Social networks and spatial configuration—How office layouts drive social interaction

This paper analyzes the spatial dimensions of office layouts in diverse knowledge-intensive workplace environments based on the theoretical and methodological propositions of Space Syntax, and brings this together with the analysis of intra-organizational interaction networks. Physical distances between agents are modeled in different ways and used as explanatory variables in exponential random graph modeling. The paper shows that spatial configuration in offices can be considered an important but not sole rationale for tie formation. Furthermore, it is shown that spatial distance measures based on detailed configurational analysis outperform simple Euclidean distance metrics in predicting social ties.     

Occupational accidents among elderly farmers in Sweden

The workforce in many countries nowadays is becoming older due to demographic change. Compared with many other occupations, farmers often work until a higher age. This study analysed occupational accidents to farmers in Sweden from an age perspective using data on 223 work injuries on farms and 990 road accidents involving tractors. The results showed that older farmers were not significantly more often injured than younger farmers, but appeared to suffer more hits and kicks from animals and were involved in more vehicle accidents than younger farmers. Older tractor drivers were more often involved in road turning accidents and in overtaking accidents involving private cars. Older farmers also sustained more skeletal injuries and took longer to heal after an accident.     

Undocumented Migration to the United States and the Wages of Mexican Immigrants

Prior work has documented the remarkable decline in the real wages of Mexican immigrant workers in the U.S. over the past several decades. Although some of this trend might be attributable to the changing characteristics of the migrants themselves, we argue that a more important change was the circumstances under within Mexican immigrants competed for jobs in the U.S. After 1986 a growing share of Mexican immigrants was undocumented, discrimination against them was mandated by federal law, and enforcement efforts rose in intensity. We combined data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) with independent estimates of the percentage undocumented among Mexicans living in the U.S. to estimate a series of regression models to test this hypothesis. Controlling for individual characteristics helps to explain the decline in the wages of immigrants, but does not eliminate the trend, which is only explained fully when the percentage undocumented is added to the model. A key date is 1986, confirmed by a Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition analysis, when undocumented hiring was criminalized and undocumented migration revived after IRCA's legalization programs ended. As the percentage undocumented rose to new heights in the face of employer sanctions, immigrant wages fell below what we would have observed under the former policy regime. Using newly available data from Warren and Warren (2013), we examined how variation in the percentage undocumented by state and year from 1990 through 2009 affected immigrant wages and confirmed a strong negative effect, but the addition of an interaction term to the model indicated that the negative effect was confined largely to undocumented migrants, whose wage penalty rose from 8 to 18 percent as the percentage undocumented rose from its observed minimum to maximum.     

Islamic Migrant Organizations: Little‐Studied Actors in Humanitarian Action

Since 9/11, attention to Islamic migrant organizations within Western countries has grown. However, the humanitarian activities of these organizations have received only limited attention. Hence, it is not yet clear why these organizations engage in humanitarian crises, which specific role Islam plays in their humanitarian engagement and which factors influence the scope of their activities in humanitarian crises. This paper aims to address these research questions by using approaches from sociology of organizations and presenting three empirical case studies from Germany. Particularly, it argues that although all three case studies are active in humanitarian crises the scope of their activities differs due to their differing organizational characteristics, member interests and external expectations.     

Assessing Urban Vulnerability in the Context of Flood and Heat Hazard: Pathways and Challenges for Indicator-Based Analysis

Applying indicators in the context of vulnerability assessments is widespread but remains challenging for various reasons. This article focuses on quantitative estimates of urban vulnerability to climate change related hazards. It presents a methodology to assess three components of residential vulnerability in areas of different socio-environmental conditions: exposure, susceptibility and coping capacity, including the selection of indicators, combination of variables and building of indices. The overall purpose is the assessment of urban vulnerability in order to allow for a more precise consideration of who is vulnerable and why, and to demonstrate the potential coping capacities of people living in flood and heat prone areas. This acknowledges that in Santiago de Chile, the case study used to underpin this article empirically, only hazard exposure assessments have been undertaken so far. The case study findings of the vulnerability assessment confirm that the indicator-based approach is appropriate for analysis of exposure and susceptibility, but that coping capacity appraisal remains a challenge.     

An Exploratory Study of Health Professionals' Attitudes about Robotic Telepresence Technology

This article presents the results from a video-based evaluation study of a social robotic telepresence solution for elderly. The evaluated system is a mobile teleoperated robot called Giraff that allows caregivers to virtually enter a home and conduct a natural visit just as if they were physically there. The evaluation focuses on the perspectives from primary healthcare organizations and collects the feedback from different categories of health professionals. The evaluation included 150 participants and yielded unexpected results with respect to the acceptance of the Giraff system. In particular, greater exposure to technology did not necessarily increase acceptance and large variances occurred between the categories of health professionals. In addition to outlining the results, this study provides a number of indications with respect to increasing acceptance for technology for elderly.     

The Development of Anticipatory Postural Adjustments in Infancy

Efficient voluntary action requires postural adjustments that compensate for potential balance disturbances before they occur. These anticipatory postural adjustments have been widely investigated in adults, but relatively little is known about their development, especially during infancy. This study examined the early development of anticipatory postural activity in support of pulling action while standing. A total of 34 infants between 10 and 17 months were tested. The task required infants to open a cabinet drawer to retrieve toys while a force resisting the pulling action was applied to the drawer. The experiment included between 9 and 13 pulling trials. The force resisting the pull was doubled after the first 4 initial trials and returned again to its original value after another 4 trials. Electromyographic activity from the gastrocnemius and biceps brachii muscles was recorded. The proportion of pulls involving anticipatory activity in the gastrocnemius muscles progressively increased between 10 and 17 months. In addition, infants with considerable experience in opening drawers learned to recruit greater strength of their anticipatory postural adjustments for heavier pulls. Implications for the role of motoric experience in anticipatory postural activity are discussed.     

Should I stay or should I go?

In 2002, the German system of higher education went through a set of reforms that were—amongothers—intended to make the university career more attractive for young academics, in order not to lose them to alternative careers. Until today, however, there is no theoretical or empirical analysis on the determinants of young academics’ career decisions. In our paper, we analyse the decisions of young academics to leave the university career system on the basis of a self-selection model. Using an original data set on junior scientists in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, we render first empirical evidence on the determinants of young academics’ careers decisions, and find that these are influenced by monetary as well as non-monetary factors.