Suchergebnisse

The Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibit discrimination against applicants and employees with disabilities. Following the elements of a prima facie claim of discrimination, this legal brief explores the conditions under which obesity has been deemed a disability. Although obesity is not generally considered a disabling impairment, plaintiffs have successfully brought obesity-related claims based on a rarely implicated definition of disability. The so-called regarded as definition protects those who are not substantially limited by any condition but are subjected to discrimination based on the perception that they are limited by a physical or mental impairment. Although employers have faired well in such obesity-related discrimination claims, a review of federal case law suggests that public human-resource managers are advised to adopt a strategy that reduces the likelihood of obesity-related discrimination, as it is more desirable to avoid potentially litigious behavior than to emerge victorious in court.

The difficulties of achieving sustainable development reflect several internal tensions in the three-pillar approach: The adoption of economic development as a separate pillar from social development challenges the view that the purpose of one is to achieve the other; economic valuation of the environment removes the distinction between environmental and economic goals; and no distinction is drawn between the development of developing countries and the development of developed ones. These tensions are shown to be symptomatic of difficult issues being avoided. A closer examination revives doubts about whether the conservation of the global commons and the development of developing countries can both be achieved without major changes in economic structures and governance systems, nationally as well as globally. It is concluded that the development of more appropriate systems requires imaginative research in every discipline of the social sciences, with a vital role for cooperation between American and Chinese institutions.

Abstract Social scientists have increasingly come to recognize the informal economy as a prominent and permanent structural feature of modern society. Rural sociologists have made a considerable contribution to this literature, demonstrating informal work to factor prominently in the livelihood strategies of rural Americans. Despite this scholarly attention significant gaps persist in our understanding of the informal economy. Drawing on data from a survey of family households in nonmetropolitan Pennsylvania, this paper examines the contours and correlates of informal work. The results make a strong case that participation in informal work is widespread and most often combined with formal work as a household livelihood strategy. While income is not found to be a significant correlate of informal work, it is found to influence the reasons cited for participation. Important correlates of informal work are identified and differences in the factors associated with informal work done to generate income (cash or in‐kind) versus savings are revealed.

Abstract  This study examines the unique experiences of low‐income rural participants in an asset building program‐the Individual Development Account. Using data from the American Dream Demonstration, this study addresses three main questions: (1) What are the individual characteristics associated with saving outcomes among rural IDA participants? (2) What are the program characteristics associated with savings among rural participants? (3) What are the policy implications for supporting asset building in rural areas? To answer these questions we conduct an Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis. The results suggest that low‐income rural participants have the ability and willingness to save toward the accumulation of assets in IDAs. Looking at individual characteristics, home ownership appears to be an important predictor of savings. In addition, this study suggests that program characteristics (financial education, peer group meetings, match rate, direct deposit, and monthly saving target), not merely individual characteristics, are important in explaining saving performance for this group.

Anyone familiar with American communities knows that they vary significantly in terms of their physical attractiveness. In this study, the authors explore the community-level correlates of attractiveness using data from all of Iowa's 954 cities and towns. Each of the communities was visited by a researcher who scored it in terms of its attractiveness. The authors correlate these ratings with a variety of community-level sociodemographic, economic, and attitudinal indicators. The results show that attractive communities tend to be larger, wealthier, and more civic-minded than other communities. Attractive communities also tend to have a higher percentage of elderly and college-educated residents. Further analysis revealed that population, wealth, and education are correlated less strongly with attractiveness as community size increases, whereas civic mindedness is correlated more strongly with attractiveness as community size increases. The authors discuss what their findings mean for communities trying to become more attractive.

This article discusses the successful legal exclusion of Irish lesbians and gays from the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York and explores the ideologies of nation-space and public space that underpin this exclusion. It argues that the progression through urban space of the marches enforces compulsory heterosexuality, through actual and semiotic exclusion. Irish American nationalism can be read as illustrative of the heterosexualization of nationalism. It was the unquestioned assumption that being homosexual is antithetical to being Irish that provided the fundamental premise from which it was logically and successfully argued in U.S. courts: that the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is a violent, obscene enemy bent on the destruction of Irish ethnicity and Irish communities. By contrast, the article holds up the parades in Cork and Dublin as designated inclusive and multicultural events, the nation-space of the Irish Republic economically liberated and wishing to communicate modernity to its citizens.

As with many science fiction works, the Star Trek franchise uses allegory to address contemporary social issues. Taking a liberal humanistic stance, it addresses race and racism using aliens as allegorical stand-ins for humanity. However, the producers of the Star Trek franchise were inadvertently perpetuating the racism they were advocating against. Operating within the framework of normative Whiteness, the producers privilege the White American male as the average human being. The characters of other racial and cultural backgrounds try to assimilate into the normative Whiteness defined by the producers or they are simply in the background to support the White lead characters. By drawing on previous work on the original series and The Next Generation, this article examines episodes from Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise to determine how the Star Trek franchise reinscribes, or sometimes destabilizes, the mode of racial and cultural homogeneity assumed by the producers.

"Shadows of Law: Melville, Stowe, and the Government of Freedom" charts the shifting relations between legal authority and African-American civil rights from the 1850s to ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments in the 1860s. Focusing on the function of trope of the law's shadow in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Melville's Battle-Pieces (1866), the essay records the process whereby the law was transformed in antislavery discourse over the course of the 1850s from an incident of slavery into a necessary instrument in the maintenance of freedom. Where important early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison often suggested that the law itself entailed slavery, the measures which actually effected the abolition of slavery imply that freedom is essentially a legal condition. "Shadows of Law" deploys careful readings of Stowe, Melville, and several contemporaneous legal landmarks (most importantly, Dred Scott v. Sandford)to explain how this reversal could come to pass.

