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David P. Baker is a Professor of Education and Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also the associate director of the Social Science Research Institute. He publishes widely on the comparative analysis of education and stratification, and the global impact of education as an institution. Recent publications include “Student Victimization: National and School System Effects on School Violence in 37 Nations” (American Journal of Education Research, 2002) and “Socio-Economic Status, School Quality, and National Economic Development: A Cross-National Analysis of the ‘Heyneman-Loxley Effect’ on Mathematics and Science Achievement” (Comparative Education Review, 2002).Aaron Benavot is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Grounded in an institutional approach to education and development, his research has examined historical and cross-national patterns in official school curricula, the consequences of educational expansion on economic development and democratization, the economic impacts of curricular contents, and the origins and expansion of mass education. He is currently studying the diversification of educational knowledge in local Israeli schools and also the dynamics of transnational social science research projects in the European Union.Karen Bradley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University. Her research examines women’s participation in higher education cross-nationally. Recent publications include “Equal but Separate? A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Maria Charles, American Sociological Review, 2002) and “The Incorporation of Women into Higher Education: Paradoxical Outcomes?” (Sociology of Education, 2000). She is currently collaborating with Maria Charles on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and the American Educational Research Association that examines factors underlying women’s underrepresentation in engineering and math/computer science programs in several countries.Wendy Cadge is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University. Her research focuses on the cultural aspects of globalization in the United States and Southeast Asia. Her first book, Heartwood: the First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.Maria Charles is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Her research explores how cultural ideologies and social structures affect the economic and social status of individuals and groups. Most recently, Charles is author of “Deciphering Sex Segregation: Vertical and Horizontal Inequalities in Ten Countries” (Acta Sociologica 46:265–286, 2003), and coauthor of Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (with David Grusky, Stanford University Press, in press) and “Equal but Separate: A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Karen Bradley, American Sociology Review 67: 573–599, 2002).Chang Y. Chung is a Statistical Programmer at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of South Carolina and M.S.E. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He is involved in multiple research projects as statistical programmer, data manager, and co-author. A recent publication is “Employment and Earnings of Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers in U.S. Labor Markets” (with Thomas Espenshade and Margaret Usdansky, Population Research and Policy Review, 2001).Sara R. Curran is an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sociology at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has research interests in demography, migration, gender, economic development, environment, aging and Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a book, Shifting Boundaries, Transforming Lives: Globalization, Gender, and Family in Thailand. Recent publications include: Ambio. Special Issue: Population, Consumption, and Environment, (with Tundi Agardy, 2002) and “Engendering Migrant Networks: The Case of Mexican Migration,” (with Estela Rivero Fuentes, Demography, 2003).Bruce Fuller is a Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the dilemmas around the decentering of public aims and institutions within the worlds of child care, family welfare, and school reform. Prior to becoming a full-time teacher, he worked for a state legislature, a governor, and then as a heretical sociologist at the World Bank. His most recent books are Inside Charter Schools: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization (Harvard, 2000), and Government Confronts Culture (Taylor & Francis, 1999).Emily Hannum is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on education, poverty, and social inequality, particularly in China. Recent publications include “Ethnic Differences in Basic Education in Reform-Era Rural China” (Demography, 2002) and “Education and Stratification in Developing Countries: A Review of Theories and Empirical Research” (with Claudia Buchmann, Annual Review of Sociology, 2001). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and National Institutes of Health that investigates factors in the family, school, and community that support rural children’s education and healthy development in Northwest China.Nabil Khattab completed his Ph.D. at the University of Jerusalem. He is currently a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester. His main areas of interest are sociology of education, the ethnic and gender aspects of the labor market, and social inequality. His most recent publication is “Segregation, Ethnic Labor Market, and the Occupational Expectations of Palestinian Students in Israel” (The British Journal of Sociology, 2003). In his current project, he is looking at the labor market prospects for Pakistani-Bangladeshi women in the U.K. and Muslim women in Israel.Patricia McManus is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research centers on gender and family inequality under advanced capitalism. She will spend 2003–2004 in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute’s Center for the Study of Sociology and the Life Course, where she will study welfare state policy and married women’s work careers in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Current projects also include a study of the impact of residential mobility on gender inequality within households (with Claudia Geist), and a cross-national comparison of the wage penalties for motherhood in the United States