Reframing the whistleblower in research: Truth‐tellers as whistleblowers in changing cultural contexts

Whistleblowing is fraught with conceptual dilemmas, including those who may be considered whistleblowers and fundamental concepts associated with the term. Whistleblowing is a dynamic concept, set within and deeply related to culture, yet scholarship has focused primarily on whistleblowing and its ramifications within management and organizational settings, as opposed to engaging with the wrong‐doing disclosed and conceptualizing how we assign meaning to whistleblowers/ing in changing landscapes of societal values and cultural institutions. To grasp the cultural sociological understanding of what constitutes whistleblowing, these themes and how they are shaped need to be drawn out in scholarship. Thus, the purpose of this review is to determine through which disciplines, lenses and discourse whistleblowing has been developed in academia and to identify gaps in disciplines and methods, highlighting how these affect our broader understanding of whistleblowing. This review article offers preliminary insight into how people engage in meaning‐making connected with terms such as whistleblowing, abuse and corruption through the lens of the #MeToo movement. The article encourages further research in disciplines such as sociology, political theory, human rights, socio‐legal studies and particularly, within cultural sociology.     

Varicella immunization requirements for US colleges: 2014–2015 academic year

ABSTRACT

Objective: To obtain information on varicella prematriculation requirements in US colleges for undergraduate students during the 2014–2015 academic year. Participants: Health care professionals and member schools of the American College Health Association (ACHA). Methods: An electronic survey was sent to ACHA members regarding school characteristics and whether schools had policies in place requiring that students show proof of 2 doses of varicella vaccination for school attendance. Results: Only 27% (101/370) of schools had a varicella prematriculation requirement for undergraduate students. Only 68% of schools always enforced this requirement. Private schools, 4-year schools, northeastern schools, those with <5,000 students, and schools located in a state with a 2-dose varicella vaccine mandate were significantly more likely to have a varicella prematriculation requirement. Conclusions: A small proportion of US colleges have a varicella prematriculation requirement for varicella immunity. College vaccination requirements are an important tool for controlling varicella in these settings.     

Confidence bands for Brownian motion and applications to Monte Carlo simulation

Minimal area regions are constructed for Brownian paths and perturbed Brownian paths. While the theoretical optimal region cannot be obtained in closed form, we provide practical confidence regions based on numerical approximations and local time arguments. These regions are used to provide informal convergence assessments for both Monte Carlo and Markov Chain Monte Carlo experiments, via the Brownian asymptotic approximation of cumulative sums.     

Family influences on family size preferences

Several studies have demonstrated important effects of parents’ childbearing behavior on their children’s childbearing preferences and behavior. The study described here advances our understanding of these family influences by expanding the theoretical model to include parental preferences, siblings’ behavior, and changes in children’s preferences through early adulthood. Using intergenerational panel data from mothers and their children, we test the effects of both mothers’ preferences for their own fertility and mothers’ preferences for their children’s fertility. Although both types of maternal preferences influence children’s childbearing preferences, mothers’ preferences for their children’s behavior have the stronger and more proximate effects. Mothers’ preferences continue to influence their children’s preferences through early adulthood; siblings’ fertility is an additional determinant of children’s family size preferences.     

Network Instability in Times of Stability

Personal networks undergo change in response to major life course events. Individual, relational, and network characteristics that influence network instability in the absence of a significant life transition/crisis are less understood. We focus on those ties that transition from active to dormant. Because the shift to dormancy is often interpreted as a reduction in support or social capital, it is considered problematic. This study is based on longitudinal survey data of middle‐class adults who did not undergo life changes. Even in this context of relative stability, support networks experience rates of dormancy similar to those observed during periods of major upheaval. Tie dormancy is unrelated to individual characteristics, network size and density, or homophily along dimensions other than sex. Frequency and medium of communication are particularly notable as factors that were not related to tie dormancy. Ties were less likely to become dormant if they were geographically or emotionally close, immediate kin or neighbors, highly supportive, the same sex, or more embedded in the network. These findings provide context for how support networks operate when not buffeted by exogenous forces. They provide a baseline for understanding the impact on networks of transitions, trauma, new media, and difficult life circumstances.     

POWER INSIDE THE FIRM AND THE MARKET: A GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM APPROACH

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the United States and Europe. This article examines the role of market competition in this trend of corporate reorganization. We find that, at intermediate levels of competition, the CEO of the corporation decides to have less power inside the firm and to delegate control to lower levels of the firms' hierarchy. Workers' empowerment and the move to a flatter organizational structure emerge as an equilibrium when competition is not too tough and not too weak. The model predicts merger waves or waves of outsourcing when countries become more integrated in the global economy as the corporate sector reorganizes in response to an increase in international competition. (JEL: F12, D23, L22, L1)     

Approximate Bayesian computational methods

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods, also known as likelihood-free techniques, have appeared in the past ten years as the most satisfactory approach to intractable likelihood problems, first in genetics then in a broader spectrum of applications. However, these methods suffer to some degree from calibration difficulties that make them rather volatile in their implementation and thus render them suspicious to the users of more traditional Monte Carlo methods. In this survey, we study the various improvements and extensions brought on the original ABC algorithm in recent years.     

Influence and Complementarity of Follow-on Managerial Innovations within a Public Organization

Public Organization Review - The objective of this research is to explore the relations between different categories of managerial innovations in public organizations. This paper aims to...     

Maximin design on non hypercube domains and kernel interpolation

In the paradigm of computer experiments, the choice of an experimental design is an important issue. When no information is available about the black-box function to be approximated, an exploratory design has to be used. In this context, two dispersion criteria are usually considered: the minimax and the maximin ones. In the case of a hypercube domain, a standard strategy consists of taking the maximin design within the class of Latin hypercube designs. However, in a non hypercube context, it does not make sense to use the Latin hypercube strategy. Moreover, whatever the design is, the black-box function is typically approximated thanks to kernel interpolation. Here, we first provide a theoretical justification to the maximin criterion with respect to kernel interpolations. Then, we propose simulated annealing algorithms to determine maximin designs in any bounded connected domain. We prove the convergence of the different schemes. Finally, the methodology is applied on a challenging real example where the black-blox function describes the behaviour of an aircraft engine.