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Occupations traditionally played a central role in stratification accounts. In the wake of the Great Recession, debates regarding the extent and nature of occupational stratification have been reinvigorated. An exploration of occupational wage stratification patterns defined by both detailed occupational unit groups and the broader occupational class categories of the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) reveals the proportion of wage inequality between occupations and occupational classes has remained broadly stable 1997 to 2015. No compelling evidence is found for growing wage inequalities between detailed occupations within NS-SEC categories. This article underlines the continued utility of occupations and particularly the NS-SEC grouping of them in describing the structure of stratification in contemporary Britain.

Little is known about variation in the efficacy of financial participation across countries. This article examines the relationship between two types of financial participation (profit-sharing and employee share-ownership) and labour productivity across 29 European countries using a representative workplace survey. Consistent with theoretical expectations, profit-sharing is associated with superior labour productivity when it is open to all employees, whilst the evidence for employee share-ownership is more mixed. Analysis reveals considerable variation in the efficacy of both schemes across Europe. Country-level collective bargaining coverage has the greatest explanatory power in accounting for cross-country variation in efficacy. In countries with higher levels of collective bargaining coverage, profit-sharing performs less well, whereas employee share-ownership performs better, relative to countries with lower collective bargaining coverage. These findings shed light on the comparative dimension of the financial participation–labour productivity link.

I read Ian Wedde's memoir over Christmas 2014 on Waiheke Island, where I had been taken on holiday as a child sixty years earlier, delighting in his non-judgemental evocation of the 1950s—that culturally embarrassing decade that was a paradise to grow up in. In his account of a Blenheim childhood I encountered echoes of my mother's recall of her childhood there in the 1920s. For the baby-boomers this is a defining literary registration of our era from within the lucid recall of a major writer of our generation. Sargeson's or Frame's New Zealand childhood worlds are distant now, and it is engaging to recognize a collective narrative not mired in puritanism or poverty. The Grass Catcher is a welcome generational story of place, community, and language.

"The Republic of Indonesia is a rising great power in the Asia-Pacific, set to become the eighth largest economy in the world in the coming decades. It is the most populous Muslim majority country in the world. The largest Islamic organizations and parties have supported Indonesia's participation with global markets, but this has not come from an ideological support for capitalism or economic liberalization. Islamic political culture has denounced the injustices caused by global capitalism and its excesses. In fact, support for Indonesia's engagement with the international political economy is born from political pragmatism, and from Indonesia's struggles to achieve economic development. This book examines the role of Islamic identity in Indonesia's foreign economic relations and in its engagement with the world order. There is no single expression of Islam in Indonesia, the politics espoused by Islamic parties and organizations are far from monolithic. Islamic sentiment has been invoked by the state to justify heinous acts of brutality, as well as by violent, subnational revolutionary groups. However, these expressions of Islam have deviated from the dominant narrative, which is in favour of international cooperation and economic development. Economic exploitation, political alienation, financial volatility, and aggression toward Muslims around the world that has caused some Islamic groups to radicalize. The political culture of Islam in Indonesia is a social force that is helping to foster a peaceful rise for Indonesia. However, a peaceful expression of Islam is not inevitable for the republic, nor can it be assumed that Islamic identity in Indonesia will unwaveringly support the global economic order, regardless of what might occur in global politics"--

This book examines U.S.-Latin American relations from an historical, contemporary, and theoretical perspective. By drawing examples from the distant and more recent past and interweaving history with theory Mark E. Williams illustrates the enduring principles of international relations theory and provides students the conceptual tools to make sense of inter-American relations. It is a masterful guide for how to organize facts, think systematically about issues, weigh competing explanations, and draw your own conclusions regarding the past, present, and future of international politics in the region.

Human civilizations throughout time have all grappled with the challenge of molding geographical and environmental conditions for the purpose of developing their respective societies and cultures. Empires of old have imposed their imperial will over subject populations to have them 'fit' into a prescribed empirical development paradigm. This is no less true in regions of East Asia when, in the aftermath of World War II, Western nations – led especially by the United States – began to impose political and economic policies that galvanized the ethos of a 'modern' development paradigm in the East Asian realm. This situation has led to a clash of societal traditions and cultural values that has not abated for more than seventy years. The purpose of this short study, then, is to examine the impact of the so-called 'Western development architecture' in East Asia, and to acknowledge changes that have produced a dichotomy of Western and Eastern development paradigms in the current political-economic situation of the early 21st century.

The notion of job quality has been at the forefront of academic and policy-debates, best crystallized in the pursuit to create more but also better jobs as a route to economic prosperity. Motivated by the need to better understand how occupational-level structures shape job quality, we derive predictions from the occupational closure literature to explore how occupational licensing – the strongest and fastest growing form of closure – shapes job quality in Britain. Using nationally-representative data over several decades, we find that the effects of licensing tend to be confined to jobs in the most stringently-licensed occupations, with such jobs having higher pay, lower job insecurity, greater opportunities for skill-use, and higher continuous learning requirements – relative to jobs in similarly-skilled unlicensed occupations. Of particular concern, however, is the finding that jobs in stringently-licensed occupations are also characterized by significantly lower task discretion and significantly higher job demands. Overall, our study adds a new dimension to job quality debates by highlighting the role of emergent occupational-level institutional structures in shaping job quality, and further, that despite the overall positive effects closure strategies have, they may come at a cost to certain critical intrinsic dimensions of job quality.

ObjectiveThis study provides the first representative portrait of temporal trends in subjective social status (SSS) in China. SSS has been shown to be important for health and well‐being outcomes, yet little is known how its determinants change over time.MethodsUsing data from 10 nationally representative survey waves, 2003 to 2012 (N = 80,141), we examine descriptive and multivariate trends. Oaxaca‐Blinder decomposition is used to decompose changes in determinants in mean SSS over time.Results and ConclusionResults demonstrate that (1) average SSS has risen over time, yet there is an enduring tendency for the Chinese to place themselves in lowest levels in the social hierarchy; (2) objective socioeconomic variables such as income explain much of the rise in average SSS; (3) yet the strength of the relationship between socioeconomic variables predicting SSS has been weakening over time. This article adds to our understanding of the determinants of SSS in contexts undergoing transition.