and Germany (with Markus Gangl).Stephen L. Morgan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, sociology of education, and methodology. Recent publications include “Modeling Preparatory Commitment and Non-Repeatable Decisions: Information Processing, Preference Formation and Educational Attainment” (Rationality and Society, 2002) and “Counterfactuals, Causal Effect Heterogeneity, and the Catholic School Effect on Learning” (Sociology of Education, 2001). His current projects include studies of black-white differences in educational achievement and changes in labor market inequality in the 1980s and 1990s.William R. Morgan is a Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. He has been studying and developing education in northern Nigeria over a period of 25 years. In Cleveland, he recently completed data collection for a seven-year study of the impact of the treatment and recovery process for cocaine-addicted women on their children’s development, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. His new project is a pilot study of the peer recruitment method to deliver HIV/AIDS education to networks of high-risk adolescents and young women.Hiroshi Ono is an Assistant Professor at the European Institute of Japanese Studies, Stockholm School of Economics. He is interested in social stratification and inequality, and the sociology and economics of education, family, and work. Currently he is working on two projects. The first is examining Internet inequality in five countries, and the second is comparing human resource practices between foreign-owned versus domestic firms in Japan. His recent publications include “College Quality and Earnings in the Japanese Labor Market” (forthcoming, Industrial Relations), and “Gender and the Internet” (with Madeline Zavodny, Social Science Quarterly, 2003).Hyunjoon Park, a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is interested in social stratification, education, and health inequality with a particular focus on East Asian countries. His current project examines the process of the transition to adulthood among Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese young people across several dimensions, including educational and occupational attainment, and family formation. Two forthcoming publications include “Intergenerational Social Mobility among Korean Men: In Comparative Perspective” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2003), and “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Voluntary and Involuntary Job Mobility among Young Men” (with Gary Sandefur, Social Science Research, 2003).Susan E. Short is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She specializes in family sociology, social demography, and social inequality. Recent coauthored publications include “Use of Maternity Services in Rural China” (Population Studies, forthcoming); “Maternal Work and Time Spent in Child Care in China: A Multimethod Approach” (Population and Development Review, 2002); “China’s One-Child Policy and the Care of Children: An Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data” (Social Forces, 2001); and “Birth Planning and Sterilization in China” (Population Studies, 2000). In on-going research, funded by the NICHD, she examines the consequences of China’s one-child policy for child well-being.Rongjun Sun is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. His research focuses on population aging, and family relations in both the United States and China. Recent publications include “Old Age Support in Urban China from both Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives” (Research on Aging, 2002) and “Community-Acquired Pneumonia in Older Veterans: Does the Pneumonia Prognosis Index Help?” (with Lona Mody and Suzanne Bradley, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2002). He is currently studying the mortality of the oldest-old in China.Anchalee Varangrat is a Lecturer at the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Thailand. Her research focuses on family formation, population, and development. She is the author of Population Projection for Thailand, 2000–2025 (Thailand Ministry of Public Health and Mahidol University, 2003). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Wellcome Trust on factors affecting Thai marriage patterns.Regina E. Werum is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Her research focuses on educational inequality from comparative historical and international perspectives. Recent publications include “Warehousing the Unemployed? Federal Job Training Programs in the Depression-Era South” (American Journal of Education, 2001), and a forthcoming chapter with B. Powell and L. Steelman titled, “Macro Causes, Micro Effects: Linking Public Policy, Family Structure, and Educational Outcomes” (in After the Bell: Educational Solutions Outside of School, edited by D. Conley). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the NAE/Spencer Foundation and NSF that investigates cross-cultural differences in how social capital affects academic outcomes.Raymond Sin-Kwok Wong is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include inequality and stratification, sociology of education, quantitative methodology, urban poverty, and economic sociology, particularly Chinese entrepreneurship in East Asia. His recent publications include “Multidimensional Association Models: A Multilinear Approach” (Sociological Methods & Research, 2001), “Occupational Attainment in Eastern Europe Under Socialism” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2002), and “Chinese Business Firms and Business Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong” (De-Essentializing Capitalism: Chinese Enterprise, Transnationalism, and Identity, edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, 2003).Gad Yair is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include the sociology of schools and schooling, organizational theory, the sociology of learning, sociological theory and its history, and the theory-methodology nexus. Recent relevant publications are “Educational Battlefields in America: The Tug-of-War over Students’ Engagement With Instruction” (Sociology of Education, 2000) and “Decisive Moments and Key Experiences: Expanding Paradigmatic Boundaries in the Study of School Effects” in The International Handbook on the Sociology of Education: An International Assessment of New Research and Theory, 2003).

