The future of PR is ‘fantastic’, ‘friendly’ and ‘funny’: Occupational stereotypes and symbolic capital in entry-level job advertisements

Over the past decade, there has been a move towards examining public relations as a socio-cultural practice, acknowledging practitioners as influential communicators who produce and symbolise cultural values through public relations messages. Ideally, a diverse group of professionals would aide in representing a diverse society, but to date, the profession remains female dominated. In this article, it is proposed that practitioners’ own discourse do not only establish what is most valued in the occupation and which habitus suits the practice best, but that the discourse also opens and closes occupational entry for new practitioners thereby contributing to a lack of diversity.This article presents the findings of an indicative thematic content analysis of one of the most common, yet under-research sites of discourse, namely entry-level job advertisements in New Zealand and Australia. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the analysis found that the advertisements placed little to no emphasis on the nature of the work, instead focusing on elements of ‘fit’ whereby new entrants were expected to be charismatic, friendly, and willing to work in an environment that is ‘fun’ and ‘flexible’. In doing so, public relations practitioners tacitly created invisible barriers, a self-limiting occupational culture and furthered existing stereotypes of the ‘perfect’ practitioner.     

Europeanisation and the Youth Guarantee: The case of France

In 2013, the European Council approved the Youth Guarantee (YG) to counteract youth unemployment. Because of its specific features, the YG is useful for understanding whether the EU has triggered policy change in national youth unemployment policies. Contrary to most of the literature on similar topics, we focused in this study on the effect of this specific European measure rather than on broader EU strategies or policies. The study contributes to the literature by qualifying the degree of fit/misfit and suggesting a counterfactual analysis, using the case of France. We first situate the article within the broader Europeanisation debate and present our research design. The second section introduces the policy structure of the YG and investigates youth unemployment policy in France, prior to and after the European initiative. The third section discusses whether the French youth unemployment policy would have been developed in the same way without the YG. A final section concludes.     

A new estimator of Kullback–Leibler information and its application in goodness of fit tests*

We propose here a general statistic for the goodness of fit test of statistical distributions. The proposed statistic is constructed based on an estimate of Kullback–Leibler information. The proposed test is consistent and the limiting distribution of the test statistic is derived. Then, the established results are used to introduce goodness of fit tests for the normal, exponential, Laplace and Weibull distributions. A simulation study is carried out for examining the power of the proposed test and to compare it with those of some existing procedures. Finally, some illustrative examples are presented and analysed, and concluding comments are made.     

Multivariate bandwidth selection for local linear regression

The existence and properties of optimal bandwidths for multivariate local linear regression are established, using either a scalar bandwidth for all regressors or a diagonal bandwidth vector that has a different bandwidth for each regressor. Both involve functionals of the derivatives of the unknown multivariate regression function. Estimating these functionals is difficult primarily because they contain multivariate derivatives. In this paper, an estimator of the multivariate second derivative is obtained via local cubic regression with most cross-terms left out. This estimator has the optimal rate of convergence but is simpler and uses much less computing time than the full local estimator. Using this as a pilot estimator, we obtain plug-in formulae for the optimal bandwidth, both scalar and diagonal, for multivariate local linear regression. As a simpler alternative, we also provide rule-of-thumb bandwidth selectors. All these bandwidths have satisfactory performance in our simulation study.     

A note on testing the regression functions via nonparametric smoothing

The authors present a consistent lack‐of‐fit test in nonlinear regression models. The proposed procedure possesses some nice properties of Zheng's test such as the consistency, the ability to detect any local alternatives approaching the null at rates slower than the parametric rate. What's more, for a predetermined kernel function, the proposed test is more powerful than Zheng's test and the validity of these findings is confirmed by the simulation studies and a real data example. In addition, the authors find out a close connection between the choices of normal kernel functions and the bandwidths. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 39: 108–125; 2011 © 2011 Statistical Society of Canada     

Fitting asymmetric bimodal data with selected distributions

ABSTRACT

This article discusses two asymmetrization methods, Azzalini's representation and beta generation, to generate asymmetric bimodal models including two novel beta-generated models. The practical utility of these models is assessed with nine data sets from different fields of applied sciences. Besides this tutorial assessment, some methodological contributions are made: a random number generator for the asymmetric Rathie–Swamee model is developed (generators for the other models are already known and briefly described) and a new likelihood ratio test of unimodality is compared via simulations with other available tests. Several tools have been used to quantify and test for bimodality and assess goodness of fit including Bayesian information criterion, measures of agreement with the empirical distribution and the Kolmogorov–Smirnoff test. In the nine case studies, the results favoured models derived from Azzalini's asymmetrization, but no single model provided a best fit across the applications considered. In only two cases the normal mixture was selected as best model. Parameter estimation has been done by likelihood maximization. Numerical optimization must be performed with care since local optima are often present. We concluded that the models considered are flexible enough to fit different bimodal shapes and that the tools studied should be used with care and attention to detail.     

任务特征对人-组织匹配与员工绩效关系的调节作用

研究检验了任务特征对“人-组织价值一致性”与任务绩效关系的调节作用。结果发现任务非常规性会强化人-价值一致性与员工绩效考核成绩的负关联,而任务依存性会弱化人-价值一致性与员工绩效考核成绩的负关联。研究提出一种非线性模型描述“人-组织匹配”与员工绩效之间的关系,该模型可以较好地解释为何以往研究对于“人-组织匹配”与员工绩效关系的结论不一致的现象。     

Outliers and Patterns of Outliers in Contingency Tables with Algebraic Statistics

Abstract. In this paper, we provide a definition of pattern of outliers in contingency tables within a model‐based framework. In particular, we make use of log‐linear models and exact goodness‐of‐fit tests to specify the notions of outlier and pattern of outliers. The language and some techniques from Algebraic Statistics are essential tools to make the definition clear and easily applicable. We also analyse several numerical examples to show how to use our definitions.     

个人与组织匹配对工作绩效影响的实证研究——以通信企业为例

通过对不同省份通信企业的问卷调查,运用结构方程模型,实证研究了个人与组织匹配、自我效能对工作绩效的影响。结果表明,个人与组织匹配和自我效能都对工作绩效有着显著的正向作用,其中,自我效能在个人与组织匹配对工作绩效的作用过程中起着中介作用。继而根据研究结果对通信企业的人力资源管理提出了相关的建议。