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Becoming ‘working’ women: formations of gender, class, and caste in urban India
No full textThis article explores the value of Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender for the study of changing social relations amidst rapid socio-economic change in post-liberalisation India. The article is based on insights and reflections from long-term ethnographic research with young lower middle class women in Delhi, employed in the emerging services sector. For these young women, ‘working’ is not merely an activity, it is an identity. And employment is not merely a source of income, it is a site for renegotiation of social relations. As they traverse between home, work and leisure, their new subjectivities come under contestation. In conversations, young women readily talk about gender and class, but are relatively silent about caste, even though it plays out in subtle ways in the workplace and more generally in their everyday lives. This context throws up a set of new questions in relation to Formations – can we understand the entanglements of gender, class and caste in the same way that Skeggs proposes the inextricability of gender and class? What, if any, are the differences between respectability, honour and prestige? Does a Bourdieusian framework open up or limit the avenues of analysis for this context? Engaging with these questions, this article demonstrates the wide-ranging appeal of Skeggs’ astute thinking in Formations of Class and Gender and brings it into dialogue with Global South feminist scholarship
Methodologies of informed intuition: the role of informed intuition and intuitive openness
No full textIn political science, positivist scholars often approach intuition cautiously as something best avoided or improved by methodological training. Meanwhile, interpretive scholars typically laud “hunches” as necessary guiding logics. This article introduces the novel concept of “informed intuition,” drawing on understandings of intuition in cognitive psychology and organizational behavior that emphasize the importance of learning and feedback in developing and using intuition. Many political scientists agree privately that they use intuition but rarely acknowledge it in published works. As such, the article argues for harnessing, acknowledging, recognizing, and legitimizing the role of informed intuition across methodological and epistemic divides. Specifically, it demonstrates the importance of acknowledging the role of informed intuition in the logics of research (inductive, deductive, or abductive) and case selection. In doing so, the article aligns with discussions of transparency to argue that researchers should also consider demonstrating intuitive openness to enhance research integrity
The indebted woman kinship, sexuality, and capitalism. By Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 248 pp.
No full textNew materialism, whiteness and the politics of vitality: rethinking activity/passivity in critical security studies
No full textNew materialist thought has become particularly influential in critical security studies over the past decade. Advocating for an understanding of security that comprises and does justice to the vibrant, unpredictable and active role of materiality, scholars have significantly contributed to an array of debates within critical security studies. Engaging with post/decolonial, critical race studies and feminist literatures, this article offers a critique of new materialism that focuses on its embracement of ideas of vitality, activity and movement as a way to overcome modernity’s pervasive subject/object dualisms. My argument is that this stance risks reifying an activity/passivity hierarchy that has been centrally interwoven with colonial, racial and gendered dynamics of subjugation. The idea is that new materialism’s incisive critique has often failed to interrogate colonial modernity’s abjection of passivity itself, a process that has been paramount in the historical production and securing of whiteness. This article’s goal, however, is not only to push the analytical and political boundaries of new materialism. By rethinking the racial-colonial underpinnings of this activity/passivity hierarchy, the article also offers promising research avenues for critical security studies which help us understand and interrogate racial-colonial security structures and practices of policing, violence and exploitation
The generalized Hausman test for detecting non-normality in the latent variable distribution of the two-parameter IRT model
No full textThis paper introduces the generalized Hausman test as a novel method for detecting the non-normality of the latent variable distribution of the unidimensional latent trait model for binary data. The test utilizes the pairwise maximum likelihood estimator for the parameters of the latent trait model, which assumes normality of the latent variable, and the maximum likelihood estimator obtained under a semi-non-parametric framework, allowing for a more flexible distribution of the latent variable. The performance of the generalized Hausman test is evaluated through a simulation study and compared with other test statistics available in the literature for testing latent variable distribution fit and an overall goodness-of-fit test statistic. Additionally, three information criteria are used to select the best-fitted model. The simulation results show that the generalized Hausman test outperforms the other tests under most conditions. However, the results obtained from the information criteria are somewhat contradictory under certain conditions, suggesting a need for further investigation and interpretation. The proposed test statistics are used in three datasets
Beyond the ideal: unravelling the complexities of overqualification, employee volunteering and job satisfaction