Growth in female tertiary enrollment has been accompanied by persistent gender differentiation within systems of higher education worldwide. We identify three dimensions of female “status” in higher education – overall female enrollments, sex segregation across tertiary levels, and sex segregation across fields of study – and we offer a conceptual framework for understanding cross-national similarity and variability on these dimensions. Commonalities across countries reflect the interaction of global pressures for expansion and democratization of education with persistent cultural representations of “gender difference.” Variability can be attributed, in part, to the different ways in which global cultural and structural pressures have been manifested within particular socio-historical settings.

Milton Nascimento is one of the most prolific Brazilian singers and songwriters of all time, an artist who has formed friendships and made songs with a host of Brazilian artists, with international stars from Latin America, and with artists abroad. Milton’s repertoire has made its way into the fabric of musical compilations of Brazilian music for international listeners. Perhaps unbeknownst to these international listeners, Milton, as an Afro-Brazilian artist, reflects a complex and paradoxical relationship to “race” in his music – at times openly touching upon racial themes, even during an area when the government forbade open discussion of racial tension in Brazil – but at times signifying race more subtly, either through subtle references to diversity in Brazil or through the very elements of his music.

In 1992, Mexican authorities and Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, (SNTE, National Education Workers Union) signed an agreement to decentralize the educational system called ANMEB (National Agreement on the Modernization of Basic Education), in which the Ministry of Education transferred basic education services to the 32 states of the country. Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP, the Federal Ministry of Education) still had the power to allocate money and enforce a national curriculum. SNTE, considered the largest and most powerful union in Latin America with 1.5 million affiliates, allowed the reform with the condition of keeping its status as national union.

As world society develops and nations become embedded in it, cultural patterns that began as properties of Western modernity diffuse to other areas. Individualism has long been noted as a unique feature of American nationalism (Arieli, 1964; Greene, 1993; Lipset, 1963, 1996). But both the spread of democracy and the declining legitimacy of dictatorship and racism after WW II opened the gates for forms of egalitarianism and individualism to spread transnationally (see Elliott & Lemert, 2006; Gaddis, 2005, p. 164ff). This chapter considers the consequences of this transformation.

Gender, race, and class-based meanings inform longstanding divisions and status hierarchies within the culinary profession, such as those between public and private and amateur and professional cooking. Private and personal chefs’ work in homes disrupts these divisions and hierarchies. Given their precarious position, how do these chefs negotiate their standing within the profession?

This chapter draws on interviews with 41 private/personal chefs. Eight were primarily private household employees, while all others were primarily self-employed.

The chefs negotiated their status by making distinctions between themselves and commercial chefs, along with other private/personal chefs. The chefs both challenge and reinforce the dichotomies and criteria shaping status evaluations within the culinary profession. Similarly, they both contest and reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies.

The chefs’ conceptual distinctions can potentially (re)produce or challenge material inequalities. Moreover, while the fields of private/personal cheffing create opportunities for more adults to cook for a living, the traditional status hierarchies remain largely the same. It is likely that as long as those hierarchies persist, the chefs’ conceptual distinctions will continue to challenge and reinforce them.

Research on private/personal chefs has been minimal, so this chapter fills this gap. It also adds to scholarship connecting workers’ status struggles and gender, race, and class inequalities. The case of private and personal chefs sheds new light on how gender, race, and class intersect to inform status evaluations within the culinary profession.

In the past decades, Dutch public sector organizations (PSOs) have been encouraged to become more “business-like” in their internal control and accountability processes, following a more general trend toward New Public Management (NPM) in Western societies. However, in the Netherlands, this trend has met with increasing resistance and discontent among public sector professionals. In this chapter, a framework is developed that enables these public sector professionals themselves to discuss and reflect on their internal control and accountability processes, and possibly to effect changes in it.

The chapter contains a critical analysis of existing research on management control, accountability, and learning in PSOs and describes a reflection and discussion session with a group of senior staff employees at a Dutch university, employing the framework developed in this chapter.

It is argued that, generally speaking, the “business-like” approach of NPM does not appear appropriate for most public sector activities and may even negatively affect accountability and learning in PSOs.

The chapter critically assesses the impact of NPM on PSOs and provides an alternative to NPM in the form of experimentalist governance, with possible positive implications for the effectiveness of public sector activities.

This chapter is among the first to adapt a framework, developed for scientific and descriptive use, for more practical and prescriptive purposes, that is, as an instrument for public sector professionals to discuss and reflect on their internal control and accountability processes.