187,118 research outputs found
The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2002: Towards a Social Understanding of Productivity
Full text linkSkills, innovation and human capital as they feature prominently on the policy agenda of industrialized countries concerned with productivity and competitiveness issues. Not surprisingly, formal education is the preferred and most conventional policy instrument of governments in pursuing these objectives. Indeed, "more is better" is often the guiding principle here. The actual linkages, however, are not as straightforward as they may appear. Certainly, there are gains to be achieved through a better understanding of the relationship between the skills developed through formal education and their causal impact on productivity, as well as a more nuanced approach to policy in this area. In this chapter, Arthur Sweetman points out, "the issue is not whether education has benefits but, rather, the magnitude of its 'true' benefits, the benefits relative to costs, and the distribution of costs and benefits. Sweetman examines three different sets of evidence, focusing on the impact of education on earnings at the individual level and on productivity at the macroeconomic level, and on issues related to the operation of the Canadian educational system.Education, Skills, Growth, Productivity, Labour Productivity, Labor Productivity, Educational Attainment, Human Capital, Knowledge, Quality, Education Quality, Private Benefit, Social Benefit, Value, Investment
The Portability of New Immigrants' Human Capital: Language, Education and Occupational Matching
Full text linkThe implications of human capital portability – including interactions between education, language skills and pre- and post-immigration occupational matching – for earnings are explored for new immigrants to Canada. Given the importance of occupation-specific skills, as a precursor we also investigate occupational mobility and observe convergence toward the occupational skill distribution of the domestic population, although four years after landing immigrants remain less likely have a high skilled job. Immigrants who are able to match their source and host country occupations obtain higher earnings. However, surprisingly, neither matching nor language skills have any impact on the return to pre-immigration work experience, which is observed to be statistically significantly negative. Crucially, English language skills are found to have an appreciable direct impact on earnings, and to mediate the return to pre-immigration education but not labour market experience.immigration, human capital portability, occupation, language, education
The Portability of New Immigrants' Human Capital: Language, Education and Occupational Matching
Full text linkThe implications of human capital portability -- including interactions between education, language skills and pre- and post-immigration occupational matching -- for earnings are explored for new immigrants to Canada. Given the importance of occupation-specific skills, as a precursor we also investigate occupational mobility and observe convergence toward the occupational skill distribution of the domestic population, although four years after landing immigrants remain less likely have a high skilled job. Immigrants who are able to match their source and host country occupations obtain higher earnings. However, surprisingly, neither matching nor language skills have any impact on the return to pre-immigration work experience, which is observed to be statistically significantly negative. Crucially, English language skills are found to have an appreciable direct impact on earnings, and to mediate the return to pre-immigration education but not labour market experience.Immigration, human capital portability, occupation, education, language
Revealing habitus, illuminating practice: Bourdieu, photography and visual methods
Full text linkHaving taken taking as one of its starting points a concern to avoid fetishising method – or employing any form of method for its own sake – this paper then argues that visual methods of research may be particularly helpful in investigating areas that are difficult otherwise to verbalise or articulate. These include Bourdieu's understanding of habitus; our predisposed ways of being, acting and operating in the social environment that Bourdieu himself suggests are 'beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit' (Bourdieu, 1977: 94). Having outlined what Bourdieu means by habitus and considered some of the difficulties surrounding its operationalisation, the paper goes on to consider Bourdieu's own use of photography and understanding of photographic practice. It is then argued that we can move beyond Bourdieu's position by employing visual methods specifically to uncover and illuminate aspects of habitus. Where research participants are directly involved in this process this also means that visual methods can be potentially transformative, allowing for the development of forms of critical self-awareness amongst research participants of the sort that Bourdieu attributes to 'socioanalysis' (Bourdieu, 1999: 611).<br/
Twenty-first century dis-ease? habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus
No full textWhile certain theorists have suggested that identity is increasingly reflexive, such accounts are arguably problematised by Bourdieu's concept of habitus, which – in pointing to the 'embeddedness' of our dispositions and tastes – suggests that identity may be less susceptible to reflexive intervention than theorists such as Giddens have implied. This paper does not dispute this so much as suggest that, for increasing numbers of contemporary individuals, reflexivity itself may have become habitual, and that for those possessing a flexible or reflexive habitus, processes of self-refashioning may be 'second nature' rather than difficult to achieve. The paper concludes by examining some of the wider implications of this argument, in relation not only to identity projects, but also to fashion and consumption, patterns of exclusion, and forms of alienation or estrangement, the latter part of this section suggesting that those displaying a reflexive habitus, whilst at a potential advantage in certain respects, may also face considerable difficulties simply 'being themselves'.'I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.' (DeLillo, 1997: 103
Everything starts with an E: fashions in theory, fashion theory and the cultural studies debate
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'Anchoring the (postmodern) self? Body modification, fashion and identity'
No full textRecent years have seen a considerable resurgence in the popularity of tattooing and piercing, a development that some have dismissed as a fashionable trend. Others have argued that the relative permanence of such forms of body modification militates against their full absorption into the fashion system. Drawing on interviews with a variety of body modifiers, the article examines this debate, and notes that certain tattooees and piercees appear, in some respects, to regard their tattoos and piercings as decorative accessories. At the same time, however, such corporeal artifacts are approached and experienced as distinct from other, more free-floating products in the 'supermarket of style'. Whether or not their meaning is fixed in these terms, tattoos and piercings are employed by some as a form of anti-fashion and as a way of fixing or anchoring the reflexively constructed self. In this sense they share both affinities and differences with other forms of contemporary body project
Marked bodies, oppositional identities? Tattooing, piercing and the ambiguity of resistance
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