What You Know or Who You Know? Occupation-specific work experience and job matching through social networks

While work experience is generally seen as an indicator of human capital, it may also reflect the accumulation of social capital. This study examines how work experience facilitates informal access to employment—that is, being matched with a new employer through an informal search or informal recruitment through the non-search process (without engaging in a job search). Results from fixed effects regression on panel data from the NLSY show that experience is related to informal entry into new jobs, though in a very specific way. The odds of being informally recruited into a new job improve as work experience in related occupations rises, but this relationship holds only among men. These findings highlight the social benefits of occupation-specific work experience that accrue to men but not to women, suggesting an alternative explanation for the gender disparity in wage returns to experience.     

Organizational perspectives on digital labor market intermediaries

Dramatic changes in organizational forms and employee-employer relationships have coincided with a proliferation of labor market intermediaries. Often digital and internet-based, these new hiring technologies assist organizations in recruiting and screening potential job candidates. We identify three types of digital labor market intermediaries (dLMIs): connectors, curators, and comminglers. We examine the use of dLMIs through the lens of organizational theory, focusing on implications for organizational efficiency, power, and equity. dLMI use is patterned but variable across different organizations and has unintended outcomes that defy efficiency expectations. It poses new constraints for job seekers while allowing organizations and intra-organizational groups to negotiate institutional pressures and power imbalances. Finally, dLMI use appears to reproduce pre-existing inequalities among different types of employees.     

Peer group self-identification in samples of Russian and U.S. adolescents

Most peer group self-identification research has been conducted in the United States. This article examined the generalizability of self-identified group name research among teens in Ufa, a city in the Russian Federation. A cross-sectional, anonymous collection of data on group self-identification, drug use, addiction concern, sensation seeking, and self-rated school performance was collected from 365 10th grade youth in Ufa and 965 10th grade youth in the United States. The results supported the existence of peer group self-identification by youth in both countries and, in general, replicated the findings that youth who self-identify as a High Risk Youth, are relatively likely to use drugs, show greater concern about becoming an addict, report a greater sensation seeking preference, higher levels of depression, and poorer school performance. Implications of these results are discussed.     

Garbage‐can Policy‐making Meets Neo‐liberal Ideology: Twenty Five Years of Redundant Reform of the English National Health Service

The garbage‐can theory of decision‐making (Cohen et al. 1972), has been adapted into a perspective on policy‐making, with adaptations of the approach placing notable emphasis upon the health sector (Kingdon 2006; Paton 2006). This article creates an adapted ‘garbage‐can’ framework to help explain each stage of the reform of the English National Health Service (NHS) over the last 25 years. The emergence of the key idea and resultant policy at each stage of reform of the English NHS has been arational and indeed sometimes irrational. Policy has reflected advocacy by policy‐salesmen (Kingdon 2002), proffering ‘solutions’ to ill‐defined problems and answers to unasked questions, and politicians' short‐termist responses at each decision‐point. Yet the garbage‐can alone is not enough: if arationality rules in policy‐making day to day, this does not mean that there is not an overall ideological context, trend or bias in reform. The article also posits that ‘market reform’ has derived from the ideological hegemony of a naive anti‐statism (hostility to a misleadingly defined and often mythological ‘centralist state’) in public services and enthusiasm for market competition rather than any evidence‐based application of pro‐market ideas to health policy. A question arises: how are these two approaches (short‐term arationality and longer‐term ideological bias) combined in explanation of how policy over time is biased in a particular direction while seemingly arbitrary and directionless at each messy decision‐point. The article attempts to combine the insights of a garbage‐can approach with wider explanations of ideological hegemony.     

Social Work Practice With LGBT Seniors

The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center began providing services to LGBT seniors in 2008. Since then, the Center’s seniors program has grown to over 3,300 clients. It provides a variety of enrichment and support services with the overarching goal of empowering seniors to successfully age in place. This article outlines the service delivery program of the Center’s Seniors Services Department and describes its successes and challenges in meeting the needs of diverse LGBT seniors. It offers future directions for social work practice, policy, and research with LGBT older adults.     

