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This paper examines survey data relating class mobility to satisfaction and dissatisfaction with seven different domains of everyday life among nationally representative samples of men and women living in ten industrialized nations. The evidence is set against competing pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the mobility experience found in earlier literature. Results show that individuals who move from working-class origins to middle-class destinations are no more likely to be systematically satisfied or dissatisfied with life than are the socially immobile or even those downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds into the working class. Indeed, in all nations, the overall association between class experience and satisfaction with life is both weak and uneven across the different life-domains. The study also serves to illustrate an important principle of research methodology more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the attempt to address food insecurity and food waste, food rescue has been presented by advocates in high-income countries as an alternative model to conventional food banks. Although supermarkets and restaurants in industrialized nations - including New Zealand, the focus of my case study - are constantly stocked with 150-200% of surplus food over what it takes to nutritionally feed their populations (Stuart, 2012), they continue to report high rates of food insecurity, such as in New Zealand where just 60.8% of households report being fully food secure (NZ Ministry of Health, 2019). To explore one approach to food security initiatives in urban areas, I conducted a nine-week ethnographic case study of Kaibosh Food Rescue, a non-profit food aid initiative in Wellington, New Zealand, which collects and redistributes food waste'. By following the food through its social life and interviewing an array of stakeholders, I found that once food is declared as 'waste' by supermarkets, in its afterlife rescued food continues to embody multiple values. I argue that not only does this rescued food still hold much nutritional value, but it can also create social spaces, facilitate action and help empower recipients, all of which were facilitated by the presence of food that in the commercial food industry realm was declared to have no value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on fertility and women's employment in industrialized nations. The association between fertility and women's labor force activity reflects the incompatibility between caring for children and participating in economically productive work that typifies industrialized societies. Prior to industrialization, work and child rearing tasks could be performed more or less simultaneously. In historical and contemporary pre-industrial societies, nonmechanized agricultural tasks and piecework could be combined with child supervision with relatively little danger to the child or marked loss of economic productivity. As industrialization proceeded, however, childcare and economically productive work became increasingly incompatible. Cross-national differences in the demographic behaviors that determine fertility, including trends in first birth timing, birth spacing, and nuptiality, underlie the aggregate variation in fertility levels and trends. A closer look at a few countries reveals the importance of each of these factors. In Japan, for example, where nonmarital births account for about 1 % of all births, the substantial drop in fertility since 1975 is related to the avoidance or postponement of marriage among Japanese women. Decreasing fertility in Ireland, Italy, and Spain also reflects marriage patterns, although the remarkable drop in Irish fertility over the past several decades and the exceedingly low fertility rates of the Mediterranean countries are due as well to a decrease in the number of children married women bear.