General Job Satisfaction From a Developmental Perspective: Exploring Choice—Job Matches at Two Career Stages

The authors explored predictions of general job satisfaction at early and middle adulthood and uncovered several findings about developmental processes associated with job satisfaction. Tests of life‐span career theory propositions revealed that neither choice‐job congruence nor gender added significantly to predictions of job satisfaction at 2 career stages. Earlier occupational choice and current job added to predictions of midcareer (modal age 43 years) job satisfaction, especially for men. The predictability of job satisfaction is apparently influenced by the career stage when satisfaction is appraised.     

Mission attachment and satisfaction as factors in employee retention

Nonprofit organizations rely on the mission to attract resources and guide decision making. Increasingly, mission statements are recognized as a strong management tool that can motivate employees and keep them focused on the organization's purpose. This research investigated employee attitudes toward the mission in a youth and recreation service organization. In general, the employees expressed positive attitudes toward the organization's mission, and those attitudes were related to employee satisfaction and intentions to remain with the organization. However, dissatisfaction with pay tended to override employee's mission attachment as explanation of why they may leave the organization. The implication is that mission might be salient in attracting employees but less effective in retaining them.     

A “brer rabbit” case for reverse mandated benefits

Reverse mandated benefits is a government-mandated policy that requires employees to provide their employers with benefits that workers would not provide otherwise. Of course, only those benefits would be mandated that are worth more to employers than they cost, as determined by political authorities. My case for such a policy argues that it is at least as sensible as policies mandating that employers provide benefits to their employees that would not be provided otherwise.     

‘I hereby come out’: What sort of speech act is coming out?

The process of coming out linguistically as a lesbian or as a gay man is occasionally referred to as a speech act (e.g. Harvey 1997: 72; Liang 1997: 293). This analogy is taken as a starting point to explore the extent to which coming out is a performative act, and what sort of speech act coming out may be. The discussion draws on the perspective of both the speaker and the hearer to consider how the acts involved in coming out are open to interpretation. Parallels are drawn between the act of coming out as a lesbian or a gay man and other instances of self–disclosure or of individuals' constructions of new facets of their identities.     

Formalization of grievance procedures: A multi-firm and industry study

This study examines how two aspects of formalization of grievance procedures affect grievance procedure effectiveness: written versus oral presentation of grievance and the level of union and management authorized to resolve grievances at the first step. Several demographic variables were controlled for: size of bargaining unit, percentage of organization represented, number of grievances filed, and industry. A sample of 46 firms, representing a broad cross-section of unionized companies in the private sector, was obtained with the help of the American Arbitration Association. Results indicate that more formal grievance procedures (e.g., written presentation) are positively related to resolution rates at the first step. The number of grievances field and the size of the bargaining unit were positively related to total resolution rates prior to arbitration. We thank the American Arbitration Association for making this study possible.     

Effects of Category Order on Answers in Mail and Telephone Surveys1

Abstract Past research suggests that mail surveys encourage a primacy effect, which is a tendency to choose the first answers from a list, whereas telephone surveys encourage a recency effect, a tendency to choose the last answers from a list. This paper summarizes results from 82 new experiments conducted in 12 separate surveys in seven states. Only four of 33 mail survey comparisons exhibited significant primacy effects, while five of 26 experiments in telephone surveys exhibited recency effects. In addition, only three of 23 cross-method comparisons produced a significant primacy/recency effect in the expected manner. The conclusion is that the prevalence of primacy and recency effects has been over-estimated by past research and a new theoretical approach that takes into account multiple causation is needed for examining these effects.     

Forced to work and liberated from work

The work-welfare nexus is essential in all social policy regimes. The question is in what situations individuals should be entitled to social welfare benefits and in which situations they should be obliged to work. Social welfare law and administrative practices define mechanisms that separate the deserving poor from people able to work. This article analyses the functions and character of these "separation mechanisms" in Sweden during three periods in history: a) in rural society in the late 19th century; b) in industrial society during the successful years of the Swedish model from World War II until the late 1970s; and c) the present, including the period of welfare retrenchment and reconsideration since the early 1980s. The conclusion is that Swedish social policy has always been strongly work-oriented, but the specific form and content of the work ethic has varied under the influence of different ideologies and handled in different social policy institutions. Under specific conditions the work line has been either generous or restrictive and it has been based on structural attempts to improve the opportunities to work as well as on attempts to strongly pressure the individual to work. The work line of today is seen as an interesting attempt to combine an effort to create good work through improved work conditions and an effort to reinforce elements of work enforcement in the social insurance system.     

log-logistic survival estimation based on failure-censored data

Approximations of the Bayesian estimators of the survival function based on the censored data of the log-logistic distribution are obtained under squared-error and log-odds squared-error loss functions. A numerical example is presented. Through a Monte Carlo simulation study, the behavior of the approximations found by Tierney & Kadane and Lindley are compared with a method suggested by Weiss & Howlader.