Who will give effect to the ILO's Maritime Labour Convention, 2006?

The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006, which takes effect on 20 August 2013, consolidates dozens of ILO standards adopted since the 1920s. It has been described as the “fourth pillar” of the international maritime regulatory regime, alongside three major IMO Conventions on safety at sea and marine pollution control. The challenge, the authors argue, will be to enforce it within the existing inspection frameworks of flag State implementation and “port State control”. Technically, the responsibility rests on the former, but the proliferation of flags of convenience suggests that the latter will have a crucial part to play too, as will, in either case, inspector training.     

Liberal approaches to ranking infinite utility streams: when can we avoid interference?

In this work we analyse social welfare relations on sets of finite and infinite utility streams that satisfy various types of liberal non-interference principles. Earlier contributions have established that (finitely) anonymous and strongly Paretian quasiorderings exist that verify non-interference axioms together with weak preference continuity and further consistency. Nevertheless Mariotti and Veneziani (2011) prove that a fully liberal non-interfering view of a finite society leads to dictatorship if the weak Pareto principle is imposed. We first prove that this impossibility result vanishes when we extend the horizon to infinity. Then we investigate a related problem: namely, the possibility of combining “standard” semicontinuity with efficiency in the presence of non-interference. We provide several impossibility results that prove that there is a generalised incompatibility between relaxed forms of continuity and non-interference principles, both under ordinal and cardinal views of the problem.     

Un análisis de la relación entre ambiente familiar y delincuencia juvenil

Resumen

En este trabajo se analiza la relación entre las interacciones afectivas y normativas del ambiente familiar, y la conducta delictiva de los adolescentes varones. La muestra del estudio estaba compuesta por tres grupos de adolescentes: no delincuentes, delincuentes no detectados y delincuentes detectados (institucionalizados). Los resultados de los análisis realizados ponen de manifiesto la existencia de diferencias significativas entre las características familiares de delincuentes y no delincuentes. Concretamente, los datos del estudio permiten afirmar que: 1) las variables afectivas parecen más importantes que las referidas a los aspectos normativos para discriminar entre los grupos de sujetos, y 2) entre las variables afectivas serían el apego del hijo hacia los padres y el conflicto familiar las que aparecen como especialmente relevantes para discriminar entre delincuentes y no delincuentes, asociándose un alto nivel de apego/bajo nivel de conflicto con no delincuencia, y un bajo nivel de apego/alto nivel de conflicto con delincuencia.     

The moderating effect of personal values in the relationship between working conditions and wellbeing / El efecto moderador de los valores personales en la relación entre condiciones de trabajo y bienestar

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the impact that the opportunities to realize personal values at work have on wellbeing. More specifically, we tried to test the moderating effect of personal values on the relationship between opportunities for fulfilment and wellbeing. A sample of 403 civil servants from a public institution in Brazil answered a questionnaire that included measures for each of the variables studied. The results from hierarchical regression showed that there were no significant interactions between opportunities to realize personal values at work and personal value priorities in the prediction of wellbeing at work. The mere presence of opportunities to realize values that express individual interests is enough to increase wellbeing. Likewise, the results converge with those of other previous studies on the importance of working conditions in predicting wellbeing. On the other hand, this study included variables that up to now have not been used in the field of wellbeing at work, especially in relation to its eudaimonic and hedonic elements.     

Pushed or pulled? Entrepreneurial behaviour among immigrants as a strategy to cope with negative social identity

Migratory movements are one of the most remarkable demographic, social and psychological phenomena in today’s world. For the people involved, these migrations pose a radical change in environment and in their lives as they face adaptation to new perceptions, values and behaviours. All these lead to major challenges and repercussions for their personal and social identities. Using the Theory of Social Identity as our interpretative framework, together with a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews, we have researched the entrepreneurial behaviour seen in 94 immigrants. We show the strategies adopted by these immigrants for personal mobility, social creativity and social competition to cope with the negative social identity derived from the occupational segregation and socio-labour exclusion they experience in the labour market and as mechanisms for psychosocial adaptation to the social, political, economic and labour characteristics in their environment.     

Soft Repression and the Current Wave of Social Mobilisations in Spain

The current political and economic crisis has fuelled a new cycle of collective action in Spain. The response of the Spanish authorities to this wave of mobilisations has been to strengthen public order. But on some occasions, the excessive use of police force has given rise to problems of image for the Spanish government. To avoid public criticism, the Ministry of the Interior has tried to camouflage police repression by combining the use of truncheons with other, more subtle, coercive measures. The silent nature of such repressive tactics means that their existence is rarely discussed in the specialised literature, which tends to focus on the violent acts committed by the State. However, this type of ‘soft repression’ plays an important pre-penal role within the official strategies to contain the new and challenging social conflict in Spain.     

Organizational Identification During a Merger: Determinants of Employees' Expected Identification With the New Organization*

In order to investigate the development of organizational identification during a merger, a quasi‐experimental case study was conducted on a pending merger of police organizations. The research was conducted among employees who would be directly involved in the merger and among indirectly involved employees. In contrast to earlier studies, organizational identification was measured as the expected identification prior to the merger. Five determinants were used to explain the employees' expected identification: (a) identification with the pre‐merger organization, (b) sense of continuity, (c) expected utility of the merger, (d) communication climate before the merger and (e) communication about the merger. The five determinants appeared to explain a considerable proportion of the variance of expected organizational identification. Results suggest that in order to obtain a strong identification with the soon‐to‐be‐merged organization, managers should pay extra attention to current departments with weaker social bonds as these are expected to identify the least with the new organization. The role of the communication variables differed between the two employee groups: communication about the merger only contributed to the organizational identification of directly involved employees; and communication climate only affected the identification of indirectly involved employees.