Firm Size and Work-Related Training: New Evidence on Incidence,Intensity, and Training Type from Australia

This study examines the relationship between firm size and structured work-related training by analyzing data from the 2001 installment of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Survey of Education and Training. The results show a positive correlation between the probability of training and firm size for both male and female workers. A similar positive correlation between the intensity of training and firm size is also evident. Although the incidence of training is roughly comparable for male and female workers, males tend to train significantly more hours than their female counterparts. The findings also indicate that much less training occurs in firms with fewer than 10 workers, especially in health and safety, management and professional, and technical and paraprofessional training. Such results suggest that research on the size-training effect using firm- or establishment-level data, which generally focus only on firms with 20 or more employees, cannot detect an important source of the potential training deficit.     

Bargaining for Success: Examining the Relationship Between Teacher Unions and Student Achievement

While many previous studies have identified a positive relationship between teachers unions and student achievement on standardized tests, little research to date has explored the channels through which unions might actually affect achievement. Utilizing multilevel random intercept models, we examine the effects of two categories of items commonly negotiated in teacher contracts—“industrial union” items and “professional union” items—on individual student math scores. Further, we assess the ability of these two clusters of variables to explain the positive union effect found in previous research. The results confirm that teachers unions are positively associated with student achievement and suggest that the industrial model explains moderately more of the union effect than the professional model; however, only the combination of both models is capable of reducing the union effect to nonsignificance. These findings are also confirmed in a supplemental analysis utilizing instrumental variables to account for the possibility of endogeneity. Finally, a decomposition of the union effect suggests that teachers unions are most beneficial to middle‐ and high‐achieving students. We conclude that through industrial and professional bargaining, teachers are able to secure higher salaries, credentialing, and greater autonomy which lead to improved student achievement.     

Working on the Revolution in Bahrain: From the Mass Strike to Everyday Forms of Medical Provision

The 2011 Arab Spring uprising with the highest levels of popular support took place in Bahrain. This level of mobilization was due in part to the organizational capacity of trade unions and professional associations, and yet their role in the ‘near-revolution’ has received very little scholarly attention. In contrast to Egypt and Tunisia, where the official trade union federations played an ambiguous or even hostile role as workers began to organize strikes during the protests against Ben Ali and Mubarak, the official General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions not only supported the protests against the Al Khalifa regime, but called for two general strikes. As significant as the strikes were, the work of unpaid volunteers constituted another less recognized, but equally important form of labor activism. Understanding the mass mobilization in Bahrain, and elsewhere, requires an encompassing approach to labor: one that can conceptualize equally the ability of collectivities to stop working, but also the ability to collectively continue to work, even on an unpaid basis. I will illustrate the contradictory role of the labor movement with examples from the Bahrain Teachers’ Association and the Bahrain Nursing Society. The majority of members of both associations were women. Finally, the Bahraini regime punished both forms of labor activism – both the teachers who went on strike, and the nurses who declared they would not strike but continue to work and care for the injured protesters.     

Strike activity in the united states: An analysis of the stocks and flows

Evidence indicates that a dichotomy exists between the stocks and flows of strike activity in the United States. Canonical correlation analysis was applied to U.S. strike data from 1955 through 1980 to ascertain whether the economic or sociopolitical models of strikes were more appropriate to the explanation of either the stock or flow of strikes. The economic variables were the most important in explaining variations in the flow while the linear time trend together with the economic variables explained the variations in the stock of strikes. This suggests that strikes begin for economic reasons and that the dimensions of the stock of strikes may be more closely correlated with variables not used in the analysis but exhibit a trend over the period examined, hence a dichotomy between the flow and stock of strike activity.     

Merging Family and Firm: An Integrated Systems Approach to Process and Change

The blurring of family and business in family businesses can create tremendous stress for all family members. Scholars have been unsuccessful in applying task-oriented, business-based models to a business in which the boundaries between task and family blur and overlap. This article integrates current research and theory related to family interaction, organizational dynamics, and family businesses to present a conceptual framework that details the complex inner workings of family businesses and helps guide those who study and work with them.     

Bargaining policies and social exchange: Review of a neglected concept

Social exchange is distinguished from the “economic” through restriction of inquiry to the universe of nonpecuniary counters, chief among which are inclusion, position, and exclusion—in and from enduring groups. Explicitly or implicitly, sociological exchange theorists accept Edgeworth's neoclassical model as settled social scientific knowledge that can be explained and further elaborated in terms of institutionalized norms. Blau's elaborated neoclassical model of bilateral exchange is compared to Shackle's “action” model. Shackle allows actors a choice of bargaining policies, whereas Blau, following Edgeworth, arbitrarily imposes a single policy to objectify indifference curves and enable “outside observers” to test hypotheses relating the terms of exchange to the differentiation of power in enduring groups. Were the imposition unwarranted, such “empirical” claims would vanish. The neoclassical restriction also prevents actors from conceiving “investment opportunities” in bilateral exchange, thus defeating the sociological objective of deriving power from social exchange. Three figures illustrating Edgeworthian indifference curves are provided along with an appendix to clarify the distinction between objective and subjective theory.     

