Cultures of sleep: organization and the lure of dormancy

Sleep occupies us for around a third of our lives. Yet traditionally considered a period of respite and recuperation from the demands of work and its organization, little attention has been paid to the status of sleep from the perspective of management and organization studies. This article seeks to address this particular absence and, in doing so, attempts to contextualize both a growing cultural fascination with sleep as well as a more general strategy to reconstitute the dormant body as a site of organization and managerial intervention. In doing so, the article will look to contribute to the field in such a way as to raise the question of sleep as both an embodied and a culturally negotiated practice, and to consider its significance for the study of processes of social and organizational reproduction.     

Domestic responsibilities and the employment of young Māori women

Abstract

While the employment rate of women has risen steadily in New Zealand over the last two decades, employment is still highly variable by ethnicity and age. One of the groups least engaged in paid employment is young Māori women (15–24 years). Their employment rates are much lower than their Pākehā counterparts (42 and 64%, respectively) and this is not offset by their greater involvement in education.

Although there is a general awareness of these differences, there has been no systematic enquiry into the possible reasons for the relatively low engagement of young Māori women in the formal economy. Using a full set of 178,776 unit records pertaining to all young Māori and Pākehā women from the 2001 Census of Population and Dwellings, we develop a number of novel measures of household composition as indicators of domestic responsibilities. These become arguments in a multivariate statistical model in which young women are modelled as choosing to participate in the formal paid workforce and/ or in education.

Our results show that young Māori women's choice of paid work is no more sensitive to her domestic responsibilities than those of young Pākehā women, but they do encounter these responsibilities far more often. The results have a number of important implications for Māori development.     

A Cognitive–Social Model of Fertility Intentions

We examine the use and value of fertility intentions against the backdrop of theory and research in the cognitive and social sciences. First, we draw on recent brain and cognition research to contextualize fertility intentions within a broader set of conscious and unconscious mechanisms that contribute to mental function. Next, we integrate this research with social theory. Our conceptualizations suggest that people do not necessarily have fertility intentions; they form them only when prompted by specific situations. Intention formation draws on the current situation and on schemas of childbearing and parenthood learned through previous experience, imbued by affect, and organized by self‐representation. Using this conceptualization, we review apparently discordant knowledge about the value of fertility intentions in predicting fertility. Our analysis extends and deepens existing explanations for the weak predictive validity of fertility intentions at the individual level and provides a social‐cognitive explanation for why intentions predict as well as they do. When focusing on the predictive power of intentions at the aggregate level, our conceptualizations lead us to focus on how social structures frustrate or facilitate intentions and how the structural environment contributes to the formation of reported intentions in the first place. Our analysis suggests that existing measures of fertility intentions are useful but to varying extents and in many cases despite their failure to capture what they seek to measure.     

Seasonal and weather-related behavioral effects among urban Aboriginal, urban non-Aboriginal, and remote Aboriginal participants in Canada

The influence of seasonal change and weather on mood, social activity, weight, food consumption, and sleep length was compared across urban Aboriginals (n = 43), urban non-Aboriginals (n = 49), and remote Aboriginals (n = 39) in Ontario, Canada. Such research is important since climate change may differentially shape the well-being of social groups. Behavioral items—including mood, social activity, weight, sleep, and food consumption—were measured using the Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire, and associations between these items and meteorological data were examined with bivariate and multivariate approaches. Weather variables had consistent, significant associations with behavior except within the remote Aboriginal group despite living in a more extreme climate. Lifestyle and adaptation may contribute to an increased weather tolerance among remote Aboriginal people, intriguing findings as cultures grapple with the implications of future climate change.     

Lessons Learned From the Supporting Father Involvement Study: A Cross-Cultural Preventive Intervention for Low-Income Families With Young Children

ABSTRACT

Despite the proliferation of fatherhood programs designed to promote paternal involvement and positive family outcomes, evaluations of these programs are scarce. The Supporting Father Involvement (SFI) study is a randomized clinical trial comprised of 289 low-income Spanish- and English-speaking families living in California. The evaluation design reflects a partnership stance that promotes empowerment of staff and social service agencies. This article examines lessons learned from the program's first 3 years (2002–2004) from the perspectives of both evaluators and program staff. The lessons cover a broad range of areas, including communication procedures, training, staffing, recruitment/retention, clinical needs, intervention content and process, and maintaining cultural sensitivity.     

