'Management Standards' and work-related stress in the UK: policy background and science

In the late 1990s, the Health and Safety Commission, as the lead authority in the UK responsible for Health and Safety at Work, conducted an extensive consultation exercise to elicit views about how work-related stress should be tackled. The Commission subsequently decided that regulation was not justified and opted for an approach with four strands. One of these was to work with stakeholders to develop clear, agreed standards of good management practice. This paper describes and discusses the rationale behind a standards-based approach that is essentially based on a method of controlling hazards. The Management Standards approach uses a taxonomy of six stressors that has evolved out of extensive research carried out on behalf of the UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and in conjunction with stakeholders, and a three-phase risk assessment methodology. Further developmental work on the standards (which are to be subjected to public consultation) and associated measurement tools is described in a companion paper in this issue of Work & Stress (Cousins, Mackay, Clarke, Kelly, Kelly, & McCaig, 2004). The emphasis is on prevention towards reducing stress in the UK working population. We review current thinking on models of work stress, consider evidence linking workplace psychosocial factors and various health and organizational outcomes, and examine the effectiveness of organizational interventions. We argue that the literature supports an approach that aims to move organizational states (represented by the current situation) to more desirable ones (represented by the six Management Standards), and that this is an effective 'population' based approach to tackling workplace stress and promoting individual and organizational health.     

Book reviews

This article examines nationalist impulses toward a familiar, traditional heteronormativity through the language and imagery of a sample of tabloid newspapers in Britain during the Falklands War in 1982. In doing so, it asks how tabloid representation of the war created a particular and normative version of ‘Britishness’, central to which was the English woman, whose body became the site for a specific coalescing of race, gender and sexuality; a fixed notion of whiteness and normative heterosexuality located in the particular, unstable cultural space of a struggling ‘post-colonial’ Britain.     

Neighborhoods, Ethnicity and School Choice: Developing a Statistical Framework for Geodemographic Analysis

Geodemographics as the “analysis of people by where they live” has origins in urban sociology and social mapping, and is experiencing a renaissance in applied spatial demography. However, some commentators have expressed reservations about the statistical limitations of common geodemographic practices, especially focusing on the potential internal heterogeneity of the geodemographic groupings, as well as the problem of clearly identifying predictor variables that might account for or explain the socioeconomic patterns revealed by geodemographic analyses. In this paper we argue that geodemographic typologies are structured methods for making sense of the spatial and socioeconomic patterns encoded within complex datasets such as national census data. By treating geodemographics as more a framework than a tool for analysis in its own right we are able to integrate it with the flexibility and statistical conventions offered by multilevel modeling. We demonstrate this with a case study of whether pupils from different types of neighborhood in Birmingham, England are more or less likely to attend their nearest state-funded secondary school and how that likelihood varies with the ethnic composition of the neighborhood. In so doing we build on previous research suggesting that ethnic segregation between schools is at least equal to that between neighborhoods in England and speculate in this regard on the consequences of current government plans to extend choice to parents within a schools market.     

Monitoring Indicators of Children’s Victimization in School: Linking National-, Regional-, and Site-Level Indicators

The paper presents a conceptual framework and methodology developed by the authors to create systematic empirical basis to monitor important social indicators. The focus here is on ways to employ indicators of victimization in school in order to inform a range of constituencies interested in the well being of school children. The paper outlines the importance of developing a wide range of indicators based on a theoretical model of social context of schools, as perceived from multiple perspectives (students, staff, parents, the general public). The importance of linking national-, regional-, and site-level indicators is emphasized and demonstrated. The paper presents examples of analyses and reports that can inform practice, policy making and evaluation in the area of school safety. Finally, monitoring indicators of victimization on all levels is described as a democratic youth empowering process.     

Challenges in Teaching Short Courses by an Academic Department: The University of Florida Experience

“A Week of Short Courses” is the title given by the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida to its offerings each spring. The offerings are short courses, each lasting 2 1/2 days. The program began in the spring of 1991 with four courses, and has grown to six courses in 1994. During this four-year period the Department of Statistics has faced many challenges that are addressed in this paper.