März 31, 2014, 1:09 pm, NIELS BEEREPOOT, BART LAMBREGTS, Allgemein.
A new form of service outsourcing has emerged, namely the global online job marketplace for freelance contractors. Such platforms are currently the closest proxy to the idea of a global labour market where everyone competes for jobs regardless of location. In this article, we examine how competition manifests itself on one such global online platform, namely oDesk. We present a comparative analysis of the relative wages and the rewarding of skills and expertise of contractors from selected countries and investigate whether, via labour arbitrage, wage convergence takes place between Western and developing countries. We find that wage convergence is noticeable but experience and skills hardly translate into better remuneration. While service outsourcing (or microwork) via global online marketplaces provides new employment opportunities for freelancers around the world, the intense competition and the inherent restrictions of this type of marketplace limit the financial gains for most contractors.
März 31, 2014, 1:09 pm, KEN CHIH-YAN SUN, Allgemein.
In this article, I argue that, by offering ageing return migrants new opportunities both to organize their lives and to rethink their social attachments, the extension of public healthcare in Taiwan constitutes a new contextual feature of the transnational social field bridging Taiwan and the USA. I use the concept of ‘transnational healthcare seeking’ to describe how returning seniors try to maintain their physical, psychological and social well-being by accessing the benefits of public healthcare available in their homeland rather than in the USA. Furthermore, I offer the concept of ‘logics of social right’ to demonstrate how older returnees seek to reconfirm their social commitment to their homeland and to defend their entitlement to its state-provided benefits against public criticism that they are free riders. In so doing, this article contributes a nuanced understanding of how ageing migrants imagine, pursue and construct an ideal later life across national borders.
März 30, 2014, 10:15 pm, Diane Clements, Allgemein.
This paper analyses the ages and occupations of the men who joined co-freemasonry for men and women in the period 1902–1914. In seeking to establish why these men joined this form of freemasonry rather than the much larger, established and highly respectable all male freemasonry, it seeks to establish their beliefs and in particular their attitude to contemporary topics. The profile of the men in co-freemasonry was very similar to the members of all male lodges but what appears to distinguish them was their attitude to women and in particular their belief that freemasonry and the knowledge that it gave should be available to women.
März 30, 2014, 9:44 pm, Olivia Chaumont, Allgemein.
Since 1992, Parisian architect and town planner Olivier Chaumont had belonged to the Grand Orient of France, then an exclusively male masonic order. Following a sex change in the mid-2000s and now legally a woman known as Olivia, her lodge willingly accepted this new identity. The brother became a sister, and in so doing helped precipitate the opening up of the Grand Orient to women. This momentous episode in France’s masonic history is captured here in an autobiographical essay written specially for the 2013 themed, double-issue of Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism: ‘Women and Freemasonry’.
März 30, 2014, 9:43 pm, Andrew Pink, Allgemein.
This report provides an overview of the second international doctoral students Study Day on freemasonry, detailing the presentations of promising PhD projects currently being undertaken. The subjects covered are: freemasonry in eighteenth-century India, and nineteenth-century Mauritius; the notion of secrecy among freemasons in twentieth-century Britain; musicology and nineteenth-century freemasonry, the complex rhetoric of Dudley Wright (1868–1949); the masonic life and times of Hippolyto Joseph Da Costa (1772–1823). Those presenting papers represent a cross-section of the doctoral experience, from just beginning the doctoral journey to having just completed it. The range of material discussed demonstrates the richness and vitality of the subject.
März 30, 2014, 9:41 pm, Margaret C. Jacob, Allgemein.
This paper examines the reactions that women in freemasonry have received from both the left and the right. Neither side seems to have a very clear understanding and sexism lurks in many of these assessments. It then turns to what is now known about women in the eighteenth century European freemasonry with the proviso that there is still a great deal that we do not know about women’s involvement in the lodges. Perhaps only for France do we have a fairly detailed picture of where the lodges of adoption could be found and the nature of their membership.
März 30, 2014, 9:39 pm, Andrew Pink, Allgemein.
The Brothers and Sisters of the Honourable Community of Modern Masons are a hitherto unnoticed eighteenth-century mixed-gender, para-masonic society. The surviving evidence of their activities is found in announcements of meetings in the London newspapers: details of benefit performances that the lodge sponsored in London theatres; an engraving of a meeting; and the lodge’s song. While the location of these Modern Masons, based in a minor pleasure garden in semi-rural Clerkenwell, suggests that this was a minor local London phenomenon, the evidence suggests a much more significant group, active in support for the political ambitions of Frederick Prince of Wales.
März 30, 2014, 9:38 pm, Róbert Péter, Allgemein.
Drawing on several so-far neglected documents available in the Burney Collection of the British Library as well as in the Library and Museum of Freemasons‘ Hall in London, this paper investigates the gender structures and roles represented in English m…
März 30, 2014, 9:36 pm, John Slifko, Allgemein.
This paper engages the historical geography of the origins of L’Ordre Maçonnique Mixte et International ‘LE DROIT HUMAIN’ Fédération américaine (the American Federation of Human Rights hereinafter AFHR) in the United States in the early twentieth century, the first major institution of freemasonry to accept full equality of men and women, with its origins in France. There is, in addition, biographical material on three seminal figures in the origin of LE DROIT HUMAIN, Antoine Muzzarelli, Louis Goaziou, and Dr. Alida de Leeuw. The research examines Louis Goaziou, a major architect in the formation of the AFHR and a small sampling of important co-workers. Antoine Muzzarelli was the real founder of AFHR. He was an editor in France and teacher of French in America. The first nine lodges at their origins involved different immigrant ethnic groups from across East, Central, and Southern Europe.
März 30, 2014, 9:15 pm, Diane Clements, Allgemein.
This paper analyses the ages and occupations of the men who joined co-freemasonry for men and women in the period 1902–1914. In seeking to establish why these men joined this form of freemasonry rather than the much larger, established and highly respectable all male freemasonry, it seeks to establish their beliefs and in particular their attitude to contemporary topics. The profile of the men in co-freemasonry was very similar to the members of all male lodges but what appears to distinguish them was their attitude to women and in particular their belief that freemasonry and the knowledge that it gave should be available to women.