The composition of public sector compensation: The effects of unionization and bureaucratic size

This paper examines the effect of the political power of public sector unions on the composition of public sector compensation. Public employee unions provide a relatively low-cost vehicle for organizing workers’ political activity in support of the rent-seeking behavior of local politicians. The unions also provide a conduit for employees to capture part of these rents as payment for political services. Since the public has little interest in paying for the political activities of public workers, these payments are most likely to be made through fringe benefits so as to minimize public scrutiny. The authors would like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions. Any errors remain those of the authors.     

No hiding place: on the discomforts of researching the contemporary policy process

It has never been easy to conduct research into currently sensitive policy issues, but there is now accumulating evidence to indicate that various forms of resistance to scholarly investigation are on the increase. Such a climate handicaps all social policy research, but may have the greatest impact on ethnographic projects. Yet, it is argued, ethnography is increasingly widely recognised among academics as having a particularly valuable contribution to make to the study of the policy process. Unfortunately, many policy practitioners (and occasionally some academic colleagues) perceive ethnographic research as being of questionable validity and low helpfulness. This behaves policy-oriented ethnographers to demonstrate that they do indeed have procedures for assuring validity, even if their style of investigation is never likely to be popular with government.     

Servant leaders inspire servant followers: Antecedents and outcomes for employees and the organization

Despite widespread adoption of servant leadership, we are only beginning to understand its true utility across multiple organizational levels. Our purpose was to test the relationship between personality, servant leadership, and critical follower and organizational outcomes. Using a social influence framework, we proposed that leader agreeableness and extraversion affect follower perceptions of servant leadership. In turn, servant leaders ignite a cycle of service by role-modeling servant behavior that is then mirrored through coworker helping behavior and high-quality customer service, as well as reciprocated through decreased withdrawal. Using a multilevel, multi-source model, we surveyed 224 stores of a U.S. retail organization, including 425 followers, 110 store managers, and 40 regional managers. Leader agreeableness was positively and extraversion was negatively related to servant leadership, which was associated with decreased follower turnover intentions and disengagement. At the group-level, service climate mediated the effects of servant leadership on follower turnover intentions, helping and sales behavior.     

Women,Legal Aid and Social Inclusion

This article examines access to legal aid for women in light of the Australian government's social inclusion agenda. It is notable that the government's image of social citizenship does not include the ability to invoke and enforce legal rights, and that discourses of social exclusion have paid relatively little attention to gendered patterns of exclusion. The article reports on a study of applications for and refusals of legal aid for family law, domestic violence and anti‐discrimination matters by socially excluded women in Queensland. It demonstrates the variety of ways in which Legal Aid Queensland's grants process operated to further exclude and marginalise these women. It argues that effective access to legal aid is an important element of social inclusion, but that this goal cannot be achieved by reliance on the tools of New Public Management.     

Expected Power for the False Discovery Rate with Independence

The Benjamini-Hochberg procedure is widely used in multiple comparisons. Previous power results for this procedure have been based on simulations. This article produces theoretical expressions for expected power. To derive them, we make assumptions about the number of hypotheses being tested, which null hypotheses are true, which are false, and the distributions of the test statistics under each null and alternative. We use these assumptions to derive bounds for multiple dimensional rejection regions. With these bounds and a permanent based representation of the joint density function of the largest p-values, we use the law of total probability to derive the distribution of the total number of rejections. We derive the joint distribution of the total number of rejections and the number of rejections when the null hypothesis is true. We give an analytic expression for the expected power for a false discovery rate procedure that assumes the hypotheses are independent.     

“We’re a movement”: crowdfunding,journalism, and feminism

As media organizations struggle to remain financially viable, and layoffs become more common, crowdfunding has been championed as one way for journalists to finance new ventures and create work outside of mainstream media. There is a growing body of research that is starting to critically examine the relationship between journalism and crowdfunding. This research, however, has tended to look at journalism as a whole, rather than specific genres. The purpose of this paper is to look at how crowdfunding is being used to create feminist online magazines, online spaces, and freelance journalism to tell stories about women, or aimed at a female-identified audience. It argues that beyond simply wanting to write and produce content the hope is to create change and often the crowdfunding campaigns are positioned as trying to create a “community” and/or a “movement.” This article uses a political economic framework, drawing on the concept of structuration, to analyze how these crowdfunding campaigns are being used to push back against, and open up, mainstream dialogues of what it means to be a woman or female-identified, as well as create safe and open spaces for these conversations.     

Abusive supervision and work–family conflict: The path through emotional labor and burnout

Building on the theoretical foundations of conservation of resources theory, this research provides insights into the relationship of abusive supervision with work–family conflict (work-to-family and family-to-work). Further, it is the first attempt to incorporate the emotional labor to burnout link as the mediating process between abuse and conflict. Using a sample of 328 individuals working fulltime we examined both the direct relationship of abuse with conflict as well as the indirect relationship through surface acting (emotional labor) and burnout. Our results suggest that abusive supervision influences conflict and the relationship is partially mediated through the surface acting to burnout path.     

Race and Reciprocity: Inter‐household Exchanges in a Multiracial Neighborhood

This study investigates the degree to which African‐American households are socially integrated into a multiracial, middle‐class suburban neighborhood near Dallas, Texas. Although U.S. neighborhoods are becoming increasingly heterogeneous in composition, little is known about black households' participation in social and informational networks within multiracial middle‐class neighborhoods. Drawing on theories of the gift and social capital, we view neighborhoods in terms of complex patterns of inter‐household exchanges of material and symbolic goods. We predict that black‐led households will exchange at a lower rate with their neighbors than will other households and test this prediction using survey data collected from 119 households and from follow‐up interviews with eight black heads of household. Our main finding from the survey is that black households exchanged at a significantly lower rate than did other households, ceteris paribus. The follow‐up interviews found little evidence of black racial homophily in neighboring or of racism within the neighborhood. However, the low rate of black inter‐household exchanges may be partly explained by black head of households' personal experiences of racism outside the neighborhood and by a racially constituted disposition against borrowing from neighbors. We discuss implications of our findings for research on racial integration and segregation.     

Latinos and the Skin Color Paradox

For African Americans and Latinos, skin color is a significant predictor of many social and economic stratification variables including income, education, housing, occupational status, spousal status, poverty rates, criminal justice sentencing, and rates of depression. Given these patterns, some scholars have surprisingly found that skin color is not a significant predictor of many political attitudes for African Americans, and called this phenomenon the “skin color paradox.” This article investigates the role of skin color, race, and national origin in predicting political marginality and political commonality among Latinos. The models suggest that skin color is not a significant predictor of political attitudes, consistent with the skin color paradox theory but that national origin does predict some political attitudes.