Dynamics of Domestic Labor Across Short‐ and Long‐Distance Family Relocations

Family relocations within developed countries are argued to have gendered consequences for paid employment, with men's careers improving and women's careers deteriorating. However, little is known about their potential relationships with outcomes in other life domains, including partnered men's and women's relative shares of domestic labor. The authors addressed this gap in knowledge by theorizing and examining how within‐couple gender gaps in domestic work evolve across short‐ and long‐distance family relocations over the life course, paying attention to the over‐time dynamics before and after event occurrence. To accomplish this, they used 12 years of panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey and panel regression models. The results indicated that family relocations widen the within‐couple gender gap in weekly housework hours, largely because of shifts in women's employment situation and fertility episodes that accompany residential relocations.     

Women of the corporation: A sociolinguistic perspective of senior women's leadership language in the U.K.

This paper reconceptualises a classic theory (Kanter 1993[1977]) on gender and leadership in order to provide fresh insights for both sociolinguistic and management thinking. Kanter claimed that there are four approved ‘role traps’ for women leaders in male‐dominated organisations: Mother, Pet, Seductress and Iron Maiden, based on familiar historical archetypes of women in power. This paper reinterprets Kanter's construct of role traps in sociolinguistic terms as gendered, discursive resources that senior women utilise proactively to interact with their predominantly male colleagues. Based on a Research Council funded ¹ study of 14 senior leaders (seven female and seven male) each conducting at least one senior management meeting in the U.K., the paper finds that individual speakers can transform stereotyped subject positions into powerful discursive resources to accomplish the goals of leadership, albeit marked by gender.     

Is money the main reason mothers return to work after childbearing?

Women’s reasons for returning to work after childbearing are complex, often including a mix of financial and other reasons related to their preferences, choices and constraints regarding employment; various qualitative studies have explored this decision-making process. This paper also considers how these decisions about returning to work are made, but uses quantitative techniques to analyse how reasons for return to work vary with factors such as women’s timing of return to work, what types of jobs they had previously worked in, or returned to, and what type of leave they used. This enables an examination of which women feel more constrained in their labour market options by returning to work sooner than preferred, and also their reasons for returning. Analysis is based on the 2005 Parental Leave in Australia Survey, a survey nested in the Wave 1.5 collection of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). Mothers had children aged between 15 and 29 months at this time, and 56 per cent of these mothers had returned to work.     

THE PROCESS OF CHANGE IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS

The facts and myths of changes in technology and authority structure in public organizations are investigated using data from a case study of structural reorganization and the mechanization and automation of mail processing in the United States Postal Service. External political pressure and internal labor-management conflict combined to cause changes that were legitimated by an institutional logic of scientific management and technical progress. Improvements in productivity and overall mail service have been limited by political and institutional considerations that continue to govern the operation of the Postal Service.     

Parent-perceived Attitudes of Professionals: Implications for Service Providers

While parents' reactions to a diagnosis of disability in their child have been well documented, less is known of parents' reactions to the professionals who provide the diagnostic and support services used by parents. This study identified four major parameters within which the attitudes of professionals are perceived by parents of children/teenagers diagnosed as intellectually disabled. Comments of the 131 mothers and fathers interviewed helped to shed light on what they have expected of service providers, and suggest adjustments that may need to be made by professionals to the attitudes they convey in interaction with parents.     

New technology and the value-based management of transformational leadership

New technology is calling on people to provide adaptive responses in situations where there are many exceptions or where a high degree of variability exists or where people provide linkages between programmable segments. Further, groups of people who are geographically dispersed and unacquainted with each other will work together to solve business problems or define a process and will then disband when the job is done. Thus, the general model of responsible autonomous job behavior becomes the key facet of individual-organization-technological relationships. It is suggested that this model is best activated by the empowerment of people through the value-based management of transformational leadership.     

Principal component and correspondence analysis of compositional data: some similarities

Principal component and correspondence analysis can both be used as exploratory methods for representing multivariate data in two dimensions. Circumstances under which the, possibly inappropriate, application of principal components to untransformed compositional data approximates to a correspondence analysis of the raw data are noted. Aitchison (1986) has proposed a method for the principal component analysis of compositional data involving transformation of the raw data. It is shown how this can be approximated by a correspondence analysis of appropriately transformed data. The latter approach may be preferable when there are zeroes in the data.     

Neoliberalism,Inequality and Politics: The Changing Face of Australia

Since the early 1980s Australian public policy has undergone the most major transformation since Federation. This transformation has been underwritten by two key principles: liberalism – the view that citizens are autonomous individual actors whose interests are best served when they are free from coercive government interventions into individual action; and marketisation – the belief that free markets are arenas which best enable individual autonomy and produce efficient economic outcomes. These principles define ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘hard liberalism‘. After summarising the major policy changes identified with neoliberalism in Australia, the paper introduces a new research project that examines its impact on socioeconomic inequality, gender inequality and politics and culture. Inspection of relevant data indicates that there are important trends in inequality, public opinion and political behaviour that warrant this investigation.     

Context,Cultural Bias,and Health Risk Perception: The “Everyday” Nature of Pesticide Policy Preferences in London,Calgary, and Halifax

Risk perception and the cultural theory of risk have often been contrasted in relation to risk‐related policy making; however, the local context in which risks are experienced, an important component of everyday decision making, remains understudied. What is unclear is the extent to which localized community beliefs and behaviors depend on larger belief systems about risk (i.e., worldviews). This article reports on a study designed to understand the relative importance of health risk perceptions (threat of harm); risk‐related worldviews (cultural biases); and the experiences of local context (situated risk) for predicting risk‐related policy preferences regarding cosmetic pesticides. Responses to a random telephone questionnaire are used to compare residents’ risk perceptions, cultural biases, and pesticide bylaw preferences in Calgary (Alberta), Halifax (Nova Scotia), and London (Ontario), Canada. Logistic regression shows that the most important determinants of pesticide bylaw preference are risk perception, lack of benefit, and pesticide “abstinence.” Though perception of health risk is the best single predictor of differences in bylaw preferences, social factors such as gender and situated risk factors like conflict over chemical pesticides, are also important. Though cultural biases are not important predictors of pesticide bylaw preference, as in other studies, they are significant predictors of health risk perception. Pesticide bylaw preference is therefore more than just a health risk perception or worldview issue; it is also about how health risk becomes situated—contextually—in the experiences of residents’ everyday lives.