A longitudinal study of intergenerational transmission of poverty in Hong Kong across the 2010s: Social investment, homeownership and mother’s education

This study examines the extent to which poverty is passed from parents to children in Hong Kong based on the social investment thesis. Through tracking the educational and career trajectories of the second generation (aged 23–25) of 77 families, this study suggests that adolescents with poor parents have a 202 percent higher chance of being poor in young adulthood. This poverty-continuation probability increases dramatically to 681 percent if parental poverty is defined in terms of homeownership rather than income. Another important factor that also affects intergenerational poverty is the mother’s educational level. Implications for social workers and policy makers are discussed.

Structural Change Shapes Career Mobility Opportunities: An Analysis of Cohorts, Gender and Parental Class

Research suggests that structural change drives occupational mobility in high-income countries over time, but two partially competing theories explain how such change occurs. One suggests that younger cohorts replace older ones through higher education, and the second suggests that individuals adapt to structural change by switching from declining to new or growing occupations during their careers. A proposed occupational scheme aligns with the two dimensions of structural change – skill upgrading on the vertical axis of occupational differentiation, increasing demand for data comprehension (i.e. high skill) and primary tasks concerning either people or things on the horizontal axis. Applied to career trajectories in the Swedish labour market, sequence analyses of the scheme suggest stability in attainment of career mobility types over time between consecutive birth cohorts, and considerable evidence for within-career manoeuvring. Analyses address heterogeneity along parental class and gender.

Family Duties and Job Flexibility: Tradeoffs for Chinese Urban, Educated Mothers with Toddlers

Drawing on survey and interview data from mothers of 14-month infants in Nanjing, China, we explore women’s job trajectories as they juggle work and family responsibilities. Four profiles that emerge among our sample of 371 mothers (high stability, rapid cyclers, high-paid wage-growth, and intermittent) reflected not only their work career trajectories but also their different strategies of managing work-family balance. High-stability mothers were more likely than the other three groups to work in state-owned enterprises and experience a negative work climate. They illustrate how China’s changing economy shape work preferences of mothers who value interest and self-fulfillment, but pursue stability to accommodate their childrearing responsibilities.

Work and fertility in Taiwan: How women’s and men’s career sequences associate with fertility outcomes?

There has been much debate over the micro-level relationship between employment situations and fertility in Europe and Northern America. However, related research in East Asia is scant, although countries in this region have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Moreover, most studies analyze the employment-fertility relationship from a static perspective and only for women, which underemphasizes life-course dynamics and gender heterogeneity of employment careers and their fertility implications. Drawing on retrospective data from the 2017 Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS), this study explores women’s and men’s career trajectories between ages 18 and 40 in Taiwan using sequence cluster analyses. It also examines how career variations associate with different timing and quantum of birth. Empirical results show that economically inactive women experience faster motherhood transitions and have more children by age 40 than women with stable full-time careers. For men, having an unstable career associates with slower fatherhood transitions and a lower number of children. For both genders, self-employed people are the earliest in parenthood transitions and have the highest number of children by midlife. Our findings demonstrate sharp gender contrasts in employment careers and their diversified fertility implications in low-fertility Taiwan

RASE: Modeling cumulative disadvantage due to marginalized group status in academia

We propose a framework of Resources, Achievement, Status, and Events (RASE) that allows the many disparate but well-documented phenomena affecting underrepresented groups in STEM to be assembled into a story of career trajectories, illuminating the possible cumulative impact of many small inequities. Our framework contains a three-component deterministic cycle of (1) production of Achievements from Resources, (2) updated community Status due to Achievements, and (3) accrual of additional Resources based on community Status. A fourth component, stochastic Events, can influence an individual’s level of Resources or Achievements at each time step of the cycle. We build a specific mathematical model within the RASE framework and use it to investigate the impact of accumulated disadvantages from multiple compounding variables. We demonstrate that the model can reproduce data of observed disparities in academia. Finally, we use a publicly available visualization and networking tool to provide a sandbox for exploring career outcomes within the model. The modeling exercise, results, and visualization tool may be useful in the context of training STEM faculty to recognize and reduce effects of bias.

Typology of career trajectories and motivation of their choice by teachers of higher education institutions

This research article presents a typology of career trajectories for higher educational institutions’ teachers and examines their motives of a potential change in a career trajectory, their willingness to move to work in another university or leave the academic field. The motives for choosing a career path are systematized and ranked. There was carried out an empirical research using the method of semi-structured interviews with 108 professors and managerial staff representatives of Russian universities. The informants were selected according to gender, age, industry characteristics, their working experience in higher education and positions held.The results of the study identified three categories of workers: loyal to their organization (not meaning to change their working place and sphere of interests); dedicated to the profession (admitting a transfer to another university, but not planning to leave the academic field); and change-oriented (considering the possibility of choosing another job – outside the academic sector). The empirical research has shown that teachers with extensive work experience are most willing to change their current jobs.The originality of the study lies in developing a typology of career trajectories for teachers and in clarifying key motivations within the subgroups included in the typology presented, as well as in using a qualitative method for studying career trajectories in relation to scientific and pedagogical workers. A qualitative analysis of career strategies made it possible to analytically assess the informants’ opinions.The article is of interest to the higher education researchers involved in the process of personnel management and in training scientific and pedagogical workers. It will also be useful for heads of HR departments and for HEI vice-rectors dealing with personnel issues.

Development Studies in the World System of Global Knowledge Production: A Critical Empirical Analysis

In this article, I present the results of an analysis of the geopolitical diversity of 61,781 papers that have been published in 17 leading international journals in development studies, and the results of another analysis in which I analysed the career trajectories of 260 faculty members working at 10 highly valued development studies departments. Regarding geopolitical diversity, I found a systemic inequality in terms of both research output and education trajectories. I argue that these imbalances contradict the expressed goals and values of development studies as a discipline that aims to reduce geopolitical inequalities. Policy implications are also discussed, in which I propose to reconsider academic recruitment standards and to raise the visibility of different epistemologies of published research in development studies.

Cross-media, co-creative and current: New strategies for educating talent for Danish children’s film and television in the 2020s

This article analyses recent developments in Danish film and television education through a case study of a new training initiative for creating content for children and young audiences. Following an outline of traditional training and career trajectories in the Danish screen industries in general, and for working with children’s film and television specifically, the case study investigates the guiding ideas behind Manuskriptskolen for børnefiktion (‘The Cross-Media School of Children’s Fiction’), which was established in 2020. The school marks a new approach to Danish film education in several ways. First, by creating a training ground focusing on a specific audience, rather than on screenwriting or film-making more generally. Second, by thinking of content for this audience as fundamentally multi-platform and teaching students storytelling across different media from the outset. Third, by insisting that creating content for this audience calls for having knowledge about the current lives of young people and their media use, and encouraging strategies for engaging or even co-creating content with them. The article builds on qualitative interviews, document analysis and observations at industry events as part of the research project Reaching Young Audiences: Serial Fiction and Cross-Media Storyworlds for Children and Young Audiences.