This study offers a descriptive overview of changes in fertility plans during the COVID-19 crisis in a sample of the young population (18-34) in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. ...The data were collected between 27 March and 7 April 2020. Our results show that fertility plans have been negatively revised in all countries, but not in the same way. In Germany and France fertility plans changed moderately, with many people still planning or postponing their decision to have a child. In Italy, however, the proportion of abandoners is much higher than in the other countries, and the proportion of those deciding to postpone their plans is lower. Moreover, across countries the demographic characteristics of individuals appear to be associated with fertility plans in different ways. In Italy, abandoners are common among individuals younger than 30 and those without a tertiary education. In Germany, abandoners are slightly more prevalent in the regions most affected by COVID-19. In the United Kingdom, the individuals that most frequently abandoned their fertility plans are those who expect the crisis to have a dramatic negative effect on their future income. Finally, in France and Spain we do not observe a clear pattern of revision of fertility plans.
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in - though an insufficient understanding of - changes in the governance of welfare and related governance regimes, with the latter being ...conceptualized as systems of multifaceted inter-agency relations and associated modes of coordination. Referring to evidence from France, Britain and Germany, the article explores these changes with an eye on the role of voluntary organizations within these regimes. It challenges widespread typologies of ‘welfare mixes’ as well as general assumptions about international variation. It argues that, throughout Western Europe, similar governance regimes emerged in the postwar settlement, materializing in an ‘organized welfare mix’. It then illustrates how these regimes currently undergo a process of permanent dis- and reorganization, again irrespective of international differences. Long- established patterns of a system-wide coordination via negotiated public-private partnerships turn into volatile configurations, with a growing albeit varying influence of the market rationale. Moreover, there is an increasing distance between voluntary provider organizations and both the welfare state and civil society, with this entailing precarious, but also more dynamic interrelations. Finally, civic action becomes more fluid, sporadic, dispersed but also more creative in many places. Hence, there is the paradox of the new welfare mixes exhibiting innovative dynamics and systematic organizational failure at the same time, with (more) output heterogeneity as an inevitable consequence.
This article explores how hybrid organizations, which incorporate competing institutional logics, internally manage the logics that they embody. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of four ...work integration social enterprises embedded in competing social welfare and commercial logics, we show that, instead of adopting strategies of decoupling or compromising, as the literature typically suggests, these organizations selectively coupled intact elements prescribed by each logic. This strategy allowed them to project legitimacy to external stakeholders without having to engage in costly deceptions or negotiations. We further identify a specific hybridization pattern that we refer to as "Trojan horse," whereby organizations that entered the work integration field with low legitimacy because of their embeddedness in the commercial logic strategically incorporated elements from the social welfare logic in an attempt to gain legitimacy and acceptance. Surprisingly, they did so more than comparable organizations originating from the social welfare logic. These findings suggest that, when lacking legitimacy in a given field, hybrids may manipulate the templates provided by the multiple logics in which they are embedded in an attempt to gain acceptance. Overall, our findings contribute to a better understanding of how organizations can survive and thrive when embedded in pluralistic institutional environments.
The documented acceleration of NH3and$NO_x (NO + NO_2)$emissions over the last 150 years has accelerated N deposition, compromising air and water quality and altering the functioning of terrestrial ...and aquatic ecosystems worldwide. To construct continental-scale N budgets, we produced maps of N deposition fluxes from site-network observations for the United States and Western Europe. Increases in the rates of N cycling for these two regions of the world are large, and they have undergone profound modification of biospheric-atmospheric N exchanges, and ecosystem function. The maps are necessarily restricted to the network measured quantities and consist of statistically interpolated fields of aqueous NO3
-and NH4
+, gaseous HNO3and NO2(in Europe), and particulate NO3
-and NH4
+. There remain a number of gaps in the budgets, including organic N and NH3deposition. The interpolated spatially continuous fields allow estimation of regionally integrated budget terms. Dry-deposition fluxes were the most problematic because of low station density and uncertainties associated with exchange mechanisms. We estimated dry N deposition fluxes by multiplying interpolated surface-air concentrations for each chemical species by model-calculated, spatially explicit deposition velocities. Deposition of the oxidized N species, by-products of fossil-fuel combustion, dominate the U.S. N deposition budget with 2.5 Tg of$NO_y -N$out of a total of 3.7-4.5 Tg of N deposited annually onto the conterminous United States. Deposition of the reduced species, which are by-products of farming and animal husbandry, dominate the Western European N-deposition budget with a total of 4.3-6.3 Tg N deposited each year out of a total of 8.4-10.8 Tg N. Western Europe receives five times more N in precipitation than does the conterminous United States. Estimated N emissions exceed measured deposition in the United States by 5.3-7.81 Tg N, suggesting significant N export or under-sampling of urban influence. In Europe, estimated emissions better balance measured deposition, with an imbalance of between -0.63 and 2.88 Tg N, suggesting that much of the N emitted in Europe is deposited there, with possible N import from the United States. The sampling network in Europe includes urban influences because of the greater population density of Western Europe. Our analysis of N deposition for both regions was limited by sampling density. The framework we present for quantification of patterns of N deposition provides a constraint on our understanding of continental biospheric-atmospheric N cycles. These spatially explicit wet and dry N fluxes also provide a tool for verifying regional and global models of atmospheric chemistry and transport, and they represent critical inputs into terrestrial models of biogeochemistry.
