Search results

Inequality is an essential factor for the alleviation of poverty. In Cameroon, most of the households derive their livelihoods from non-wage income and a better understanding of how different variables affect income inequality is a way to reduce those inequalities and improve social welfare. Studies carried out so far barely make out the determinants among non-wage earners. This study sets out to identify these determinants, using the regression-based decomposition technique and data obtained from the 2005 Employment and Informal Sector Survey (EISS) undertaken by the National Statistic Institute (INS) in Cameroon. Results show that the total inequality of an hourly active income ensues from the ratio of age/experience and unobserved individual heterogeneity among non-wage earners.

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of off-farm work on food security in rural Bangladesh. We use rural household-level data and a nonparametric propensity score matching (PSM) estimator. Matching estimators are used in observational data to address the potential selection biases caused by nonrandom allocation of the treatment. Monthly food-consumption data and household income and expenditure surveys from rural Bangladesh for 2013–2014 are used in this chapter. We found that rural Bangladeshi households participating in nonfarm income-generating activities, especially in higher return nonfarm employment, enjoy higher levels of per-capita food expenditures and diet diversity – two of the measures of food security. In particular, we find that rural households increased diet diversity in cereals, fruits and vegetables, and meats. Finally, our estimates reveal that rural households participating in off-farm work increased per-capita food consumption by about Taka 1,576, on average, and increased per-capita expenditures on milk and milk products (Taka 212), and fruits and vegetables (Taka 235) significantly. Policy makers should design and implement policies that create off-farm livelihood activities. These nonfarm activities would help smallholder farm families to diversify, to supplement their income, and to continue their agricultural operations as well as increase food security.

Companies are interested in engaging consumers in spreading the word about their products or brands. Although more and more studies are analysing word of mouth marketing (WOMM), the topic is still very recent, thus very little is known about how to develop a WOMM campaign effectively. This chapter develops a literature review on WOMM in social media for better understanding on how to manage WOMM.

The studies reviewed have allowed us to identify the main decisions that should be taken when planning a WOMM campaign: the selection of the seed, the type of message and the inclusion of incentives.

We identify the two types of objectives that companies can follow with WOMM: information diffusion or consumers’ persuasion. Depending on the campaign objectives, the strategy to be used in order to be successful is different.

This chapter can be useful to both, marketers, by showing them how to develop a WOMM campaign effectively; and researchers, by showing them the main gaps on WOMM that should be addressed in future studies.

This is one of the first attempts to review the literature and organize knowledge on WOMM. Concepts that have been treated as synonymous by many researchers such as opinion leaders, market mavens, innovative consumers, and hubs are clarified and distinguished one from the other which may help in improving previous knowledge on this field.

Sterilisation in India (and globally) has a contentious and deeply politicised history. Despite this troubling legacy, India continues to rely on female sterilisation as the main form of contraception and family planning. Abortion, which has been legal under broad grounds since 1971, intersects with sterilisation at different points over women's reproductive lifecourse. Drawing on three case studies exploring women's abortion trajectories in Karnataka, India (2017), this chapter examines sterilisation as a reproductive technology (RT) in women's abortion narratives. These include experiences of failed sterilisation necessitating abortion, as well as narratives around pre- and post-abortion counselling with sterilisation conditionalities. Women report healthcare workers shaming or scolding them for not being sterilised after their last pregnancy – demonstrating the prominence of sterilisation as an enforced social norm using ‘health’ frames. Using reproductive justice (RJ) as a lens, I analyse how sterilisation interacts with abortion and the narratives of shame and stigma that surround the two technologies and make visible the ways in which it results in the denial and restriction of women's reproductive freedoms.

Collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives are known for requiring high levels of participation, striving toward community, and making space for affective relationships among their members. The emotional intensity of such organizations has long been considered both an asset and a burden: while personal relationships may generate solidarity and sustain commitment, interpersonal interactions can be emotionally intense and, if left unmanaged, can even lead to organizational demise. How do collectivist-democratic organizations manage emotions to create and sustain member commitment? This study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a worker-run, worker-recuperated business in Argentina to analyze the emotional dynamics of a democratic workplace. First, the author shows how members of the cooperative engage in emotional labor not only in their customer service, but also through their participation in lateral management and democratic governance. An analysis of individual feeling management, however, provides only a partial picture of emotional dynamics. Drawing on the theory of interaction ritual chains, the author argues that workplace practices like meetings and events can produce collective emotions that are critical to maintaining members’ commitment to the group. Finally, the author shows how interaction ritual chains operate in the BAUEN Cooperative, tracing how symbols of shared affiliation circulate through interactions and are reactivated through the confrontation of a common threat. The author concludes by reflecting on implications for future research on emotions in collectivist organizations and participatory workplaces more broadly.

This paper devises a new method for using the information contained in income-generating equations to “account for” or “decompose” the level of income inequality in a country and its change over time. In the levels decomposition, the shares attributed to each explanatory factor are independent of the particular inequality measure used. In the change decomposition, methods are presented to break down the contribution of each explanatory factor into a coefficients effect, a correlation effect, and a standard deviation effect. In an application to rising earnings inequality in the United States, it is found that schooling is the single most explanatory variable, only one other variable (occupation) has any appreciable role to play, and all of schooling’s effect was a coefficients effect.