Size of Family of Orientation and Family Size Preference: A Replication

Abstract

Past studies have found a modest, positive association between size of family of orientation and preferred family size and fertility behavior in the family of procreation. While there is some consistency in the findings, contradictions are also noted. The present study replicates earlier studies dealing with preferred family size, and seeks to resolve some of the contradictions by utilizing multiple classification analysis to determine the simultaneous impact of parental family size, religion, happiness, lifestyle stability, and birth order on family size preference.     

Size and distribution trade-offs for the leximin ordering

A relative invariant and an absolute invariant inequality ordering satisfying extreme bottom-sensitivity, are proposed. It is shown that the leximin social welfare ordering can be expressed in terms of a ranking of distributions on the sole basis of their size, measured by the mean, and the degree of inequality, measured according to these inequality concepts. Leximin thus exhibits extreme bottom-sensitivity. This property does not withstand that leximin prefers a larger size of the cake at the cost of higher inequality in a number of cases. These trade-offs between size and equality are characterised in terms of degrees of dominance of the lower parts of the ordinary and absolute Lorenz curves that are accepted by leximin for a given increase in the mean.     

Combining Stated and Revealed Preference Data to Construct an Empirical Examination of Intrahousehold Bargaining

Most analysis of intrahousehold decisions has been conducted using aggregate revealed preference data where preferences of individual agents are never observed, only the household consumption outcomes are observed. We examine household behavior in a bargaining framework by combining stated preference information from individual members of the household with revealed preference information on the household’s actual choices. The resulting model provides information on the degree to which the decision is the result of a bargaining process as well as information on the factors affecting bargaining power.

Narrative and Frame Alignment in Social Movements: Labor Problem Novels and the 1929 Gastonia Strike

Research on social movements and frame alignment has shed light on how activists draw new participants to social movements through meaning making. However, the ‘framing perspective’ has failed to interrogate how the form or genre in which frames are deployed affects the communication of meaning. The burgeoning literature on social movements and narrative would seem to point to one discursive form of importance to meaning making in social movements, but scholars have failed to connect their insights with the literature on framing. In this article, I analyze five novels published in response to a 1929 communist-led strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. I argue that labor movement activists deployed these long-form narratives for the purposes of ‘frame alignment,’ specifically ‘frame amplification’ and ‘frame transformation,’ and I show how these narratives conveyed frames in ways that other discursive forms could not. The study raises new questions about the selection and reception of discursive forms in social movements.     

AFTER TAFT-HARTLEY: The Legal-Institutional Context of U.S. Strike Activity, 1948 to 1980

This article examines how the legal-institutional context created by American labor law has impacted the frequency, issue composition, and economic damage of strike activity since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. Emphasis on the legal-institutional context complements conventional perspectives of strike activity which focus on business cycle and political-organizational interpretations. A new labor law index is developed to measure the legal-institutional context, and it is comprised of five components: number of pro-labor laws, National Labor Relations Board unfair labor cases filed, use of antilabor injunctions, labor mediation, and labor arbitration. For the period of 1948 to 1980, high values on the labor law index reduced overall strike frequency, reduced some types of control-related strikes, had no effect on economic strikes, and decreased working time lost to strikes, especially in the monopoly sector. These findings suggest that the legal-institutional context of the post-Taft-Hartley period has served to regulate and delegitimize expressions of labor unrest that most seriously challenge capitalist interests.     

Tertius Dolens: The Student Experience of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association Strike*

Le fondement théorique de notre étude sur l'expérience vécue par les étudiants d'une grève du corps professoral d'une université s'appuie principalement sur la formulation théorique de Blumer selon laquelle l'interaction entre des acteurs, dans un cadre industriel, peut être divisée en trois étapes: 1) interprétation de l'expérience; 2) établissement de nouvelles relations; et 3) direction du mouvement ou ajustement. Chaque étape entraîne un changement de situation ainsi que des modifications correspondantes de la perception de soi et des autres. Dans cette étude, nous intégrons également le travail de Stebbins sur les situations difficiles. Nous appliquons ces concepts fondamentaux à l'étude d'une grève où un élément puissant ‐ la main‐d'ceuvre ‐, représentée ici par le corps professoral, se mesure à un autre élément ‐ la direction ‐, représentée ici par l'administration. Par ailleurs, nous privilégions un point que les autres études perdent souvent de vue: l'effet de cette lutte sur un élément tiers moins puissant, à savoir la population étudiante. The theoretical basis for this study of the student experience of a university faculty strike is provided primarily by Blumer's theoretical formulation that interaction between actors in an industrial setting can be studied in three principal phases: (1) interpretation of the experience; (2) the forging of new and emergent relationships; and (3) lines of movement or adjustment. Each phase involves a change in situation along with corresponding changes in the perception of self and other. We also integrate Stebbins' work on predicaments. These major concepts are employed as we follow a strike in which one powerful sector, labour (represented here as Faculty), is pitted against another, management (represented here as Administration), and focus on what other studies often lose sight of—namely, the effect of the battle on a less powerful third sector, the students.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.