Beards and Bloomers: Flight Attendants,Grievances and Embodied Labour in the Canadian Airline Industry, 1960s–1980s

This paper examines union grievances dealing with the body, appearance and demeanour fought by the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants Association, on behalf of its female and male members over a 30‐year period. Taking a historical, materialist‐feminist approach, we examine how workers used the grievance system to resist regulations they believed contradicted their right to dignified labour. We ask how and why bodily regulation differed for men and women, and how this changed over time, as the union merged its male and female job occupations. Using arbitrated grievances, union records and discussion of these issues in the mass media, we show how both feminism and service union activism encouraged flight attendant resistance to airlines’ efforts to regulate the appropriate body and attire for male and female workers. The use of labour law offered workers some respite from regulation, but did not facilitate fundamental questions about the power of management to ‘dress’ its workers.     

‘Je suis socialiste et quinziste’: rugby,wine and socialism in the Aude since 1976

In the Languedoc, the intersections between rugby, wine and socialism give telling insights into the value and significance of regional identity. At the end of the 1970s, the Languedoc's wine industry and rugby were facing up to the challenges of modernisation; the responses which emerged drew upon the principles of regional identity drawn from the ‘banal nationalism’ of wine-drinking, left-voting rugby players in local administrations and at the head of powerful trade unions. The cross-over between board-room and locker-room helped to accent regional responses to change and modernization, ensuring that regional heritage remained potent and ready to be communicated.     

AD HOC MODEL BUILDING USING TIME-VARYING PARAMETER MODELS*

Decision support for managers and policy makers, such as required in planning and evaluation efforts, often requires ad hoc behavioral modeling to account for context-specific phenomena and to handle data limitations. This paper introduces a systematic approach useful for meeting these requirements in which time-varying parameter estimation plays an important role. A case study evaluating the impacts of public policy actions on residential natural gas conservation illustrates the approach.     

Do military veteran and civilian students function differently in college?

Objective: The authors sought to assess military veterans' functioning in college by comparing their experience with that of civilian students. Participants: The study, conducted from April 2012 to February 2013, included 445 civilian and 61 student service member/veteran (SSM/V) undergraduates, drawn from a community college and two 4-year Catholic colleges, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Methods: Participants completed anonymous online surveys. Six areas of functioning in transition to college were examined: Health, Fitting In, Emotional Adjustment, Productivity, Perceived Career Support, and Social Engagement. Results: Students, both SSM/V and civilian, with past exposure to a potentially traumatic event fit in worse than students without such exposure. Past exposure to trauma was associated with poorer emotional adjustment in civilian students, but not in SSM/V. Conclusions: Implications of results were discussed.     

Gibbs sampling for marginal posterior expectations

In earlier work (Gelfand and Smith, 1990 and Gelfand et al, 1990) a sampling based approach using the Gibbs sampler was offered as a means for developing marginal posterior densities for a wide range of Bayesian problems several of which were previously inaccessible. Our purpose here is two-fold. First we flesh out the implementation of this approach for calculation of arbitrary expectations of interest. Secondly we offer comparison with perhaps the most prominent approach for calculating posterior expectations, analytic approximation involving application of the LaPlace method. Several illustrative examples are discussed as well. Clear advantages for the sampling based approach emerge.