While microplastics are known to pervade the global seafloor, the processes that control their dispersal and concentration in the deep sea remain largely unknown. Here we show that ...thermohaline-driven currents, which build extensive seafloor sediment accumulations, can control the distribution of microplastics and create hotspots of up to 1.9 million pieces m
This is the highest reported value for any seafloor setting, globally. Previous studies propose that microplastics are transported to the seafloor by vertical settling from surface accumulations; here we demonstrate that the spatial distribution and ultimate fate of microplastics is strongly controlled by near-bed thermohaline currents (bottom currents). These currents are known to supply oxygen and nutrients to deep sea benthos, suggesting that deep sea biodiversity hotspots are also likely to be microplastic hotspots.
Europe is said to be in a trust crisis. The finance crisis and the euro crisis caused a wide-ranging and sustained loss of trust and the media suspected this to be the culmination of a long-term ...trend. This may be true for the United States but not for Europe. Trust in Europe recovered within a decade, but with significant regional differences. While trust in democracy is not at all endangered in the EU's northern and central countries, it could be at risk in the southern and the eastern ones. The paper shows that the problems in the East are exaggerated and may turn out as transitory, while the political instability in the South is more risky. Due to the fact that almost all member countries manifest a relatively high trust in the EU and a strong resolve to remain, these problems are unlikely to put European democracy at risk. JEL Classification: D84, D91, H12 Die Europaische Union scheint sich in einer Vertrauenskrise zu befinden. Vor allem nach der Finanz- und Eurokrise kam es weitraumig zu langanhaltenden Vertrauensverlusten. Die Einschatzung wirtschaftspolitischer Probleme unterscheidet sich aber zwischen verschiedenen regionalen Gruppen deutlich. Auch die Erklarungsansatze fur diese Unterschiede wurzeln in heterogenen historischen Entwicklungen. Allerdings ist weder eine generelle Gefahrung der Demokratie noch eine grundsatzliche Skepsis der Bevolkerung gegenuber der Europaischen Union zu erkennen.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) provides a solution toward decarbonization of the global economy. The success of this solution depends on the ability to safely and permanently store CO₂. This study ...demonstrates for the first time the permanent disposal of CO₂ as environmentally benign carbonate minerals in basaltic rocks. We find that over 95% of the CO₂ injected into the CarbFix site in Iceland was mineralized to carbonate minerals in less than 2 years. The result contrasts with the common view that the immobilization of CO₂ as carbonate minerals within geologic reservoirs takes several hundreds to thousands of years. Our results, therefore, demonstrate that the safe long-term storage of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions through mineralization can be far faster than previously postulated.
Drawing on a yearlong ethnographic study of reinsurance trading in Lloyd's of London, this paper makes three contributions to current discussions of institutional complexity. First, we shift focus ...away from structural and relatively static organizational responses to institutional complexity and identify three balancing mechanisms— segmenting, bridging, and demarcating— that allow individuals to manage competing logics and their shifting salience within . their everyday work. Second, we integrate these mechanisms in a theoretical model that explains how individuals can continually keep coexisting logics, and their tendencies to either blend or disconnect, in a state of dynamic tension that renders them conflicting-yet-complementary logics. Our model shows how actors are able to dynamically balance coexisting logics, maintaining the distinction between them while also exploiting the benefits of their interdependence. Third, in contrast to most studies of newly formed hybrids and/or novel complexity, our focus on a long-standing context of institutional complexity shows how institutional complexity can itself become institutionalized and routinely enacted within everyday practice.
Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Hainmueller, Jens; Hopkins, Daniel J
Annual review of political science,
01/2014, Volume:
17
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two ...theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts-and to a lesser extent its economic impacts-on the nation as a whole. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it holds for the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when, and why they matter for attitude formation. Adapted from the source document.
This study assesses the relationship between organizational innovation and technological innovation capabilities, and analyzes their effect on firm performance using a resource-based view theoretical ...framework. The article presents empirical evidence from a survey of 144 Spanish industrial firms and modeling of a system of structural equations using partial least squares. The results confirm that organizational innovation favors the development of technological innovation capabilities and that both organizational innovation and technological capabilities for products and processes can lead to superior firm performance.
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