'The Tribunal was the most stressful thing: more stressful than my son's diagnosis or behaviour': the experiences of families who go to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT)

It is more than 10 years since the Special Educational Needs Tribunal was established in 1994 as an independent panel which arbitrates in disputes between parents of children with the label special educational needs and Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in England. In 2002 the Tribunal began hearing claims for disability discrimination and was re-named the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT). Since 1994 over 20,000 appeals have been registered. This article, which forms part of my ongoing Ph.D. thesis 'Parents as advocates: the experience of parents who register an appeal with SENDisT', offers an analysis of parents' Tribunal stories. Here, the key question is what affect the process of going to SENDisT has on the social, emotional and financial well-being of the family. Through a process of narrative inquiry the aim is to foreground parents' unheard stories and to reveal their 'hidden' experiences.     

Partner Choice and the Differential Retreat From Marriage

The contemporary retreat from marriage in the United States has had a differential impact across socioeconomic and racial groups. Here, 1990 marriage rates and propensities for Virginia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin are analyzed regarding (a) the likelihood that persons in different groups ever marry and (b) patterns of partner choice with respect to race and educational level. Marriage remains strong in most race‐education groups but is substantially lower among Blacks and among those with less than 12 years of education. Patterns of partner choice have shifted to show greater symmetry between the educational levels of brides and grooms. Changes have been modest with regard to the level and pattern of interracial (Black‐White) marriage. Marriage is increasingly a union of equals, but a union chosen more by Whites than by Blacks and more by the well educated than by the poorly educated.     

The Continuing Significance of Race in the Occupational Attainment of Whites and Blacks: A Segmented Labor Market Analysis*

In this article we posit that racial discrimination is not uniform across the U.S. labor market. While it is likely that patterns of racial discrimination occur in some types of jobs more than others, little empirical research has examined the effect of race across segmented labor markets. Incorporating two decades of comparable General Social Survey data, this article revisits William J. Wilson's hypothesis that the significance of race in determining labor market outcomes is declining. We examine the effect of race within two dissimilar labor segments over time, dividing the labor market into technique‐versus social‐skills‐oriented segments. Using this theoretically useful dichotomy, we examine if the net effect of race (African American and white men) on occupational prestige has declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. Our multivariate analysis shows that the net effect of race is different in each labor market. This suggests that racial discrimination against African Americans is not uniform across the entire labor market, but instead is differentiately manifested within various labor market segments. Overall, our findings partially support Wilson's thesis indicating that while the effect of race is no longer a significant indicator of occupational prestige by the 1990s in a technique‐oriented job segment, it remains a significant predictive variable within a social‐skills‐oriented job segment, even when controlling for a range of social class and structural variables.     

The humorous construction of disability: 'stand-up' comedians in the United States

We examine how stand-up [sic] comedy constructs, circulates, perpetuates and/or disrupts stereotypical images of disabled persons in the United States. We use disabled people, rather than people-first language, to remind readers that disability is an ill-defined, culturally imposed attribute. Although humor is culturally specific, we draw on works of an international cadre of humanities scholars and social scientists to ground our analyses. We conclude that disability humor constitutes an emerging, liberatory art form. Disabled and non-disabled comedians elicit thought-provoking laughter and present disability as an interesting way to live. However, disabling humor still perpetuates stereotyping and isolation.     

The Division of Household Labor in Germany and Israel

We compare the patterns of household division of labor in Germany and Israel—two countries that share key elements of the corporatist welfare regime but differ in their gender regimes—and evaluate several hypotheses using data from the 2002 International Social Survey Program. Although time constraints and relative resources affect the division of household labor and women’s housework in both societies, we find that in Germany the gender order of household labor is more rigid, whereas in Israel the spouses’ linked labor market status exerts distinctive effects. We also find significant relationships between gender ideology and the division of household labor. We discuss the theoretical advantages of approaching the comparative study of gender inequality from the vantage point of family and gender regimes.     

A measure of slope-rotatability for second order response surface experimental designs

In the design of experiments for estimating the slope of a response surface, slope-rotatability is a desirable property. In this paper, a measure is introduced that enables us to assess the degree of slope-rotatability for a given response surface design. The measure takes the value zero if and only if the design is slope-rotatable, and becomes larger as the design deviates from a slope-rotatable design. Examples of applying this measure to some response surface designs are also given.     

敦煌民间词之文人词化过程

中唐以后,除了民间广为流行的长短句外,还出现了文人亲自创作的长短句。文人的长短句到底起源于哪里?假定文人的词是受民间词的影响而产生的,那么什么原因使文人对长短句保持持续不变的关心,并给予了词的地位?民间词的内容和风格是以怎样的方式传达到文人那里?解决了这些问题可以帮助我们更好地理解民间词文人化过程中文人词的形成原因,同时可以对定论词的性质提供参照。     

How can David orchestrate resources to enhance firm performance? A dynamic approach to coping with resource constraints

Given that the possession of abundant resources does not always guarantee superior firm performance, this study proposes a dynamic approach to enhancing firm value. Building on the resource orchestration thesis, we investigate how firms facing resource constraints enhance their capabilities over time by orchestrating resources and how this resource orchestration can play a role in improving firm performance. Using the dynamic perspective, this study identifies four resource orchestration modes, which are specified based on how a given firm dynamically allocates its resources to technology (enacted by R&D activities) and marketing (enacted by advertising activities). Accordingly, we claim that firms with resource constraints can enhance their performance by escalating or altering their resources over time. To test our hypotheses, we used a sample of 4078 small and medium-sized enterprises in manufacturing industries between 1984 and 2018. We found that focus escalation for technology positively affects firm performance, captured by Tobin's q, and that focus alternation toward either technology or market is positively related to firm performance. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.