Traditional vs. secular values and work-life well being across Europe

This paper examines how culture, defined in our analysis by reference to traditional versus secular values, affects the work-life balance across Europe. Specifically, we focus on the factors that affect the propensity of individuals across 30 European countries to exhibit behavioural patterns in the work and life domains consistent with the segmentation, spillover or compensation hypotheses. Testing the latter assertions, our empirical analysis replicates the study by Judge and Watanabe (1994) with data collected in 1999/00, thus bringing dated empirical results into a multi-country, contemporary realm. Based on self-reported job and life satisfaction measures, we then extend the empirical examination by controlling for different cultural values alongside a large set of standard economic and demographic factors. Our results emphasise the important role of views on secular versus traditional values as a main factor influencing respondents’ work-life balance and well being. The role of interpersonal trust features as a particularly prominent component in these results

Making space for women in urban governance? Leadership and claims-making in a Kerala slum

This paper looks at the role of gender in the shaping and exercise of political authority. Its empirical focus is a slum in central Trivandrum, Kerala's capital city, which is undergoing a phased process of formalisation and rebuilding funded through a flagship Indian national programme, the JNNURM. The upgrade project should offer a dense network of ‘invited’ spaces for female participation within urban governance, both through women's presence within democratically elected municipal councils, and the deliberate linking of its implementation to Kudumbashree, Kerala's network of women-only neighbourhood groups that are responsible for implementing various antipoverty interventions throughout the state. Drawing on oral histories of the slum's evolution, interviews with project participants, and detailed ethnographic observation, we highlight the contests over identifying the list of JNNURM beneficiaries who would ultimately be granted a government-built flat at the project's completion. This key task in the project's implementation has been devolved to the local level, and therefore offers important insights into the practical efficacy of these invited spaces. The contests over this list show how ‘actually existing’ urban governance unfolds, and in particular highlight the interplay of formal and informal practices at work in ‘fixing’ a list that had local legitimacy. They also illustrate the ways in which power and authority are contested, and the role gender plays within performances of leadership. Women's political agency and efficacy are hampered both by Kerala's restrictive gender norms and by the high stakes and highly masculinist struggles present within its urban politics. The paper's theoretical contribution is to broaden our conceptualisation of leadership and claims making in the Global South, and within this to pay proper attention to the gendered nature of political space

Gender, poverty and social justice

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspec

Governance of Diversity Between Social Dynamics and Conflicts in Multicultural Cities. A Selected Survey on Historical Bibliography

This paper is an excursus on multiculturalism from a historical perspective. It ranges from the encounters of different cultures in ancient times, through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period up to the present times. It describes the peculiarity of the solutions adopted, juridical or social, formal or informal. Although it is difficult to classify the various attitudes towards foreigners, a decisive distinction should be made between modern history and previous times. Until the 19th century the number of migrants was significant in a historical perspective, but limited in absolute terms. May this fact have helped the hosting institutions to encourage a favourable policy towards foreign settlements? Another distinction must be made between high qualified migration and humble and unskilled workers. Cities’ histories are full of discriminatory measures towards local immigrants from villages who swelled the ranks of urban outcasts. Finally, it seems clear that the category of multiculturalism, as a premise for the successful integration of foreigners can only be applied with precautions to historical examples. The challenge of the clash of cultures was tackled differently in past societies, without necessarily meaning that those societies were racist or xenophobic. Successful examples of integration and development with the contribution of diversity in the past could involve exclusion and discrimination apparently unacceptable nowadays.Social dynamics, Conflicts, Multicultural cities, Diversities

Does formal work pay? The role of labor taxation and social benefit design in the New EU Member States

The analysis presented in this paper defines three different synthetic measurements of disincentives for formal work: two standard measurements, namely the tax wedge and the marginal effective tax rate (METR); and a new, innovative measurement called formalization tax rate (FTR). The novelty of the latter is that it measures disincentives stemming not only from labor taxation, but also from benefit withdrawal due to formalization. A descriptive analysis across a large number of OECD and Eastern European countries reveals that the disincentives for formal work - when measured through the FTR - are especially high for low-wage earners. This suggests that formal work might not pay in this segment of the labor market, in particular for the so-called mini-jobs and midi-jobs (low paying part-time work). Another novelty of the paper is its empirical approach. Using EU-SILC 2008 data and OECD Tax and Benefit data for six Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia), we match disincentives for formal work to individual observations in a large data set. Applying a probit regression, the analysis finds a significant positive correlation between FTR or METR and the incidence of being informal. In other words, controlling for individual and job characteristics, the higher the FTR or the METR that individuals are facing is, the more likely they are to work informally. The tax wedge, on the other hand, yields a negative correlation. This indicates that the tax wedge is not sufficiently capturing disincentives for formal work. We also conclude that in cross-country analysis, it might be more useful to use the tax wedge that applies to low wage earners as opposed to average wage earners

