Towards individualising couple finance: women’s housing assets and household decisions in Japan

Individualisation, which is increasingly promoted in European welfare states, tends to be absent from policy discourse as well as housing studies in Japan. It is largely because the ‘family as a unit’ is still a dominant approach in their household finance, social security and taxation systems, which also reflects women’s lack of home ownership. However, recent demographic trends such as falling marriage rates, low fertility and increased female labour participation indicate significant diversification in women’s life-course. Thus, today women making their own financial investment and house purchase have increasingly become popular practice. In this context, a new approach beyond the conventional ‘family as a unit’ may be required in the development of a new social contract. Drawing on data from qualitative research conducted among women in their 30s, this article explores the relationship between financial independence, household decisions and asset holding of partnered women in Japan, which reveals contested dimensions of women’s independence and autonomy in household and family life. Through the lens of home ownership, it considers the importance of promoting individual assets in order to foster gender equality in marriage.     

The Local Drivers of Land Degradation in South‐East Asia

Economic globalisation has led to a huge increase in demand for food, goods and services by expanding urban middle class populations. These demands cause environmental changes that in turn feed back upon the urban environment and human population. While the global changes are well researched, the cumulative significance of local environmental changes is less well known. Yet, the local changes may have greater impact on the decisions which individuals make that affect soil erosion and land degradation. People respond to family circumstances and to local economic opportunities in ways that most suit the needs of their families and households. Several demonstration projects that were not adopted offer lessons in understanding how people make their land‐use decisions. An understanding of people's past experiences, present needs and views of the future helps those seeking to improve environmental management to promote policies and actions that are likely to succeed by being acceptable to those involved.     

Legalism as an Executive Ideology: Foundations of Barack Obama's Leadership Style

Abstract

The purpose of this commentary is to explore the sources of decision-making by President Obama. Specifically, the article notes his strong foundation in legal education, law journal editing, and early occupational activities related to law practice. It is observed that a legalist cast of mind rather than broad statements about race, class, and nation define the Obama early period in office. These considerations are often at the center of presidential options chosen, especially in areas of foreign policy and global challenges. The article claims that “legalism” serves to place serious limits on initiatives and independent actions, but also serves to put a brake on tendencies to impose a new imperial presidency. Such ideological checks and balances show unique dimensions to this president, but also continuity with past limits to extremism.     

NAFTA's Impact on Business Environmental Decision Making

Signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) liberalized trade policy and reduced tariffs between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, but activists opposed to the treaty predicted an environmental disaster. This article seeks to analyze the dynamics of environmental spending and changes in companies' profiles following NAFTA. Our results suggest that these predictions have not come true. Through an econometric model, we explore how 2,438 industries in the 1994–2002 period made environmental decisions and how much they spent on cleanup. Estimates were made with a dynamic panel model using the generalized method of moments (GMM) method. Our results suggest that environmental investment decisions depended on business size, their technological capabilities, sales performance, and the need to comply with the standards required by customers in the international market. The last section explores policies to improve compliance with Mexico's environmental regulations and to develop sustainable, eco‐friendly manufacturing.     

Are All Policy Decisions Equal? Explaining the Variation in Media Coverage of the UK Budget

A country's budget is one of the most important public policy instruments, as it establishes the government's policy priorities and has the potential to determine winners and losers. The budget, however, is a mixture of different components and these get varying degrees of attention in the media. Drawing on sociology of news research, this paper seeks to explain this heterogeneous coverage of a budget's policy decisions. To do so, it uses a unique data set of over 5,000 articles of press coverage of six UK budgets (2008–2012). These articles are coded for the presence/absence of each of the budget's policy decision, via automated content analysis. On the basis of a multivariate negative binomial model, we find that the salience of a policy decision in the coverage is determined by its cost, whether it is negative (i.e., tax hikes and spending cuts) or positive, the income group that is the most affected by it, and the level of attention given to it by the government.     

Intersectional power dynamics and extended households: Elderly and widowed women’s international migration from Armenia

Drawing upon interviews and fieldwork conducted in Armenia and Turkey with 25 Armenian migrant women and their non-accompanying family members, the present article examines how gendered norms intersecting with age, marital and motherhood statuses have structured the migration decision-making process as it occurs at the household level. These migrant women were mostly elderly, widowed and from extended households, where male income support to the family was either insufficient or wholly absent for a variety of reasons. Building on the Household Survival Strategies (HSS) approach, this article examines the dynamism and complex kinship norms in extended-households and how these have led some women to assume the role of migrant labourers in a patriarchal context that would ordinarily deny them mobility. While empirically this study sheds light on women’s migration from an understudied geography, it also deepens our understanding of the interplay between patriarchy, intersectionality and women’s agency outside of the traditional nuclear household.     

The 14th-Century Rebuilding of the Collegiate Church of St Mary’s,Warwick

The 14th-century rebuilding of the collegiate church of St Mary’s by the earls of Warwick has received surprisingly little scholarly consideration, despite the status of its patrons and the distinctiveness of its architecture. This article uses drawings of the building before the fire of 1694, which destroyed its west end, together with the college’s extensive cartulary and other records, to reconstruct the 14th-century church. From this a timeline for the construction of the church is proposed. Regional, national and international stylistic precedents and antecedents are explored and used to test the validity of the ‘centre/periphery’ model of architectural change. The article concludes with a brief discussion of methodological insights drawn from the analysis.     

Expressing Anxiety? Breast pump usage in American wage workplaces

This article considers the potential and problems for women seeking to combine breastfeeding with wage labor outside the home through the use of breast pumps. After locating the breast pump within cultural, historical and legislative contexts of shifting views about infant nutrition on the one hand and trends in women's participation in the wage work force on the other, we unpack how this technology has re-shaped the landscape of choices about infant feeding in the United States. Using disciplinary lenses of science and technology studies, feminist geography and women's studies, we examine how the breast pump has reshaped workplace experiences after childbirth. Based on interviews and survey data with respondents in Albany, New York across a range of class and racial backgrounds, we submit that while the breast pump does allow some women to combine breastfeeding and wage work outside the home, the advantages of breast pumps are constrained both by cultural attitudes about pumping as an activity, the lack of a sufficient legislative framework, as well as by the way workplaces themselves are designed.     

抗美援朝的战略决策在政治与军事互动中的得与失

抗美援朝战争的特殊性决定了其政治与军事的互动作用与以往战争相比更有特殊性的表现 ,如政治对军事的主导作用增强 ;军事行动所追求的目标已不再是以全歼敌人并摧毁国家机器为目的的全面胜利 ,而是在力争维护国内国际和平前提下取得打退敌人有限胜利等。由于这些特殊性 ,使我党在以政治和军事互动作用为基础的抗美援朝的战略决策上有得有失