Job insecurity and emotional exhaustion: Testing psychological contract breach versus distributive injustice as indicators of lack of reciprocity

This study examines the processes underlying the association between job insecurity and emotional exhaustion, proposing that lack of reciprocity in the organizational exchange relationship is a main theoretical explanation for this association. Specifically, based on the social exchange perspective, we compared and tested two distinct mediating mechanisms: psychological contract breach and distributive injustice. These two indicators of lack of reciprocity constitute the explanatory process through which job insecurity relates to emotional exhaustion, the primary component of burnout. Data analyses from a sample of 322 blue-collar workers in Italy confirmed the mediational hypotheses. A contrast test revealed that distributive injustice was the indicator with more explanatory strength. The results contribute to research on the theoretical explanations of the adverse consequences of job insecurity, considering the nature and antecedents of psychological distress from an organizational exchange perspective.     

Heuristics for scheduling in a flowshop with setup,processing and removal times separated

The problem of scheduling in a flowshop, where setup, processing and removal times are separable, is considered with the objective of minimizing makespan. Heuristic algorithms are developed by the introduction of simplifying assumptions into the scheduling problem under study. An improvement method is incorporated in the heuristics to enhance the quality of their solutions. The proposed heuristics and an existing heuristic are evaluated by a large number of randomly generated problems. The results of an extensive computational investigation for various values of parameters are presented.     

A Tiered Approach for Risk‐Benefit Assessment of Foods

Risk‐benefit analyses are introduced as a new paradigm for old problems. However, in many cases it is not always necessary to perform a full comprehensive and expensive quantitative risk‐benefit assessment to solve the problem, nor is it always possible, given the lack of required date. The choice to continue from a more qualitative to a full quantitative risk‐benefit assessment can be made using a tiered approach. In this article, this tiered approach for risk‐benefit assessment will be addressed using a decision tree. The tiered approach described uses the same four steps as the risk assessment paradigm: hazard and benefit identification, hazard and benefit characterization, exposure assessment, and risk‐benefit characterization, albeit in a different order. For the purpose of this approach, the exposure assessment has been moved upward and the dose‐response modeling (part of hazard and benefit characterization) is moved to a later stage. The decision tree includes several stop moments, depending on the situation where the gathered information is sufficient to answer the initial risk‐benefit question. The approach has been tested for two food ingredients. The decision tree presented in this article is useful to assist on a case‐by‐case basis a risk‐benefit assessor and policymaker in making informed choices when to stop or continue with a risk‐benefit assessment.     

Struggles of being and becoming: A dialogical narrative analysis of the life stories of Sami elderly

The Sami are an indigenous people living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Historically, national states have made strong efforts to assimilate the Sami people into the majority populations, and the Sami have experienced stigmatization and discrimination. However, after World War II, there has been a revitalization process among the Sami that was pioneered by the Sami Movement and gradually adopted in broader spheres of Norwegian society. The lifespans of the current cohort of elderly Sami unfold throughout a historical period in which contrasting public narratives about the Sami have dominated. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between elderly Sami's individual life stories and contrasting public narratives about the Sami. Nineteen elderly Sami individuals in Norway were interviewed. This article is a dialogical narrative analysis of the life stories of four elderly Sami. The article illuminates how individual life stories are framed and shaped by public narratives and how identifying is an ongoing process also in late life. A dialogical relationship between individual life stories and public narratives implies that individual stories have the capacity to shape and revise dominant public narratives. To do so, the number of stories that are allowed to act must be increased. A commitment in dialogic narrative research on minority elderly is to make available individual stories from the margins of the public narratives to reduce narrative silences and to prevent the reproduction of established “truths”.     

Civil Society Capacity Building for Democratic Reform: Experience and Lessons from Indonesia

This article examines civil society strengthening experience in Indonesia to illuminate issues, challenges, and lessons for non-governmental organization (NGO) capacity building and international donor-supported democratic reform. The authors conceive of capacity as a function of contextual factors, and internal factors associated with an individual NGO or a network of NGOs. Contextual factors that need to be taken into account in Indonesia include weak reform implementation, state distrust of NGOs, and backsliding on some basic freedoms. Among the important internal features of NGOs in democracy promotion are overreliance on confrontational advocacy strategies, shallow organizational capacity, inability to cooperate to leverage impact, limited outreach to indigenous constituencies and sustainability problems. Indonesia’s democracy-promotion NGO coalitions have largely operated as instruments of donor-supported reforms. As they seek to become socially embedded actors pursuing indigenous agendas, they face the need to confront the various expectations of their stakeholders regarding their roles and legitimacy, develop flexibility to respond to new engagements with government and with citizens, and address their internal capacity gaps. Three cases are presented that illustrate both the problems and the encouraging progress with government–NGO collaborations in democratic governance.     

“I don’t want to be selling my soul”: Two experiments in environmental economics

We conducted two experiments in the context of environmental protection. We found that profit considerations and personality traits are among the essential determinants of individual contributions to the solution of environmental problems. The results show that environmental considerations are powerful motivators and subjects are willing to forgo pecuniary profits for the sake of “doing-the-right-thing”. The study shows that the environmental groups can purchase carbon offsets directly from the providers at a lower-than market price and still obtain a relatively large market share.     

Constructing Copulas with Given Diagonal and Opposite Diagonal Sections

A method for constructing copulas with given diagonal and opposite diagonal sections is presented. It makes use of a recently developed method for constructing cross-copulas with given horizontal and vertical sections. Conditions guaranteeing the existence of a cross-copula with the given diagonal and opposite diagonal sections are derived. It is shown how the new method facilitates the construction of families of copulas that simultaneously model tail dependences of upper-upper, upper-lower, lower-lower and lower-upper type.     

A small sample estimator for a polynomial regression with errors in the variables

An adjusted least squares estimator, introduced by Cheng and Schneeweiss for consistently estimating a polynomial regression of any degree with errors in the variables, is modified such that it shows good results in small samples without losing its asymptotic properties for large samples. Simulation studies corroborate the theoretical findings.