We argue that one major cause of the U.S. postwar baby boom was the increased demand for female labor during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labor-force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the long-term implications of a one-time demand shock for female labor, such as the one experienced by American women during wartime mobilization. For the war generation, the shock leads to a persistent increase in female labor supply due to the accumulation of work experience. In contrast, younger women who turn adult after the war face increased labor-market competition, which impels them to exit the labor market and start having children earlier. In our calibrated model, this general-equilibrium effect generates a substantial baby boom followed by a baby bust, as well as patterns for age-specific labor-force participation and fertility rates that are consistent with U.S. data.

Moderator: Gert Dry. ; Presented at the 8th international congress for wildlife and livelihoods on private and communal lands: livestock, tourism, and spirit, that was held on September 7-12, 2014 in Estes Park, Colorado. ; Americans have supported private land conservation for more than 30 years. In that time, the nation's 1,700 land trusts have helped landowners conserve more than 47 million acres of farm and ranch land, wildlife habitat, and open space around the country, including more than 1.2 million acres in Colorado. Financial incentives play a critical role in these efforts. This session will provide an overview of these incentives, including federal, state and local tax benefits available to conservation-minded landowners, as well as government and private funding options. This session is not intended to provide legal, financial or accounting advice. Rather, it will give participants a working knowledge of the financial incentives available for conservation in the United States, with a particular focus on Colorado.

American hegemony has passed its peak. The twenty-first century will see a more multipolar international system. Yet Western European countries may not be the United States' main foils in upcoming decades. Four new poles of the international system are now known in the business and financial press as the "BRICs economies" (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Does the concept of "the BRICs" also have meaning within a rigorous political science framework? From the perspective of neoclassical economics, the category's justification is suprisingly weak. In contrast, a political or economic realist's framing instructs the United States to focus on states that are increasing their relative material capabilities, as each of the four is. Finally, within a liberal institutionalist's model, the BRICs are a compelling set, yet one with a deep cleavage between two subgroups: large emerging powers likely to remain authoritarian or revert to that state, and states that are securely democratic. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

Recently Mozaffar etal. [Mozaffar, S., Scarritt, J.R., Galaich, G., 2003. Electoral institutions, ethnopolitical cleavages and party systems in Africa's emerging democracies. American Political Science Review 97, 379-390] presented evidence suggesting that African party systems are somehow different from party systems elsewhere in the world. In doing so, they promoted the common notion of African exceptionalism. We believe that their conclusions are open to question because they draw inferences from a number of multiplicative interaction models in which they do not include all constitutive terms, interpret constitutive terms as unconditional marginal effects, and fail to calculate marginal effects and standard errors over a sufficiently large range of their modifying variables. By correcting these practices, we reach substantively different conclusions. Specifically, we find that African party systems respond to institutional and sociological factors such as district magnitude and ethnic fragmentation in the same way as party systems in more established democracies. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]

Includes bibliographical references. ; The frequent gap between de jure and de facto arrangements within South American judicial systems suggest that an institutional focus is not enough to understand effective access. This dissertation uses a constructivist approach to measure judicial access for the environmental and gay and lesbian social movements in Chile and Argentina through examining the effect of societal, individual justices' and social movement activists' perceptions on the social movements' level of de facto judicial access. I find that while individual justices' perceptions of the social movement seeking rights can certainly affect the outcomes of cases, it is the external cultural variable of societal perceptions that more directly influences activists' own perceptions about using the judicial system. Societal perceptions (public opinion) can affect activists' decisions when choosing which political avenues, if any, they should use to gain rights - hence expanding or contracting their level of de jure judicial access.

As institutions of higher learning have seen the aging of American college students, they have been increasingly concerned about helping them overcome what deters their reentry. Adult perception of deterrents is identified in this study. Analysis and the factor structure underlying these deterrents is examined in the Situational, Institutional, and Dispositional category of deterrents. Six factors with no extraneous items were identified: bad experience, institutional reasons, lack of resources, course offerings, cost/benefit ratio and childcare were identified for potential adult students at a small private tuition-driven undergraduate college. This complex set of findings fits with barriers established in the literature. Bad Experience, a dispositional barrier, and the Institutional factor correspond to Cross' (1981) typology. Lack of Resources and Course Offerings are spread among situational, institutional and dispositional factors. Cost/Benefit Ratio is situational and institutional. Childcare is situational. This study contributes to a complex model of deterrents to participation.

In this article we draw on our family histories of language loss to stimulate public discussion of the consequences of linguistic attrition for public school students in the United States. Our concerns for multilingualism, antiracism, and peace—and the salient connections among these three—are rooted in our lived experiences. Through an exploration of our family histories, we examine the ways in which empire and language identity can interact to shape decisions made by individual speakers of minority languages. We argue that multilingualism is a valuable resource for countering xenophobia, and that the teaching of foreign and world languages adds an important dimension to engaging empire, promoting peace and solidarity, and ultimately redefining what is legitimately "American." We call attention to the potential power of well‐designed educational policies to support heritage language maintenance, to promote language rights, and to respond to dangers posed by the disproportionate power accorded to English.