A Multisample Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Short Employment Hope Scale (EHS-14)

ABSTRACT.

Employment hope is an aspect of psychological self-sufficiency that captures the process of empowerment for low-income job seekers. It is posited that this process of maintaining and developing employment hope contributes to the economic self-sufficiency outcome. The preliminary 14-item 2-factor Employment Hope Scale (EHS) was previously developed using an exploratory factor analysis (Hong, Polanin, & Pigott, 2012). This study examines whether the same items could be validated using a multisample confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Given the unsatisfied model fit of the original 2-factor model, it was modified into a 4-factor model guided by theoretical suggestion from an earlier focus-group study. The multisample CFA on the modified model explained the data significantly better than did the initial model across 2 independent samples. Reliability and validity tests confirmed the factor structure of the modified model. This study confirms that the revalidated Short EHS (EHS-14) is a more robust version of the scale. Further research is needed to demonstrate its utility as a tool to benchmark the pre-employment client empowerment process in workforce development and to monitor postemployment employee support needs in the workplace for retention.     

Tightening income documentation in a means-tested program: who stays away?

Programs using means tests to identify low-income households face a trade-off between promoting access and ensuring program integrity. The authors use a comparison-district design to estimate the effects of a pilot program to improve the accuracy of the process of certifying students for free or reduced-price meals in the National School Lunch Program. This pilot program required households to provide income documentation with their applications for these benefits. Requiring income documentation did not reduce the proportion of ineligible households getting free or reduced-price meals. Furthermore, this requirement did reduce access to the program among eligible households.     

“The Story of My Life”: AIDS and ‘Autobiographical Occasions’

Talk and ‘telling’ have assumed prominent roles in preventing HIV and promoting life with the disease at the start of the twenty-first century. Our concern in this paper is to show how social structures and circumstances shape the narrative productions of HIV positive patients whose lives are institutionally managed. We consider what ‘telling’ means when young women with few economic resources are encouraged or mandated to talk about themselves by case managers, researchers, therapists, welfare workers, and clinic staff. We organize our analysis around three such ‘autobiographical occasions’: disclosures to intimate partners prompted by agents of the state; employment opportunities in which women are hired to tell others about living with HIV as peer educators or outreach health workers; and research interviews. We argue that storylines about living with HIV have been laid down by powerful social actors whose illness experiences do not reflect those of many poor patients. These formulations constitute an ‘archive’ which organizes institutional practices and discourses. These matter not only because they provide patients with a language through which to render their actions meaningful, but because they shape the everyday experience of HIV outside the clinic, the welfare office, and the therapy session.

FPT algorithms for Connected Feedback Vertex Set

We study the recently introduced Connected Feedback Vertex Set (CFVS) problem from the view-point of parameterized algorithms. CFVS is the connected variant of the classical Feedback Vertex Set problem and is defined as follows: given a graph G=(V,E) and an integer k, decide whether there exists F?V, |F|??k, such that G[V?F] is a forest and G[F] is connected. We show that Connected Feedback Vertex Set can be solved in time O(2 ^O(k) n ^O(1)) on general graphs and in time $O(2^{O(\sqrt{k}\log k)}n^{O(1)})$ on graphs excluding a fixed graph H as a minor. Our result on general undirected graphs uses, as a subroutine, a parameterized algorithm for Group Steiner Tree, a well studied variant of Steiner Tree. We find the algorithm for Group Steiner Tree of independent interest and believe that it could be useful for obtaining parameterized algorithms for other connectivity problems.     

Social cognition and the origin of concepts in Durkheim's sociology of knowledge

This paper re-examines a key feature of Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge from a critical realist perspective. It is argued that Durkheim's attempt to establish a social basis for the categories in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life should be understood along ontological rather than epistemological lines. This brings to light new problems with the argument which, however, can be brought fruitfully into contact with the more recent social psychological literature on collective intentionality. This yields insights into future lines of inquiry into social cognition and theories of human conceptualizing capacities.