Suchergebnisse

In The Connected Species, Mark Williams explores how our drive to connect has spurred us to great innovations while also driving a wedge between groups. By better understanding how our brains have evolved to support human connection, we can work together towards a less divided, more equitable and sustainable future.

This essay will realize an intersectional historiographic approach to the career of Ina Ray Hutton, one of the most important band leaders during the rise and fall of the swing era. Hutton was known as the "blonde bombshell of rhythm," an appellation that was critical not only to her popular notoriety but also to her success performing a sustained act of racial passing, the full public awareness of which has arrived in a belated and untimely fashion (absent from her obituaries). Although her passing was likely known within certain delimited communities, it was hidden from the larger dominant white culture of the day and from the popular memory of her trans-media audience. This study will focus on the contexts of her work at the beginning of her career, and end with her late career on local and network television as sites that provide new speculative interventions to recognize the significance of this singular performer.

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.