Quality of Life Trends in the Southern Black Belt, 1980-2005: A Research Note

Previous research shows that the Southern Black Belt compares badly to the rest of the U.S., in terms of poverty, median incomes, mortality, unemployment rates, and educational levels. This study updates those earlier studies with 2000 and 2005 data to statistically assess these problems’ recent severity, and examines trends since 1980 to assess the Black Belt’s progress or regress relative to the rest of the South and the NonSouth. I used Census and other federal data for the analysis. The Black Belt’s education levels have improved substantially, nearly catching up with other regions. Yet compared with the rest of the U.S., the Black Belt lags on other indicators. This lag is narrowing somewhat for poverty rates, but not for unemployment or median family income. Perhaps most seriously, although the Black Belt’s infant mortality has declined, it remains much worse than in other regions – and that chasm has grown dramatically. Government programs have mitigated such economic, educational, and health problems in the past, and should serve this role again

Mobilization, Strategy, and Global Apparel Production Networks: Systemic Advantages for Student Antisweatshop Activism

The U.S. antisweatshop movement is a major branch of Global North labor rights activism. We focus on the movement’s college student sector, which has been active and moderately effective since its 1997 birth. Using principles from social movement theory and global political economy, we examine (1) these student labor rights groups’ campus context, (2) global production networks (GPNs), and (3) how campus context and GPNs intersect to facilitate student antisweatshop activity and effectiveness in ways distinct from the non-campus U.S. movement. U.S. college campuses are places of pre-existing collective identity and dense interaction, facilitating antisweatshop mobilization. Collegiate apparel GPNs that source from the Global South contain both the student sector’s largest grievance and an opportunity structure of power relations that this sector seeks to engage. An on-campus movement opportunity also exists: a college administration which is beholden and accessible to students and is simultaneously a gatekeeper in licensed collegiate apparel GPNs – a spatially commensurate point of strategic leverage for a student antisweatshop group as it coordinates with production workers and their local allies. Thus, the student sector possesses certain advantages within a field of power relations permeating the larger network linking it to administrations and firms. Recognizing these distinct advantages and the synergy among them should usefully inform student antisweatshop activists and their allies as they mobilize support and formulate strategies

Mobilization, Strategy, and Global Apparel Production Networks: Systemic Advantages for Student Antisweatshop Activism

The U.S. antisweatshop movement is a major branch of Global North labor rights activism. We focus on the movement’s college student sector, which has been active and moderately effective since its 1997 birth. Using principles from social movement theory and global political economy, we examine (1) these student labor rights groups’ campus context, (2) global production networks (GPNs), and (3) how campus context and GPNs intersect to facilitate student antisweatshop activity and effectiveness in ways distinct from the non-campus U.S. movement. U.S. college campuses are places of pre-existing collective identity and dense interaction, facilitating antisweatshop mobilization. Collegiate apparel GPNs that source from the Global South contain both the student sector’s largest grievance and an opportunity structure of power relations that this sector seeks to engage. An on-campus movement opportunity also exists: a college administration which is beholden and accessible to students and is simultaneously a gatekeeper in licensed collegiate apparel GPNs – a spatially commensurate point of strategic leverage for a student antisweatshop group as it coordinates with production workers and their local allies. Thus, the student sector possesses certain advantages within a field of power relations permeating the larger network linking it to administrations and firms. Recognizing these distinct advantages and the synergy among them should usefully inform student antisweatshop activists and their allies as they mobilize support and formulate strategies

Measuring Five Dimensions of Religiosity Across Adolescence

This paper theorizes and tests a latent variable model of adolescent religiosity in which five dimensions of religiosity are interrelated: religious beliefs, religious exclusivity, external religiosity, private practice, and religious salience. Research often theorizes overlapping and independent influences of single items or dimensions of religiosity on outcomes such as adolescent sexual behavior, but rarely operationalizes the dimensions in a measurement model accounting for their associations with each other and across time. We use longitudinal structural equation modeling (SEM) with latent variables to analyze data from two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion. We test our hypothesized measurement model as compared to four alternate measurement models and find that our proposed model maintains superior fit. We then discuss the associations between the five dimensions of religiosity we measure and how these change over time. Our findings suggest how future research might better operationalize multiple dimensions of religiosity in studies of the influence of religion in adolescence

Ronald C. Wimberley, 1942-2011

Ronald C. Wimberley, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh, NC, died on July 26 of complications from bile duct and related cancers. He was 68. Wimberley was a founding member of the editorial board of "Sociation Today," and a hard worker over many years for the journal

The Trend in International Health Inequality

Estimates of average life expectancy for 169 countries are used to compute the trend in between-country health inequality from 1980 to 2000. Results show that inequality in the distribution of life expectancy across countries declined in the 1980s, but then increased through the 1990s. The recent turnaround in between-country health inequality is significant because it reverses a long-term trend of declining inequality across countries that began in the first half of the twentieth century. The primary cause of rising inequality across countries is declining life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa, largely owing to HIV/AIDS. Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa holds the key to the future trend in between-country inequality. Copyright 2004 The Population Council, Inc..