(Table 1) Sample locations and clay mineral data of sediment surface samples from the Barents Sea region

A new surface sediment sample set gained in the western Barents Sea by the MAREANO program has been analysed for basic clay mineral assemblages. Distribution maps including additional samples from earlier German research cruises to and off Svalbard are compiled. Some trends in the clay mineral assemblages are related to the sub-Barents Sea geology because the Quaternary sediment cover is rather thin. Additionally, land masses like Svalbard and northern Scandinavia dominate the clay mineral signal with their erosional products. Dense bottom water, very often of brine origin, that flows within deep troughs, such as the Storfjorden or Bear Island Trough, transport the clay mineral signal from their origin to the Norwegian-Greenland Sea.

Incertidumbre y actitudes pro-redistributivas: mercados de trabajo y modelos de bienestar en Europa

La articulación entre las políticas de empleo y las políticas sociales condicionan la percepción subjetiva de incertidumbre los individuos. El modelo de mercado laboral tiene un peso determinante en la percepción de incertidumbre. El empleo en sí mismo ya no es suficiente garantía de ingresos seguros. El empleo a tiempo parcial y los contratos temporales generan una creciente demanda de políticas de redistribución de los ingresos en los países del Sur y Este de Europa. En los países escandinavos los mismos tipos de contratos laborales generan menos desigualdad porque el empleo público contribuye a generar un “círculo virtuoso” que favorece las políticas de igualdad y la conciliación entre la vida laboral y familiar. A nivel individual las actitudes pro-redistributivas las impulsan las mujeres, aquellas personas con incertidumbre en sus ingresos económicos y con bajo nivel de estudios. Por el contrario, quienes más confían en el éxito individual y el mérito son los jóvenes con estudios universitarios y aquellos que perciben ingresos económicos altos.

The Collusion of Feminist and Postmodernist Impulses in E.L. Doctorow’s "Ragtime"

Many critics of Doctorow have classified him as a postmodernist writer, acknowledging that a wide number of thematic and stylistic features of his early fiction emanate from the postmodern context in which he took his first steps as a writer. Yet, these novels have an eminently social and ethical scope that may be best perceived in their intellectual engagement and support of feminist concerns. This is certainly the case of Doctorow’s fourth and most successful novel, Ragtime. The purpose of this paper will be two-fold. I will explore Ragtime’s indebtedness to postmodern aesthetics and themes, but also its feminist elements. Thus, on the one hand, I will focus on issues of uncertainty, indeterminacy of meaning, plurality and decentering of subjectivity; on the other hand, I will examine the novel’s attitude towards gender oppression, violence and objectification, its denunciation of hegemonic gender configurations and its voicing of certain feminist demands. This analysis will lead to an examination of the problematic collusion of the mostly white, male, patriarchal aesthetics of postmodernism and feminist politics in the novel. I will attempt to establish how these two traditionally conflicting modes coexist and interact in Ragtime.