Making better regulation,making regulation better?

Better Regulation is a re-regulatory strategy that has unfolded in Britain (and, of course, beyond, through Europe and the OECD) across the past decade. This article beings by setting out some quantitative indicators of trends in national and local enforcement in three key areas of protective regulation – food hygiene and food safety, workers’ health and safety, and pollution control – from 2003/2004 to 2012/2013. It then goes on, in its main sections, to detail some of the ways Better Regulation under conditions of austerity has worked through at the level of local enforcement via a case study of four Merseyside Local Authorities; in so doing, it draws principally upon qualitative insights from a series of interviews, as well as data gleaned from a further series of Freedom of Information requests. In so doing, it considers how, on the ground, Better Regulation is made. It concludes that Better Regulation appears less about ‘better’ regulation, more about business-friendly regulation with diminishing law enforcement. There is good reason to suggest that regulatory functions will likely be increasingly re-cast as part of growth initiatives.     

Production Teams and Producing Racial Diversity in Workplace Relationships

Production teams have become a dominant form of work organization as labor markets have become increasingly diverse. This transition likely affects coworker networks—possibly undermining entrenched patterns of workplace segregation. Contact theory suggests that teams can foster network diversity when workers cooperate and share values emphasizing mutual respect. Yet variants of conflict theory, including the critical teams literature, contend that the benefits of teamwork may be eroded by associated factors, including peer discipline, work intensification, and job insecurity. This study uses 2006 General Social Survey data to assess whether and how teamwork affects the racial diversity of worker acquaintance networks, contrasting worker‐ and manager‐directed teams. We find a positive relationship between teams and diversity, but only when teams are worker directed. Despite countervailing tendencies highlighted in the literature, teams foster greater cooperation between workers, which in turn promotes cross‐racial friendships. African Americans tend to receive the greatest diversity payoffs from teams. These findings suggest that teamwork can undermine segregation, though only with certain implementations and with variation across groups.     

Dual effects of ‘losses disguised as wins’ and near-misses in a slot machine game

Individually, both near-misses and losses disguised as wins (LDWs) have been seen to exert pro-motivational effects on gambling. However, it is not clear whether both structural characteristics are effective within the same game. Participants (n = 40) played a slot machine simulation. The simulation delivered near-misses, wins and ‘full-misses’. Half the participants also received LDWs that occurred independently of the outcomes on the payline. Valence and motivation ratings were collected after each round. Results showed that the LDW group reported increased valence ratings compared to the no-LDW group. Within the LDW group, trials with LDWs also resulted in increased enjoyment compared to trials without LDWs. We distinguished near-misses falling either side of the payline. Near-misses before the payline (NMB) were rated as more motivational than near-misses after the payline (NMA), whereas NMAs were rated as more aversive than NMBs. These differences between the two near-miss types were exacerbated by LDWs. Results demonstrate LDWs increase the trial-by-trial enjoyment of non-win outcomes. The motivational and hedonic effects of near-misses differed for events either side of the payline, and these differences were exaggerated by the presence of LDWs. Thus, near-misses can retain their effectiveness in complex forms of gambling that also deliver LDWs.     

The photo‐survey research method: capturing life in the city

Recent promotion of city centre living within UK policy has led to a commensurate interest in city centre conditions and the opinions and experiences of the people who live there. An apposite, straightforward method to capture city centre residents' experiences and views is described in this article. We successfully combined a novel, under‐utilized visual technique (self‐directed photography) with qualitative methods (log‐sheets and interviews) in the form of a ‘photo‐survey’. A background to visual methodologies is presented in this article, alongside a critique of using the photo‐survey with 84 city centre residents to investigate environmental conditions and perceptions within three of the UK's major cities. The method provided a rich, detailed set of data, but also brought a number of noticeable benefits to the data collection process. The photo‐survey not only effectively captured and documented life in the city but also acted as an ‘agent for change’, evoking thoughts and feelings which ultimately encouraged participants to reflect on their existing perceptions and urban experiences. The study also raises some important considerations for future work undertaken with this method and with using photographs as a set of data, and proposes techniques for minimising potential problems.