Volume 30, Issue 4

In this paper the long-term interrelationships between types of colonization, the resulting agricultural structures, and the types of connection between local farms and international manufacturers are studied in the tobacco industries of Brazil and Zimbabwe. The argumentation is developed in three steps: It starts with a conception of colonialism as the origin of pathdependent processes which mold agricultural structures and limit the choices of supply strategies on the part of the manufacturing industry. In the second section the auction system in Zimbabwe and the system of contract farming in southern Brazil are analyzed as variants of “market” and “hierarchy”, which couple agriculture with industry. The observed intersectoral linking structures are then explained in terms of transaction-cost and resource dependence theory.

Since the breakdown of communism, Germany has experienced a major influx of ethnic German migrants (Aussiedler) from Eastern Europe. In this paper, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel of the year 1998 to analyze the integration of ethnic German migrants into the German labor market. We focus particularly on the transferability of educational credentials for the labor market integration of migrants. Although there are official procedures for ethnic German to have their educational and vocational certificates recognized, only a minority of them are working in the occupation they were actually trained for. For migrants, however, working in the occupation learned is a prerequisite for performing well in the German labor market. The problems ethnic German migrants are faced before they can utilize their vocational skills lead us to some general conclusions about dominant allocation mechanisms and further predictions about the fate of future migrant populations in the German labor market.

The content and procedure of crisis pregnancy counseling sessions is largely unknown to outsiders. This descriptive and exploratory case study aims to remedy this matter. In order to achieve this, a quantitative analysis of the counseling transcripts in Nuremberg’s crisis pregnancy centers has been undertaken. The database is made up of all 1,820 counseling transcripts which were recorded in 1998 by five church-run, independent, or municipal institutions. They not only give information about pregnant women’s main reasons for considering the termination of a pregnancy but also advice on the pregnancy itself, on sexual behavior, and on financial and legal issues. In addition, they contain references to concrete offers for institutional help and support. The analyses show that Nuremberg seems to succeed in providing a multiplicity of institutions suited to the heterogeneity of pregnant women, i.e. women who have decided to terminate their pregnancy, who are undecided, or who want to continue with the pregnancy but are looking for either material or nonmaterial help. Due to the cultural and personal diversity of pregnant women there is no such thing as an “ideal” support center that is equally suitable for all pregnant women seeking advice.

This paper focuses on one of the central methodological problems of scaling in the social sciences: the identification of multidimensional structures. In most practical research contexts exploratory factor analysis is used to solve this problem. However, the problem with this statistical procedure is that - due to certain restrictions - it does not always produce the desired outcome. Drawing evidence from one example, the author shows that under certain conditions complex dimensions are “fragmented” by orthogonal exploratory factor analysis. An alternative method which does not have distorting restrictions is a multiple scaling procedure for dichotomous items developed by Mokken (1971). Mokken scaling operates according to the principle of crystallization and reliably identifies multidimensional structures. Multiple scaling is a general multidimensional scaling method that, with the help of cluster analysis, can be implemented within classical test theory.