Ethnicity and the prostate cancer experience: a qualitative metasynthesis

Through Class Darkly: Class in the British TV Noir

Class has always been at the heart of the television crime drama. Whether it is the post-war paternalism of Dixon of Dock Green (1955 – 1976), the harsh social realism of The Sweeney (1975-1978), or the almost mythical evocations of Britain in Heartbeat (1992 – 2010) and Midsomer Murders (1997- present), class and crime have always been seen as being inextricably linked. Since the 1990s, the British crime drama has been influenced by successive waves of cultural imports from, firstly, the US and then from Scandinavia. There is now a recognisable ‘genre’ for what we might think of as British TV Noir. Beginning with shows such as Cracker (1993 – 2006), Prime Suspect (1991 – 2006) and Messiah (2001) and continuing with dramas like Red Riding (2008), Southcliffe (2013) and Hinterland (2013 – present), the British TV Noir employs narratives and stylistic tropes that might usually be associated with the cinema of the 1940s. Although drawing influence from high profile shows such as Twin Peaks (1990 – 1991), Millennium (1996) and (latterly) The Wire (2002 – 2008), CSI (2000 – present) and The Killing (2007) these British Noir shows also articulate the nation’s shifting class system. As Susan Sydney-Smith has ably demonstrated, the crime drama is “historically contingent” (Sydney-Smith, 2002, p. 5) and shaped by the surrounding socio-political, as well aesthetic, context. To this end, this chapter traces the depiction of class in three key crime series – Prime Suspect, Red Riding and Southcliffe - and explores how social class, and more importantly, its changing face provides a constant background to the narratives and characterisations. These three texts were each produced at pivotal moments in Britain’s relationship to class – Prime Suspect was shown 6 months after Margaret Thatcher vacated office; Red Riding was produced in the midst of the global recession in 2008 and Southcliffe was made in the shadows of stringing welfare and immigration reforms. These texts span three successive political administrations and over two decades of social and political change. Understanding the relationship between criminal activity and class in these dramas however is far more complicated than simply reading the historical context through the text. Commensurate with its cinematic incarnation, TV Noir is both reflective and productive, employing visual and narrative tropes to manipulate, as well reflect, its audience’s moral and social positioning. The picture that emerges from an examination of class and the British TV Noir is one of suspicion and discontent. As Andrew Spicer suggests (with reference to British cinema) the Noir sensibility both depicts and critiques a society that it sees as being “class-ridden, racist and misogynist” (Spicer, 2002, p.202). This is certainly the case with the texts that are being examined here, as social positions and taxonomies are constantly being redefined and renegotiated.

Between Memory and History : The Nineteenth Century in Jewelle Gomez’s Vampire Novel The Gilda Stories and the TV Series True Blood

This article examines two American vampire narratives that depict the perspective and memories of a main character who is turned into a vampire in the US in the nineteenth century: Jewelle Gomez’s novel The Gilda Stories (1991), and the first season of Alan Ball’s popular TV series True Blood (2008). In both narratives, the relationship between the past and the present, embodied by the main vampire character, is of utmost importance, but the two narratives use vampire conventions as well as representations of and references to the nineteenth century in different ways that comment on, revise, or reinscribe generic and socio-historical assumptions about race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Effects of subsidizing the first employee – Empirical evidence from Finland

Small businesses form a significant share of all businesses and employ a large share of all employees. Therefore, governments are often interested in subsidizing them and especially employment in smaller firms. Nonemployer firms have received special interest, especially in Finland, due to their large share of all businesses. It has been argued that the government should encourage them to hire by subsidizing employment. However, there is no evidence on the effectiveness of such policies. In general, there is surprisingly little evidence on how small firms react to employment subsidies or of employment subsidies targeted according to firm characteristics. The subject of this thesis is the effects of subsidizing the first employee. While theoretical background suggests the subsidy might have efficiency gains, because there might be market inefficiencies that lead to too little employment in small firms. The focus of this research, however, is on the empirical evidence. There was a regional subsidy for hiring the first employee in Finland between 2007 and 2011. Nonemployer firms in the subsidy area were eligible for a wage subsidy for two years when they hired the first employee. The design of the subsidy enables studying the effects in a natural experiment framework that are nowadays popular in public economics. It can be shown that the area without the subsidy provides a good counterfactual to the area where the subsidy was available. Therefore, the effects of the subsidy can be estimated with difference-in-differences method. This method compares the change in the subsidy area to the change in the area without the subsidy. The data used is firm level data spanning from 2000 to 2013. The data is provided by the Finnish Tax Administration including tax declarations by all Finland based companies. The effects for hiring decisions are estimated by examining the effects for alternative variables such as employment, wage expenditure and turnover. According to the results, the subsidy did not have statistically significant effect on any of the variables of interest. Therefore, it can be concluded that the subsidy did not increase hires in nonemployer firms. This implies that the labour demand elasticity of nonemployer firms is very small. The results are in line with previous literature on the effectiveness of general employment subsidies in Scandinavia that suggest that labour demand elasticity is rather small resulting in small or no effects of employment subsidies. However, my research provides new evidence on labour demand of nonemployer firms especially that has not been studied before. The results are in line with the observation that most nonemployer firms are self-employed persons who are not interested in growing their business to employ others as well, but only provide for themselves. Because of this employment subsidies to the self-employed are not particularly well targeted. The theoretical grounds for the subsidy actually hold for other small firms as well, so it can be argued the subsidy would be more effective if it was extended for hiring the first few employees.