Writing resistance together

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open‐ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.     

Early Childhood Education Centre Director Perceptions of Challenging Behaviour: Promising Practices and Implications for Professional Development

Given their key role in overall programme quality, it is critical to examine how early childhood programme centre directors in the United States perceive challenging behaviour. Participants completed a survey asking which behaviours they perceive to be most problematic, the number of children dismissed or expelled from the programme during the last year, and the most commonly used strategies for addressing challenging behaviours. Results point to several promising practices and highlight the variability in access to evidence‐based practices based on programme type. Areas that warrant more targeted professional development are discussed, and findings are situated within the larger early childhood context.     

Immigrant socioeconomic mobility in the United States: Mechanisms of inequality and the role of ethnic capital

We review recent social science research on the socioeconomic mobility of immigrants to the United States by focusing on the educational, occupational, and income attainments among immigrant adults, the first‐generation, and the educational attainment of their children, the New Second‐Generation. Existing research has identified significant inequalities in educational attainment between second‐generation Asian and Latinx immigrant groups. Researchers have also highlighted the importance of ethnic capital for mobility, but we find that they have largely proceeded with the assumption that co‐ethnic ties are easily available as a benefit for immigrants upon resettlement. We propose that future research on immigrant socioeconomic mobility should incorporate conceptual insights from economic and cultural sociology as well as use comparative ethnographic research designs to directly observe how ethnic capital operates to challenge or reinforce patterns of socioeconomic inequality.     

HDDA: DataSifter: statistical obfuscation of electronic health records and other sensitive datasets

There are no practical and effective mechanisms to share high-dimensional data including sensitive information in various fields like health financial intelligence or socioeconomics without compromising either the utility of the data or exposing private personal or secure organizational information. Excessive scrambling or encoding of the information makes it less useful for modelling or analytical processing. Insufficient preprocessing may compromise sensitive information and introduce a substantial risk for re-identification of individuals by various stratification techniques. To address this problem, we developed a novel statistical obfuscation method (DataSifter) for on-the-fly de-identification of structured and unstructured sensitive high-dimensional data such as clinical data from electronic health records (EHR). DataSifter provides complete administrative control over the balance between risk of data re-identification and preservation of the data information. Simulation results suggest that DataSifter can provide privacy protection while maintaining data utility for different types of outcomes of interest. The application of DataSifter on a large autism dataset provides a realistic demonstration of its promise practical applications.     

To what extent is social security spending associated with enhanced firm-level performance? A case study of SMEs in Indonesia

Although the relationship between social protection and enterprise performance is much debated in the literature, evidence is particularly limited in the case of small and medium-sized enterprises in developing economies. Using census data from 2010 to 2014, this article examines how the provision of social security influenced business performance in Indonesia. The author finds that increased social security spending of 10 per cent is associated with a per-worker revenue gain of up to 2 per cent. Moreover, profits are not found to decrease with increased social protection coverage, suggesting that increasing worker benefits may be a worthwhile business investment.     

Multivariate normal estimation: the case (n < p)

Estimation in the multivariate context when the number of observations available is less than the number of variables is a classical theoretical problem. In order to ensure estimability, one has to assume certain constraints on the parameters. A method for maximum likelihood estimation under constraints is proposed to solve this problem. Even in the extreme case where only a single multivariate observation is available, this may provide a feasible solution. It simultaneously provides a simple, straightforward methodology to allow for specific structures within and between covariance matrices of several populations. This methodology yields exact maximum likelihood estimates.     

Veganism as a lifestyle movement

In the last few years, the popularity of veganism has surged. Current literature on the cultural practice, which situates it within a social movements framework, cannot adequately explain this meteoric rise. A better approach is to view veganism as an emerging lifestyle movement based on individual consumption rather than political protest. After situating veganism within the literature on animal rights, this review then explains why a lifestyle movement perspective yields a more compelling account of its growing mainstream appeal. Drawing on both cultural and organizational sociology, this review provides insights into the cultural origins of veganism, its evolving relationship to other food movements, and highlights the key role played by cultural entrepreneurs, the key changemakers who are bringing veganism from the margins to the mainstream.     

Unmasking the Barriers to Financing Social Enterprises

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The institutional complexity of social enterprises (SEs) often hinders their access to financing from conventional...