The warped mirror: the reflection of the ableist stare in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man

David Lynch’s The Elephant Man tells the story of Joseph Merrick – called John Merrick in the film – a man who lived in Victorian England and who was exhibited in ‘freak’ shows under the moniker ‘The Elephant Man.’ One of Lynch’s central concerns in the film is visuality – how Merrick’s disabled body is seen and looked at, both by the characters in the film and by the film’s audience. Ultimately, at both the narrative level and the cinematic level, Lynch exposes the insidious power of forms of looking at the disabled body that collude with and reinforce ableist social hegemony. Using Lacanian and Foucauldian theory and building on the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Todd McGowan, this article examines exactly how Lynch is able to achieve this anti-ableist work.     

Evaluating the Introduction of a National Minimum Wage: Evidence from a New Survey of Firms in Ireland

Abstract. In April 2000 the Irish government introduced a national minimum wage of IR£4.40 (€5.58) an hour. We use data from a specifically designed survey of firms to estimate the employment effects of this change. Employment growth among firms with low‐wage workers prior to the legislation was no different from that of firms not affected by the legislation. A more refined measure of the minimum wage, however, suggests that the legislation may have had a negative effect on employment for the small number of firms most severely affected by the legislation. However, the size of these effects is relatively modest.     

The Median Versus Inequality-Adjusted GNI as Core Indicator of ‘Ordinary’ Household Living Standards in Rich Countries

Social Indicators Research - This paper first highlights the extent to which national income per head will be unreliable as an indicator of household income change over time around the middle for...     

A Phase I/II adaptive design for heterogeneous groups with application to a stereotactic body radiation therapy trial

Dose‐finding studies that aim to evaluate the safety of single agents are becoming less common, and advances in clinical research have complicated the paradigm of dose finding in oncology. A class of more complex problems, such as targeted agents, combination therapies and stratification of patients by clinical or genetic characteristics, has created the need to adapt early‐phase trial design to the specific type of drug being investigated and the corresponding endpoints. In this article, we describe the implementation of an adaptive design based on a continual reassessment method for heterogeneous groups, modified to coincide with the objectives of a Phase I/II trial of stereotactic body radiation therapy in patients with painful osseous metastatic disease. Operating characteristics of the Institutional Review Board approved design are demonstrated under various possible true scenarios via simulation studies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Human Resource Development in SMEs: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Human Resource Development (HRD) in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) is a significant area of scholarship. However, the cumulativeness of research on HRD in SMEs remains relatively low when compared to HRD generally. This paper reports a systematic literature review (SLR) to synthesise research in this area. A disciplined screening process resulted in a final sample of 117 papers published in 31 journals from 1995 to 2014. The synthesis of these empirical and theoretical studies revealed that: (a) the literature utilises a narrow range of theoretical and conceptual perspectives; (b) HRD is being investigated across a variety of SME contexts, themes and units of analysis; (c) researchers define HRD in multiple ways and use a diverse set of measures of HRD activity; (d) there is significant potential for future research across the SME and HRD disciplines, SME settings and beyond existing theoretical perspectives. We offer suggestions for further advancing the development of this area of research in terms of theory, content and methodology.     

Justifying Justice: Therapeutic Law and the Victimization Defense Strategy

As cultural sociologists have long held, systems of collective meaning invariably take on concrete institutionalized form. In as much as a therapeutic code of moral understanding has become a dominant impulse in American culture, we would expect to find evidence of this cultural sensibility in society's major institutional structures, including the criminal justice system. In this article, we consider the impact of the therapeutic ethos on criminal adjudication through an examination of the `victimization defense strategy'—an increasingly popular legal argument that explains criminal action through a focus on past experiences of social victimization. We find that the emergence and application of this legal strategy relies heavily on the therapeutic ethos, a development that both reaffirms the validity of the therapeutic culture and potentially transforms the very essence of the adjudicative process.     

Privacy and profitability in the technological workplace

VI. Conclusion New communications technology inevitably creates new problems of privacy; think of the introduction of telephones (when party lines were common), faxes (which can lie in a room accessible by many people before reaching the addressee), and cell phones (which allow bystanders to hear one side of seemingly confidential communications). Computer monitoring of performance, e-mails, and Internet access are no different in this regard. Each development requires adjustments. I thank Holly Newell of the University of South Carolina Law School Class of 2004 for her diligent research on and editorial assistance with this article.     

Returns to education in the Irish youth labour market

Using data from two large-scale household surveys in 1987 and 1994, we estimate wage equations which show substantial increases in returns to university education for young Irish workers over the period, despite the exceptional increase in numbers with these qualifications. Returns to non-degree third level certificates and diplomas fell in relative terms, but returns to qualifications obtained by those leaving school at about 16 years of age rose. We argue that the increased return to university education primarily reflects the generalised shift in demand towards skilled labour internationally and the open nature of the Irish labour market. However, a floor may have been placed under earnings for low-skilled youth by the increased generosity of income support available to them. Received: 29 December 1997/Accepted: 7 August 1998     

Dimensions of Housing Deprivation for Older People in Ireland

Housing is an important aspect of living standards and quality of life for older persons, but the housing-related problems they may face encompass rather different circumstances, relating to the condition of the dwelling, how well equipped it is, whether housing costs represent a serious burden, and whether the neighbourhood environment is problematic. This paper brings out the importance of distinguishing these different dimensions of housing problems for older people, illustrated empirically using data for Ireland from an important new European dataset. Controlling for other factors, being older is associated with more housing quality problems but fewer housing cost and neighbourhood problems than for those of working age. The variables predicting deprivation among older people differ across the dimensions and the correlations between the dimensions are low. Over half the older people in the sample experience some form of housing-related deprivation, but a majority of these are reporting only one. Scores on a summary index for older persons are much less strongly associated with factors such as household income and poverty, marital status, and location and type of dwelling than for all households, bringing out the importance of distinguishing and studying the different dimensions and framing appropriate policy responses to each.