No full textPurpose This article examines the relationships between objective overqualification, volunteering as an extra-work activity and job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on a vast secondary sample of 20,686 British employees across four waves covering the period 2009–2017. The bivariate ordered probit estimate was used to test the study hypotheses in the bioprobit procedure in STATA. Findings Our study unravels compelling insights. Overqualified employees experience lower job satisfaction and engage more in volunteering activities. The results emphasised that voluntary work allows the utilisation of skills and fulfils basic psychological needs, leading to enhanced general well-being and higher job satisfaction. Practical implications Overqualified employees, by actively engaging in volunteering, not only make valuable contributions to society but also experience positive spillover effects that significantly influence their workplace attitudes and behaviours. This underscores the potential for promoting volunteering as an effective means to mitigate the private and social overqualification. Originality/value This study provides valuable insights into the role of overqualification as well as resulting job dissatisfaction, in shaping volunteering decisions. This insight contributes to the overqualification literature and strengthens our understanding of volunteering as an important mechanism in the relationship between overqualification and job satisfaction
Getting lost in a field: a personal history of the development of Behavioural Public Policy
No full textThis essay is a write-up of my Professorial Inaugural Lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics on 9 December 2024. Herein, I describe how I became involved and have helped develop the field of behavioural public policy (BPP). I detail how the intellectual architecture of BPP-its journal, Annual International Conference and Association-came into existence, and allude to my hopes for how the field might develop as we go forward
Précis of Open and inclusive: fair processes for financing universal health coverage
No full textWe summarise key messages from the World Bank Report Open and Inclusive: Fair Processes for Financing Universal Health Coverage. A central lesson of the Report is that in decision-making on the path to Universal Health Coverage (UHC), procedural fairness matters alongside substantive fairness. Decision systems should be assessed using a complete conception of procedural fairness that embodies core commitments to impartial and equal consideration of interests and perspectives. These commitments demand that comprehensive information is gathered and disclosed and that justifications for policies are publicly debated; that participation in decision-making is enabled; and that these characteristics of the decision system are institutionalised rather than up to the good will of decision-makers. Procedural fairness can improve equity in outcomes, raise legitimacy and trust, and can help make reforms last. While improving procedural fairness can be costly and there are barriers to achieving it, the range of instruments that countries at varying levels of income and institutional capacity have used with some success shows that, in many contexts, advances in procedural fairness in health financing are possible and worthwhile
Social connection and its prospective association with adolescent internalising and externalising symptoms: an exploratory cross-country study using retrospective harmonisation
No full textBackground: Social connection factors play a key role for young people's mental health. It is important to understand how their influence may vary across contexts. We investigated structural (e.g. household size), functional (e.g. social support) and quality (e.g. feeling close) social connection factors in relation to adolescent internalising and externalising symptoms, comparing two countries Brazil and the United Kingdom (UK). Methods: We pooled data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and the Brazilian High Risk Cohort Study (BHRCS). We included 12 social connection variables, identified through retrospective harmonisation and lived experience expert involvement. We tested measurement invariance and conducted multiple regressions to analyse associations between the social connection factors (age 14) and later internalising and externalising difficulties (age 17.5) in both cohorts. We investigated country-level interactions and used weights to account for attrition, survey design, population representativeness and sample size. Results: We found pooled main associations with later internalising symptoms for ‘living with half-siblings’ (p <.001), ‘moving address’ (p =.001), ‘mother marital status’ (p <.001–.003), ‘bullying’ (p =.001), ‘being bullied’ (p <.001) and ‘difficulties keeping friends’ (p <.001). For externalising, we found main associations with ‘household size’ (p =.041), ‘moving address’ (p =.041), ‘mother's marital status’ (p =.001–.013), ‘bullying others’ (p <.001) and ‘being bullied’ (p <.001). Country-level interactions suggested higher internalising symptoms were associated with ‘household size’ (p =.001) in Brazil and ‘being bullied’ (p <.001) in MCS. Additionally, ‘half-siblings in household’ (p =.003), ‘poor mother–child relationship’ (p =.018), ‘single mother’ (p =.035), ‘bullying’ (p <.001) and ‘being bullied’ (p <.001) were more strongly linked to externalising difficulties in MCS. Conclusions: Social connection factors, mostly structural, contributed to adolescent internalising and externalising difficulties in both countries. Factors relating to bullying and family composition seem to play a stronger role in each country. Cultural and socioeconomic factors might explain these differences. Future research should investigate cross-regional differences to meaningfully inform global mental health efforts
The causal effects of education on age at marriage and marital fertility
No full textThe negative association of education and fertility, over time and between countries, is a central stylized fact of social science. Yet we have scant evidence on whether this is, or is not, causal. Using the universe of vital registration index data from England, 1912 to 2007, I first show that it is possible, using unique names, to construct a demographically and socioeconomically representative sample of 1.5 million women. Historical record linkage of women is typically not attempted but is possible here because of the unique characteristics of English civil registration. I then exploit the natural experiment of sharp discontinuities in who was affected by compulsory schooling law changes in 1947 and in 1972, which exogenously and effectively raised the minimum school leaving age. A Regression Discontinuity design, executed on the individual data, identifies the causal effect of education on age at marriage and fertility. Education may have raised age at marriage in 1972. However one extra year of education at 15 or 16 has a zero causal effect on marital fertility