How Responsive is Female Labour Supply to Child Care Costs: New Australian Estimates

The degree of responsiveness of Australian women's labour supply to child care cost has been a matter of some debate. There is a view that the level of responsiveness is very low or negligible, running counter to international and anecdotal evidence. In this paper we review the Australian and international literature on labour supply and child care, and provide improved Australian estimates of labour supply elasticities and child care demand elasticities with respect to gross child care price. We find that the limited literature in Australia has suffered from measurement error problems stemming in large part from shortcomings with data on child care price and child care usage. We use detailed child care data from three recent waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey (covering the period 2005 to 2007) to address these problems. We extend the standard labour supply and child care model to allow for separate effects of different child care prices for children in different age ranges and we calculate regional child care prices based upon child-level information. The salient finding is that child care prices do have statistically significant effects on mothers’ labour supply and child care demand. The new estimates are in line with international findings, and their robustness is supported by a validation exercise involving an alternative technique and an earlier time period.labour supply, child care price, child care demand, elasticity

Overcoming structure and agency: Talcott Parsons, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the theory of social action

Copyright © 2009 by SAGE Publications. This is the authors final version, after peer-review. It has been accepted for publication in the journal later in 2009. 12 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released May 2010.Since the 1960s, the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein has had a marked influence on the social sciences. As an important sub-field, the sociology of science has drawn extensively on the Wittgenstein and he has become a key reference point in debates in the philosophy of the social sciences about structure and agency. There, a number of commentators have employed Wittgenstein’s ‘sceptical paradox’ to demonstrate that the dualistic account of social reality provided by major figures in contemporary social theory, such as Giddens, Bourdieu, Bhaskar and Habermas, are unsustainable; they are hopelessly individualist. This paper acknowledges the importance of Wittgenstein but maintains that a critique of contemporary social theory consonant with the ‘sceptical paradox’ was already present in the sociological canon: in the form of Parsons’ utilitarian dilemma in The Structure of Social Action. This paper seeks to recover the utilitarian dilemma for current debates in order to demonstrate the enduring relevance of Parsons. The paper goes on to argue that not only did Parsons provide a critique of individualism compatible with Wittgenstein’s but that he actually transcended it

The word of command: communication and cohesion in the military

© 2006 by Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.Military sociologists have attempted to explain how military institutions develop and maintain high levels of social cohesion. They have focused primarily on how the personal and intimate social interactions between soldiers produce bonds of comradeship. This comradeship is taken as the basis of social cohesion. Although sustainable, there is an unfortunate bias in the work of military sociologists. They focus almost exclusively on informal rituals in which personal bonds are forged. In fact, the decisive rituals that bind military groups together are the formal processes of training. Drawing on ethnographic analysis of the British armed forces and the Royal Marines, in particular, this article attempts to redress the balance. It examines the drills—above all, the communication drills—that British troops are collectively trained to perform and claims that these constitute the key social rituals for the British military. On the basis of this analysis, an alternative account of comradeship is propose

The future of the European Security and Defence Policy

The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) marks an important political moment when European integration has been extended to the issue of defence. Understandably, there has been extensive commentary on the ESDP, most of which has focused on the ESDP's institutional, industrial or military deficiencies. These commentaries have been illuminating but by concentrating on the manifest weaknesses of the ESDP, scholars have perhaps neglected to discuss explicitly how a coherent ESDP could develop. Drawing on recent work by Ben Tonra, this paper discusses the social conditions which are likely to be necessary if the ESDP is to develop into a robust policy. Above all else, a coherent ESDP depends upon the development of a binding sense of mutual obligation between France, Germany and Britain. These nations need to commit themselves to collective defence goals. The paper goes on to argue that for this collective commitment to be developed between these nations, the ESDP requires missions. Only through missions, in which these nations together experience a shared threat, will enduring collective interests and the political will to address them be developed. The future of the ESDP will thus be finally determined by the actions which are carried out in its name. In the end, this may mean that a European defence identity develops not through an independent ESDP but through NATO

Partnered women’s labour supply and child care costs in Australia: measurement error and the child care price

We show that measurement error in the constructed price of child care can explain why previous Australian studies have found partnered women’s labour supply to be unresponsive to child care prices. Through improved data and improved construction of the child care price variable, we find child care price elasticities that are statistically significant, negative and in line with elasticities found in other developed countries.Labour supply; child care; local area effects

From 1968 to 1999

© 'The European Ritual: Football in the New Europe', Anthony King, 2003, Ashgate. Chapter 1 of book. Post-print version

Nationalism and sport

© SAGE Publications 2006.As Benedict Anderson noted, national communities have to be actively created through the imagination. The members of a national community need to recognise their special and exclusive bond to each other. Anderson cited the importance of print capitalism to the emergence of national communities in the nineteenth century. His argument is compelling but there are other important rituals which are critical to the creation of national solidarities. Sport is one of these. Through the sporting spectacle, not only can national communities be recognised but the transformation of these solidarities can also be traced. In the current era, under the pressure of globalisation, the nation is undergoing profound change. Through the analysis of football – and particularly the recent European Championships in Portugal – this chapter examines the gradual emergence of a re-negotiated national identity in England. Although focussing on a specific empirical example, this chapter is intended to illuminate processes which are occurring more widely

Baudrillard's nihilism and the end of theory

© 1998 Telos Press Publishing. Permission to reproduce article granted by the publisher

Structure and agency

Chapter 1 of book. © 2004 Routledge

Football hooliganism and the practical paradigm

© 1999 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc.There has been a convergence in the study of football hooliganism in the 1990s between the approaches of Clifford Stott and Steve Reicher, and Anthony King, whose work emphasizes the interactional rather than predispositional element to football violence. Instead of looking only to the dispositional factors within the members of the crowd, which past research has emphasized, both Stott and Reicher and King highlight the way in which violent outcomes are the results of mutual interactions between the crowd and other agencies, such as police. Consequently, crowd violence cannot be read off as the automatic result of premeditated intention but should be seen as a complex and potentially contingent occurrence, where prior dispositions inform interactions but do not determine them