Gender Segregation,Size of Workplace and the Public Sector

Gender segregation is considered to be a key structuring factor in the labour market, and is central to explanations of phenomena as diverse as the everyday experience of men’s and women’s employment to the underachievement of women and the limited impact of equal pay legislation. Studies of occupational segregation by gender tend to be polarized between qualitative and quantitative extremes. At the quantitative end, a primary focus of research has been to quantify segregation to a single index, permitting simple comparisons between countries and over time. However, detailed case studies of particular occupations have often hinted at ways in which breakdowns in occupational segregation have been replaced by other forms of gender segregation. This paper will present data showing that even within occupational categories there is still significant gender segregation and concentration by public/private sector and by size of workplace. For instance, female pharmacists are very over-represented, and female gardeners very under-represented, in the public sector. And the general tendency for women to work in smaller workplaces is severe for some occupations (e.g. office managers) and reversed in other occupations (e.g. production fitters). These analyses question the usefulness of single indices which take account only of segregation or concentration by occupation and therefore underestimate the gendering of job opportunities even within mixed occupations.     

The Achilles' heel of scale service design in social security administration: The case of the United Kingdom's Universal Credit

This article takes a critical view of the United Kingdom government's design for the delivery of the Universal Credit (UC) benefit reforms. It is argued that the UC is destined to fail because of the policy's extension into specifying the means (“digital by default”) of delivery for such services. The authors argue that an unseen but ubiquitous set of “scale” management assumptions has been allowed to infiltrate the means by which the government intends to enact its headline policy objective to “make work pay”. Following Seddon's “Vanguard Method”, a practical example of how a better service was designed in a local authority housing benefits service is then examined. Results from this service include being able to deal with up to 50 per cent more demand, with fewer resources, in half the official target time. Finally, the article will conclude with a call for more evidence‐based policy.     

Cohort size and schooling choice

We develop a perfect-foresight overlapping generations model to investigate the effects of cohort size on schooling decisions and cohort-specific welfare measures. A set of sufficient conditions are presented which ensure the existence of an unique sequence of human capital rental rates and schooling choices for any sequence of cohort sizes. We calibrate the partial equilibrium model using data on schooling investments and aggregate wages over the period 1920 through 1980, and use the parameters to assess the magnitude of lifetime cohort wealth and schooling elasticities computed with respect to the entire cohort size sequence. We find that the equilibrium response of schooling to perturbations in the cohort size sequence is small, so that the adverse effects of increases in the size of own and neighboring cohorts on cohort wealth are not significantly migrated by adjustments in schooling investments within our modelling framework.This research was partially supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant R01-HD28409 and by the C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. Comments and suggestions by three anonymous referees have resulted in a substantially improved paper. Francis Gupta provided extremely able research assistance. All remaining errors and omissions are attributable to me.     

The beer talking: four lads, a carry out and the reproduction of masculinities

Discourse analytic research on masculinity has produced some interesting and insightful understandings of male-bonding talk and/or talk around alcohol-related activities. These and other contributions have helped demonstrate the dependence of ‘hegemonic’ masculinities on the discursive subordination of the ‘other’, notably women and gay men. The present study builds on such work by examining the reproduction of masculinities in the context of a group of four young men interacting under the influence of alcohol. The talk was recorded with the permission of the four participants (one of whom is a co-author - GE) and subsequently subjected to discourse analysis. Particular attention is paid to definitions of (male) self and others - women, gay men and men from ethnically different backgrounds - which are negotiated during the interaction. The analysis is discussed in the light of current debates on the discursive reproduction of masculinities.     

Coming to Terms with Termination of Public Organizations

Why do some public organizations survive and others do not? The bureaucratic retrenchment efforts since the 1980s showed public administration scholars that the structure of the state has its own demography. Yet studies on the survival of public organizations tested different hypotheses using different methods and definitions. This review article reflects on the consequences of different takes on termination, it compares and reports on the main findings thus far and argues that we should study organizational survival focusing on transitions to build on existing empirical work.     

Institutional Adjustments and Strategic Planning Action: The Case of Victorian Wildfire Planning

This paper provides a critical analysis of the way that practice-based strategic planning in terms of disaster risk reduction occurs, highlighting the drivers and facilitators of change. It documents these in the context of other governmental systems. Examination the changes to wildfire planning policy in Victoria, Australia, following the 2009 Bushfire Season, provides an explanation of the realpolitik of policy formation, management and change, as well as inter-governmental interactions. The findings document and discuss the conditions and reasons for strategic change occurring in the case study.     

Daily Grind: A Comparison of Causality Orientations,Emotions, and Fantasy Sport Participation

In 2015, daily fantasy football entered the fantasy sports market as an offshoot of the traditional, season-long form of the game. With quicker payouts and less commitment, the new activity has drawn comparisons to other forms of illegal gambling, and the determination of whether it is a primarily a game of skill or chance has become the center of the comparison. For the most part, legal commentators and society, in general, views traditional, season-long fantasy football as an innocuous, social activity governed equally by both skill and chance. Little evidence exists, however, about participant perception of skill and chance components in daily fantasy football. The current study surveyed 535 daily and traditional-only fantasy football participants in order to understand differences and similarities in the causality orientations of participation (skill or chance). In addition, enjoyment and anxiety were tested for mediating effects on causality orientations and consumption behavior. The results suggest the differences between the activities are not extreme. However, differences were found in which causality orientations influenced enjoyment and which emotion mediated the relationship between perceived skill and consumption.     

Third‐Party Intervention in Peer Victimization: Self‐Evaluative Emotions and Appraisals of a Diverse Adolescent Sample

African American, European American, Mexican American, and Native American adolescents (N = 270) described how they felt and appraised their own actions in response to a peer's victimization. Analyses compared times they had calmed victim emotions, amplified anger, avenged, and resolved conflicts peacefully. Adolescents felt prouder, more helpful, more like a good friend, and expected more peer approval after calming and resolving than after amplifying anger or avenging peers. They also felt less guilt and shame after calming and resolving. Avenging elicited more positive self‐evaluation than amplifying. Epistemic network analyses explored links between self‐evaluative and other emotions. Pride was linked to relief after efforts to calm or resolve. Third‐party revenge reflected its antisocial and prosocial nature with connections between pride, relief, anger, and guilt.