Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work,Gender, and Beauty

Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on the basis of their physical appearance. The concept advances research on the service economy by moving beyond a focus on emotions to emphasize worker corporeality. This article first untangles aesthetic labor from related concepts, including body work, emotional labor, and embodied cultural capital. Next is a review of three contexts in which scholars have applied aesthetic labor to the workplace: the organization, freelance labor, and the market. Because it situates the value of beauty in context, aesthetic labor foregrounds those power relations that define aesthetics, such as class, race, and gender. The concept incorporates insights from field theories of bodily capital, such that aesthetic labor denaturalizes beauty and seeks to explain the processes through which looks translate into economic and symbolic rewards.     

Intimate partner violence & depression: a deadly comorbidity

(1) Clients exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) are at considerable risk for depression, suicide, and homicide. (2) Disclosure of IPV should be accompanied by nonjudgmental, careful, clear documentation of physical and emotional findings by nurses, including direct statements in clients' own words. (3) Frequent, consistent support of clients experiencing IPV from their families and friends (including nonjudgmental listening, unconditional acceptance, discussion of options, and exploring decisions) is of considerable importance and can facilitate the buffering effects of such support against suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts.     

Current State of the Sociology of Occupations

This report is a review of the recent literature (mostly since the mid 60s) of the sociology of occupations. The notion of measuring professionalism, especially as represented by the attribute approach, has failed to deal with crucial sociological issues. The sociology of occupations has been criticized for being without an overall theory, but the search for such a theory may not be a justified goal. Work in this field has produced many interesting and useful generalizations of a more limited range. Studies of this field are numerous, but they are distributed unevenly over the range of occupations and work issues. The strong point is the numerous detailed case studies of occupations. However, there are also some good examples of efforts to relate occupational behavior to a larger societal perspective.     

Evaluating the performance of sparse principal component analysis methods in high-dimensional data scenarios

High-dimensional datasets have exploded into many fields of research, challenging our interpretation of the classic dimension reduction technique, Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Recently proposed Sparse PCA methods offer useful insight into understanding complex data structures. This article compares three Sparse PCA methods through extensive simulations, with the aim of providing guidelines as to which method to choose under a variety of data structures, as dictated by the variance-covariance matrix. A real gene expression dataset is used to illustrate an application of Sparse PCA in practice and show how to link simulation results with real-world problems.