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Downsizing has become a way of life for those in today's labor market, increasingly leading to more employees working on a contingent basis. The higher salaries and insurance costs associated with older employees, along with an ongoing corporate youth culture, increases the likelihood that older workers will be affected by downsizing. How these older workers deal with being downsized, particularly how their worldview is affected is the focus of this paper. In-depth interviews and a theoretical framework based on Bourdieu's concept of habitus are used to explore this issue. Three themes emerge from the interviews: (1) a refusal of dislocated workers to be diminished as human beings by job loss; (2) a feeling of helplessness in an era of escalating corporate dehumanization; and (3) coping mechanisms for an emerging age of ageism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines interstate in-movement, out-movement, and resulting patterns of net migration of Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic Whites in the United States, using data from the 2005-2007 American Community Survey. After illustrating their patterns of internal migration, we also show how Black, Asian, Hispanic, and White net migration levels are associated with several economic and social characteristics of the states. The goal is to learn how similar or dissimilar members of these four broad racial categories are in choosing to enter and exit different parts of the country, and thereby contribute to ongoing discussion of differential spatial relocation of racial groups (i.e., are some groups moving to a different set of states than others?). The results suggest that the similarities in patterns of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and White in-, out-, and net migration overshadow the differences. States to which members of one racial category are attracted, and states that they avoid or depart from, are, to a very strong degree, the same states that the other races also move to, avoid, or leave. Moreover, we find that these racial groups resemble each other in terms of the direction and strength of their net migration's correlation with state economic and social characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I assessed the influence of capitalist ideology on today's worker in the restructured U.S. economy, conducting a qualitative study of 33 professionals from the baby-boom generation. Because economic restructuring has been shown to have negative consequences for workers, I examined the extent that these unfavorable impacts are expressed in the meanings that participants attached to their contemporary work situations. I found that ideology tends to distort reality as perceived by these workers on three levels of sentience. First, capitalistic ideology is accepted with little question at a low level of awareness which I equate to false consciousness. Second, economic restructuring ideology, which emphasizes profitability and competition, has a higher level of awareness, but is still passively accepted. I categorize these effects as passive distortions. Third, boomer professionals actively negotiate the restructured economy through adaptive distortions that tend to propagate and reify economic restructuring ideology. Adaptive distortions include early career success, proactive behavior, work motivations, individuality, and authenticity. Overall, boomer professionals do not appear to resist economic changes even though these changes are not in their best interest. Based on this study, the ideology of economic restructuring seems to be proliferating unconstrained and unabated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]