Nonverbal behavior and attitudes toward touch

A measure of comfort with touching was found to predict whether or not subjects would volunteer to participate in an experiment involving hugging strangers of both sexes and also to predict levels of personal space. Among those volunteering to give hugs, subjects reporting greater comfort with touch rated those hugs more positively, but this seemed to reflect a readiness to interpret touch positively rather than any clear differences in the nature of the hug actually given. Earlier findings that women report greater comfort with touch than do men were replicated. It was found that reported touch comfort was directly related to such constructs as satisfaction with life, with oneself, and with one's childhood, as well as to self-confidence, assertiveness, socially acceptable self-presentation, and active rather than passive modes of coping with problems. Touch comfort was inversely related to expressed concerns with touches which might reflect status differentials, homosexuality, or negative affective states. It was concluded that the touch comfort construct reflects the degree of one's openness to expressing intimate behavior, the degree to which one adopts an active, rather than passive, interpersonal style, and the degree to which one's social relationships are satisfactory.     

Defying Gender Norms in Rural Bangladesh: A Social Demographic Analysis

This paper proposes core innovations in the strategy of research on demographic behaviour. One aim is a shift of attention away from events and towards a focus on dynamic processes and their interplay: away from a preoccupation with marriage and divorce, births, deaths, migrations, and household structure towards a broader perspective that takes account of partnership and intimacy, parenthood, potential and well-being, position in society and space, and personal ties. Another aim is a much closer engagement with genetics, neuroscience, psychology, and behavioural economics. A third aim is a strategy that pays more attention to pathways within the individual, to the processes entailed when the individual interacts with various contexts, and to progressions that involve the interplay of the pathways and processes through the life course. These shifts of emphasis, which have already begun to occur, require a systematic reassessment of priorities for research on demographic behaviour.     

The Cgmanova Model

The Completely General MANOVA (CGMANOVA) model may be used to analyze many complex designs including the GMANOVA, EGMANOVA, MSUR models, the multivariate seemingly unrelated growth curve model, and numerous other designs that do not have closed form solutions using the likelihood ratio method. In this paper we review the theory of the CGMANOVA model and compare 11near model likelihood test results with the Wald statistic.     

Labor Supply,Labor Demand,and Men's Underemployment in Rural and Urban Labor Markets1

Abstract This paper examines how the structure of the labor market differentially affects white men's underemployment in urban and rural areas. The effects of labor supply and demand, including special measures of public employment and two previously neglected aspects of competition—global industrial competition and sexual labor market competition—on unemployment, low-wage employment, and low-hours employment are examined. A higher proportion of females in the labor force in rural labor market areas provides benefits to men in the form of lower unemployment, but also costs them, through an increased prevalence of low-wage employment, while the opposite effects are evident for areas with concentrations in periphery service industries. The findings suggest that industrial restructuring in the form of increased foreign competition and an increased loss of core transformative jobs are especially threatening to rural men's employment adequacy.     

The subcontracting of cleaning work: a case in the casualisation of labour*

Casual labour is defined in this article as labour lacking security of income and employment. It is argued that such labour has remained an integral type of labour organization in modern capitalist economies, and has even been expanding both in advanced and declining sectors. The article studies in detail one specific process of casualisation-the transition to subcontracting in the case of cleaning work, as it took place in Israel. The major considerations leading to such a transition are specified - the desire to cut costs and to find new sources of labour. The basic differences between subcontracted labour and direct wage labour are discussed, focusing on the intensification of labour, the deterioration of wages and benefits and the obstacles to workers organization. The relation is then examined between subcontracted labour and the composition of the labour force, primarily the displacement of Jewish by Arab women workers and the differentiation which has developed between groups of subcontracted workers on the basis of gender, nationality and citizenship. The role of the state and the labour movement in this process of casualisation is highlighted throughout the discussion. Concluding with some final comments of the more general significance of casual labour for the highly organized Israeli labour force and working class.     

“I Amn Not a Utistivc on Thje Typ” (“I'm Not Autistic on the Typewriter”)

Facilitated communication involves hand-over-hand or hand-on-forearm support of students as they communicate through pointing at pictures, letters or other objects. Over time, it is expected that the hand and arm support can be faded back. This observational study describes an effort to introduce facilitated communication to 22 students, ranging in age from 3 years 10 months to 21 years, in several US public schools. The students are all labeled autistic and do not speak or speak only with echolalic phrases. The findings include observations of the students communicating with facilitation, language samples, and conversations by the students. The students reveal unexpected literacy and numeracy skills. The appearance of these abilities raises a number of questions concerning prior assumptions about autism, communication, independence and interdependence, and the education of students with and without disabilities.     

Some constructions for PBIBDs

New families of group divisible designs have recently been constructed by Bush, by Kageyama and Tanaka, and by Bhagwandas and Parihar. Their constructions are generalised here.     

'Boys own' stuff: masculinity and the management of further education

The connections between men, masculinity and management remain understated if not largely concealed, despite a critical spotlight being increasingly cast on masculinity by many academic and other writers. In a similar vein, numerous commentators on organisation have charted the rise of new organisational forms and structures, and the management practices which flow from them. With few notable exceptions, however these bodies of work deny or downplay the complex linkages and inter-connections between masculinity and the activities of management. By drawing on the case of UK further education (FE), and more particularly, the management practices therein, an aim of this article is to draw attention to this inter-relationship of masculinities and men managers. In so doing, we suggest that the term ‘masculine subject’ best exemplifies those men, and women, who seek to invest their sense of being in masculinist discourses. The empirical basis is taken from research undertake across a number of FE colleges wherein 24 men managers were inter viewed as part of a larger project concerned with the management and regulation of the sector. In exposing the intensified and increasingly uncertain work conditions now typifying the new FE work culture, this article draws attention to practices of oppression and bullying by managers underplayed or overlooked by writers elsewhere.