Carol Ann MacGregor

Religion and Volunteering in Context Disentangling the Contextual Effects of Religion on Voluntary Behavior

This study examines whether religion’s effect on volunteering spills over to nonreligious individuals through personal ties between religious and nonreligious individuals. We use three different analytic strategies that focus on national, local, and personal network level contexts to identify the network spillover effect of religion on volunteering. We find that if nonreligious people have close friends with religious affiliations, they are more likely to volunteer for religious and nonreligious causes. However, this network spillover effect cannot be inferred from the relationship between volunteering and national or local level religious context—a common approach in the literature. In fact, we find that the average level of local religious participation is negatively associated with volunteering among the nonreligious in the United States. This novel finding suggests that to fully understand religion’s civic role in the wider community, we need to consider how religion might influence the civic life of people outside religious communities, not just those within them. Our findings also suggest that in spite of methodological advances, studies that purport to test mechanisms at one level of analysis by using data at a larger level of aggregation run a high risk of committing an ecological fallacy.

Catholic Schools in New Orleans in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Changes in the education system following Hurricane Katrina have received considerable attention from scholars in recent years. However, the role of Catholic schools is often overlooked in such discussions of school reform, which most often concentrate on the dramatic changes in the public school sector. This oversight is significant given that some segments of Catholic schools are devoted to serving populations similar to those targeted by emerging charter schools. At the national level, Catholic schools have struggled with declining enrollments and waves of school closures since the mid-1960s. This article aims to consider how well these national trends map onto the case of New Orleans. The authors discuss both how Catholic schools in New Orleans responded to Katrina and how they have changed in the midst of ongoing educational reforms in the city. They suggest that in spite of the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city as a whole, the storm and ensuing changes in the provision of public education have had, with a few notable exceptions, little independent influence on the organization of Catholic schools in the city. Rather, Catholic schools in the city are faced with many of the same challenges being faced by Catholic schools across the United States.

Catholic Schools in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

The first school to open in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina was St. Andrew the Apostle (Casserly, 2006). As with the first public schools to re-open in the city, St. Andrew the Apostle is located in the West Bank community of Algiers, which was significantly less impacted by the storm and levee breaches that decimated other parts of the city (Miron, 2008).

The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American EducationThe Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education, by ChurchillChristian J.LevyGerald E.Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 223 pp.

women’s education and labor force participation are well taken. Certainly, core rights such as education and the ability to earn a living are first steps toward improvements for women. It would be unfortunate, however, to draw the conclusion that they are sufficient to bring about advances in women’s rights. There are clearly cultural impediments to women’s rights as well as advantages to international norms-building efforts, and Cherif documents several such cases. For instance, religion does seem to restrain women’s rights in some cases. The Muslimmajority countries of the Middle East and North Africa were much less likely to allow women to transmit their citizenship to their children, particularly when there was an established state religion and religious courts had jurisdiction over family matters. As for the influence of international normsbuilding, countries that had signed CEDAW were more likely to allow women to retain their citizenship upon marrying a non-citizen. Countries with a legislative quota and more women’s rights organizations were more likely to have female legislators. In these cases, conventional beliefs were shown to be true: At times, culture impedes women’s rights, and international normsbuilding makes a difference. The best take-away from Cherif’s study is that education and labor force participation matter in encouraging egalitarian ideals, building a constituency for women’s rights, and motivating politicians to pay attention. Without these core rights, international agreements and women’s organizations will be hard pressed to make much headway. Once women are educated and active in the workplace, however, they can organize and use international norms to press their governments to change. Cherif’s qualitative examples illustrate this very process. She tells the story of Unity Dow, a Botswana woman who married an American citizen. Dow was prevented by law from passing along her Botswanan citizenship to her children. She filed a lawsuit and, after an appeal, won a court ruling that struck down the discriminatory law. Dow attributed her success to the alliances built up by the women’s organization she headed and the support given her case by international organizations concerned about women’s nationality rights as established in international law. Dow was a lawyer, an educated woman active in the labor force, conditions that were no doubt essential to her willingness and capacity to bring suit against her own government. But her education and occupation alone were not enough to change the law. She joined with other women activists and cited international norms in her lawsuit, and the court agreed with her. It was a fertile combination of education, professional occupation, women’s activism, and international norms that made a difference for women in Botswana. In the end, Cherif agrees. It isn’t that culture, international norms, or women’s organizations are unimportant. Rather, the fight for women’s rights is complex. Core rights foster the conditions that make political effectiveness possible. Women’s rights advance where women are empowered through education and labor force participation and then take action together to advocate for change. Cherif deserves credit for highlighting this important process.

32.95 paper. ISBN: 978143 9907849.

industry failed to reduce the number of injuries and fatalities. If more regulation is supposed to increase health and safety or the quality of the service provided, the case studies examined here fail to provide such evidence. Part of this may be due to the occupations selected or the particular stage at which they were examined; for example, although new regulations among childcare and preschool workers did not improve children’s test scores, this may be less attributable to the regulation itself and more to its timing and coverage. If, as the author hypothesizes, childcare services are in a ‘‘take off’’ stage of regulation, the expansion and duration of such regulations may produce an observable effect over time. Indeed, this has important policy implications for the support of legislation regulating key industries such as mortgage lending and education; although the initial effects of new regulation may be minimal, they may become significant over time. Does licensing complement or substitute for unionization? From an occupational point of view, the effects of licensing and unionization are quite similar in terms of increasing wages for members. Yet, the evidence seems to suggest that licensing serves as a substitute rather than a complement to unionization as the growing rate of licensing closely tracks declining rates of unionization. Licensing may be used to increase wages and signal quality, but it imposes rules and requirements that largely govern individuals rather than employers or the workplace itself. In other words, licensing may bring workers some of the same economic advantages as unions, but not necessarily the same bargaining power in the workplace. The biggest shortcoming of this book—its reliance on anecdotal case studies—underscores the author’s call to include specific questions on licensing and occupational regulation on existing national government surveys. Such questions have already been developed and tested by the Princeton Data Improvement Initiative (PDII) and would significantly improve researchers’ ability to assess comprehensively the economic effects of occupational regulation at the local, state, and federal levels. A second, minor criticism concerns Kleiner’s erroneous claim in the introduction regarding the construction industry, which he describes as the ‘‘the most hazardous industry, based on total numbers of workplace accidents’’ (p. 2). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the manufacturing and transportation industries report both higher rates and total numbers of workplace injuries, fatal and nonfatal. However, this inaccuracy neither detracts from the methodology nor affects the overall results of his study. In sum, this book represents a clear step forward in research on occupational regulation. By combining case studies and existing survey data to test fundamental economic theories concerning licensing and regulation, the author provides new insights and raises important questions concerning the role of licensing and its relationship to wages, monopolies, and unionization. Given the current declining rate of unionization alonside increasing foreign competition and rising skill requirements, this book is both timely and important to contemporary debates concerning changes in the American workplace.