Gender,Working Conditions and the Job Satisfaction of Women in a Non-Traditional Occupation: Female Correctional Officers in Men's Prisons*

Despite the recent interest in women working in nontraditional occupations, few analyses have systematically compared the work-related attitudes of such women with those of men holding the same positions. This article presents an exploratory analysis, drawing hypotheses from the “gender” and “job” models described by Feldberg and Glenn (1979), to compare work-related attitudes among male and female correctional officers. Data drawn from a survey of male and female correctional officers working at the same prison facility (three male and one female units) are utilized to contrast the importance of gender, with experiences on the job as determinants of job satisfaction. The results support the job model, which suggests that the attitudes of working women are a function of their position in the organizational structure and immediate working conditions.     

The Medieval Marquee: Church Portal Sculpture as Publicity

The complexity of movie marquees is well-known to those who frequent films with the avidity of the penitent seeking heaven. Thesymboliccontent of a marquee that has the name of the late John Wayne in The Searchers is subtly but forcefully apparent; we know what values are contained i n the lean and lone figure of Wayne, and behind him the values in Hollywood as transmitted through John Ford, the director. So it is with the “medieval marquee,” the Church portal sculpture, as Charles Altman makes clear, with the Church proclaiming its values, as it shores up the common people's belief in salvation and ensures the status quo of a class structure. The Church in the Middle Ages, according to Altman, is theentrepreneur, just as the film industry today mediates public taste with its seductive appeal; in both instances, it is the “well-planned marquee” which lures its customers inside.     

Images of Women in Mexican Comic Books*

Comic books are read on a regular basis by young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural Mexicans. Humor, adventure, police, fantastic and political comic books are but a few types of these popular publications found at newsstands on busy downtown street corners or laid out on sidewalks in quiet neighborhoods. Because of their immense popularity, their content merits serious attention. Harold Hinds and Charles Tatum study the images of women in four comic books—Kaliman, Lagrimas, risas y amor, La familia Burron and El Payo—and assess the degree to which these images conform to or deviate from traditional stereotypes of Mexican women. They find that in some cases these stereotypical images are not found: but in most, readers encounter submissive, passive and long-suffering females dependent upon males for their self-esteem; or at least woman as ideal fiancee-spouse, as mistress-sex-object and as witch. Two women—Borola of La familia Burron and Lupe of El Payo—are more assertive and not cast in the same mold as most other comic book women.     

Delivery, Management and Access Model for E_prints and Open Access Journals

A study conducted for the (United Kingdom) Joint Information Systems Committee reviewed possible models for implementing Open Access to research reports in institutional archives and Open Access journals. The conclusion was that a “harvesting model,” in which full texts reside on the original servers but metadata are harvested, held, and enhanced by a central service, was preferable to either a centralized national service or a completely decentralized service for the UK. The study included issues of populating institutional archives (IAs) and some form of mandatory archiving for publicly funded research results to obtain a critical mass of Open Access material in such a system.