350 research outputs found
Families' social backgrounds matter : socio-economic factors, home learning and young children's language, literacy and social outcomes
Parental support with children's learning is considered to be one pathway through which socio-economic factors influence child competencies. Utilising a national longitudinal sample from the Millennium Cohort Study, this study examined the relationship between home learning and parents' socio-economic status and their impact on young children's language/literacy and socio-emotional competence. The findings consistently showed that, irrespective of socio-economic status, parents engaged with various learning activities (except reading) roughly equally. The socio-economic factors examined in this study, i.e., family income and maternal educational qualifications, were found to have a stronger effect on children's language/literacy than on social-emotional competence. Socio-economic disadvantage, lack of maternal educational qualifications in particular, remained powerful in influencing competencies in children aged three and at the start of primary school. For children in the first decade of this century in England, these findings have equity implications, especially as the socio-economic gap in our society widens
Variable geometries of connection: Urban digital divides and the uses of Information Technology
This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising urban âdigital dividesâ. It focuses on the ways in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) unevenly affect the pace of life within the urban environment. Based on a detailed case study of how ICT s are being used in an affluent and a marginalised neighbourhood in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the paper suggests that urban digital divides need to be understood as more than uneven patterns of access. They emerge in this work as more than the presence or absence of specific technological artefacts. Rather, it is argued that different styles and speeds of technologically mediated life now work to define urban socio-spatial inequalities. The paper distinguishes between two such key styles and speeds. First, the paper argues that affluent and professional groups now use new media technologies pervasively and continuously as the âbackgroundâ infrastructure to sustain privileged and intensely distanciated, but time-stressed, lifestyles. Second, more marginalised neighbourhoods tend to be characterised by instrumental and episodic ICT usage patterns which are often collectively organised through strong neighbourhood ties. For the former, mediated networks help orchestrate neighbourhood ties; for the latter it is those neighbourhood ties that enable online access
The taste for the particular: A logic of discernment in an age of omnivorousness
This article provides an analysis of two leading specialist wine magazines, Decanter and Wine Spectator, and the codification and legitimation of a âtaste for the particular.â Such media of connoisseurship are key institutions of evaluation and legitimation in an age of omnivorousness, but are often overlooked in research that foregrounds the agency of tasters and neglects the conventionalization of tasting norms and devices. The wine field has undergone a process of democratization typical of omnivorousness more broadly: former elite/low boundaries (operationalized in the paper through the Old/New World dichotomy) are ignored, and a discerning attitude is encouraged for wines from a diversity of regions. Drawing on the magazinesâ audience profile and market position data, and a content analysis of advertising and editorial content from 2008 and 2010, I examine the differences in the use of four legitimation frames (transparency, heritage, genuineness and external validation) for the provenance elements of Old and New World wines. The analysis suggests that the Old Worldâtypically Frenchânotion of terroir, on which the traditional Old/New World boundary rested, has been democratized through the particularities of provenance. Yet, the analysis also reveals continuing differences between the two categories (including greater emphasis on the heritage and external validation of Old World context of production, and on the transparency and genuineness of New World producers), and the preservation of established hierarchies of taste through the application of terroir to New World wines, which retain the Old World and France as their master referent
Speed-Up Society? Evidence from the UK 2000 and 2015 Time Use Diary Surveys
Using time diary evidence on change in the frequency and distribution of activities from UK time diary data over the 15 years from the turn of the 21st century, we assess whether the thesis of âthe speed-up societyâ is manifested in an increase in time intensity in peopleâs daily lives. Comparing indictors like time fragmentation, multitasking and ICT use, to respondentsâ reports of how rushed they normally feel, we find no evidence that time pressure is increasing, or that ICT use is associated with greater feelings of time pressure. Rather, we find consistent cross-sectional differentials in our measures of time intensity by gender and occupational status, supporting the idea of relative stasis in the underlying social inequalities of time. These findings are consistent with previous research based on time use data, and we pose them as a challenge to theories of societal speed-up
Work, life and time in the new economy: an introduction
International audienc
Outsourcing and structural change: shifting firm and sectoral boundaries
The paper aims at investigating the structural change implications of
outsourcing. In trying to bridge the organizational/industrial and the
sectoral/structural analysis of outsourcing, it discusses the rational and
the methodological pros and cons of a âbatteryâ of outsourcing measurements
for structural change analysis. Their functioning is then illustrated
through a concise application of them to the OECD area over the â80s and
the early â90s. A combined used of them emerges as recommendable in
checking for the role of outsourcing with respect to that of other structural
change determinants
Reimagining Omnivorousness in the Context of Place
Place is a key driver in the formation and maintenance of cultural lifestyles. Yet place remains largely ignored in scholarly studies of cultural omnivorousness. After establishing whether there are different modes of omnivorousness as well as distinguishing between other cultural lifestyles, this article then takes a first step in readdressing this anomaly by examining whether clustering exists at the regional level in England. Using a methodologically innovative approach to simultaneously capture latent class typologies and between group heterogeneity at the area scale, our findings illustrate how place is vital to consumption habits, particularly to voracious omnivores. We argue that the underlying mechanism behind these cultural patterns at the area level is contextual in nature, and in the case of voracious omnivores, primarily due to the supply of cultural items and the importance of likeminded individuals in active networks
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