Welfare: theoretical and analytical paradigms

The paper reviews paradigms of welfare, principally the industrialization thesis, the three worlds of welfare and social investment states and shows how these link to wider public policies and underlying assumptions. It locates explanations in historical and contemporary contexts. The literature of social policy is seen to be both descriptive and prescriptive and to have developed in response to key crises. The paper considers arguments for and against universalism and targeting, and shows how these concepts fit within theories of welfare. It considers lessons from this review for discussions of how to develop social security and health systems in emerging economies and indicates the value of systems that include all or the vast majority of the population, organized around principles of collective social insurance and recognize the value of caring work. Proposals have, however, to be set in economic systems with fair, living wages and progressive income tax structures—goals which run counter to the current trajectory of financial capitalism

Social Identity and Inequality--The Impact of China’s Hukou System

We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals? response to economic incentives. We focus on China?s decades old household registration system, or the hukou institution, which categorizes citizens into urban and rural residents, and favors the former over the latter in resource allocation. Our results indicate that making individuals? hukou status salient and public significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students on an incentivized cognitive task by 10 percent. This leads to a leftward shift of their earnings distribution – the proportion of rural migrants below the 25th earnings percentile increases significantly by almost 19 percentage points. However, among non-migrants the proportion with earnings below the 25th percentile drops by 5 percentage points, and the proportion above the 75th percentile increases by almost 8 percentage points, albeit insignificantly. The results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals? intrinsic response to incentives, and consequently on widening income inequality.social identity, hukou, inequality, field experiment, China

Social Hierarchies and the Formation of Customary Property Law in Pre-Industrial China and England

Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually “despotic” towards the poor. Such assumptions are highly questionable: Quite the opposite, one of the most striking characteristics of Qing and Republican property institutions is that they often gave significantly greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable institutions in early modern England. In particular, Chinese property customs afforded much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land. In both societies, land-pawning occurred far more frequently among poorer households than richer ones, but Chinese customary law allowed debtors to indefinitely retain redemption rights over collateralized property, whereas English debtors would generally lose the property permanently if they failed to redeem within one year. This article argues that the comparatively “egalitarian” tendencies of Qing and Republican property institutions stemmed from the different ways Chinese and English rural communities allocated social status and rank. Hierarchical “Confucian” kinship networks dominated social and economic life in most Chinese villages. Within these networks, an individual’s status and rank depended, in large part, on his age and generational seniority, rather than personal wealth. This allowed many low-income households to enjoy status and rank quite disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, substantial landed wealth was generally a prerequisite for high status in early modern England, effectively excluding lower-income households from positions of sociopolitical authority. Chinese smallholders possessed, therefore, significantly more social bargaining power, and were more capable of negotiating desirable property institutions. Paradoxically, the predominance of kinship hierarchies actually enhanced macro-level political and economic equality

Integrated Coastal Zone Management in the People’s Republic of China – An Assessment of Structural Impacts on Decision-making Processes

Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) forms a generally accepted concept to ensure sustainable development in the coastal zone. The implementation of the ICZM framework as formulated, e.g. by the World Coast Conference, is often constrained by the political system within which it should be applied. This is the case in the People’s Republic of China. This study takes a political science perspective based on approaches inherent in neo-institutional and administrative theories. This way the relevant political structures are explained and the impacts that the transformation of the socio-economic system had on institutions are located. This is extended by the reflection of related political power distribution. This part of the analysis mainly contains existing knowledge on (integrated) CZM in China but evaluates it from a so far neglected point of view. The second part of the paper is taking the successful local ICZM approach of Xiamen and a proposed approach for Shanghai as an example to show that the adaptation of a working approach to other parts of the country is impossible without modifications to the organizational structures of decision-making and implementation. So far the literature emphasizes mostly modifications in content. An important reason for structural elements being comparably important is the choice of ICZM issues and the local power distribution. It furthermore shows that these are also the determining factors obstructing the upscaling of a local approach to the national level, a fact which constrains the formulation of national guidelines in China and leaves only the bottom-up alternative of introducing ICZM to China – a hard task that leaves a disproportional responsibility to the local governmental level.Integrated Coastal Zone Management, People’s Republic of China, Political Structure, Power Distribution, Jurisdictional Overlaps