and London witnessed a marked clustering of artists born in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Paris continuing to dominate among artists born in the second half of the nineteenth century. Artists born in the first half of the twentieth century clustered in New York City, with all prominent American artists clustering there.