Rendering sexism invisible in workplace narratives. A narrative analysis of female entrepreneurs’ stories of not being talked to by men

Entrepreneurism is widely regarded as being one way in which women can sidestep the sexism of male‐dominated institutionalized work environments and enter into a world in which men and women operate on a level playing field. Yet, in a corpus of stories of female entrepreneurs’ experiences, we noted that being ignored by men was a constant theme. Taking a social constructionist and narrative approach to identity, we analyse the gendered identity work that female entrepreneurs do in these stories and we seek to explicate the process through which female entrepreneurs do not evaluate being ignored by men as sexism‐in‐action. Using positioning theory as an analytical tool, we analyse these stories at three different levels: the here‐and‐now interaction between interviewer and storyteller; the there‐and‐then identity work of the characters in the storyworld; and the wider societal Discourses that the storytellers enact, and which are enacted by such identity work. Findings indicate that despite making gendered difference, inferiority and lack of agency relevant, the stories are not evaluated as sexism‐in‐action because the female entrepreneurs enact a postfeminist and neoliberal Discourse of freedom, autonomy and choice, rather than a feminist Discourse of discrimination and sexism.     

Interval censored and truncated data: Rate of convergence of NPMLE of the density

We consider survival data that are both interval censored and truncated. Under appropriate assumptions on the involved distributions, the censoring, truncation and survival, we prove the consistency of the NPMLE of the density of the survival, and give the rate of convergence. Finally, we give an example where the joint law of the censoring and truncation can be explicitly computed.     

The Importance of Identity in Policy: The Case For and Of Children

This article draws out one of the core reasons why children should be conceived as active agents in research, particularly policy‐related research. The main thesis is that policy inevitably projects and, to an extent, constitutes the subject identities of its intended objects — in this case, that of ‘children’. Drawing on several bodies of theory — the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, identity theory, ‘governmentality’ and theories of discourse — the article shows why not incorporating children’s voices is a problem for social policy, and suggests that the impact of their exclusion has the potential to render policy both inappropriate and non‐responsive.     

Some indications of limits to framing the policy preferences of the civically engaged: Interplay of social capital,race attitudes,and social justice frames

Our experiment, which tested support for a hypothetical social welfare program, found that the civically engaged as a whole were resistant to social justice framing employing universalistic versus particularistic standards. We suggest the lack of a framing effect was due to the use of a preexisting, shared “symbolic racism” frame. Social justice framing did succeed for those whose attitudes toward symbolic racism were ambivalent or neutral. Other factors including sex, income level, political participation, and ideology significantly influenced choice. These results provide some indications of limits to experimental framing of policy preferences of the civically engaged in their institutional settings.     

Les transformations actuelles du régime de l'innovation en Wallonie: une analyse des pôles de compétitivité

Notre contribution propose une grille d'analyse du régime wallon de l'innovation et des transformations dont il est l'objet. Nous mettons en évidence les dynamiques qui ont émergé en Wallonie entre les stakeholders de l'innovation et le régime existant, autour de la mise en place des pôles de compétitivité. L'originalité de notre article repose sur l'utilisation de concepts comme le “macro-récit” ou le “paysage socio-technique” pour interpréter les dynamiques d'une politique publique d'innovation et appréhender la complexité de l'univers discursif, institutionnel, historique, culturel, social et technologique des acteurs en présence. Notre analyse montre qu'une telle approche est nécessaire en complément à une évaluation d'impact traditionnelle pour mesurer les chances de succès de l'implémentation durable de la politique wallonne des pôles de compétitivité. Nous concluons que le modèle d'innovation qui transparait relève d'une appréhension systémique des modes de production de connaissance, mais reste cloisonné dans une logique instrumentale de l'innovation, insuffisante et peu réflexive, maintenant à distance la société et certains stakeholders de l'innovation.     

Intra-household inequality in transitional Russia

The paper proposes an original strategy for analyzing household sharing of income and satisfaction. Using two different subjective questions from the Russian data RLMS (Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey), we assume a correspondence between, first, the perception of income that household members report and their true income sharing, and, second, between their answer to a satisfaction question and their utility. We show that answers given by different members of the household bring pertinent information on income sharing and utility in the household. In particular, we find a significant effect of the female–male wage ratio in reported income perception and satisfaction differentials between household members. Our data covers the transition period (1994–2003) characterized by massive economic and social changes in Russia. We investigate the evolution of intra-household welfare distribution by exploiting the episode of the financial crisis of 1998 to distinguish two periods: pre- and post-crisis. Our empirical strategy consists of applying probit-type models allowing the parameters to change in a discrete manner between two periods and accounting for discrete unobserved heterogeneity.     

A Variable Selection Criterion in the Linear Programming Approaches to Discriminant Analysis*

There are numerous variable selection rules in classical discriminant analysis. These rules enable a researcher to distinguish significant variables from nonsignificant ones and thus provide a parsimonious classification model based solely on significant variables. Prominent among such rules are the forward and backward stepwise variable selection criteria employed in statistical software packages such as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences and BMDP Statistical Software. No such criterion currently exists for linear programming (LP) approaches to discriminant analysis. In this paper, a criterion is developed to distinguish significant from nonsignificant variables for use in LP models. This criterion is based on the “jackknife” methodology. Examples are presented to illustrate implementation of the proposed criterion.     

The significance of meaning. Why IPBES needs the social sciences and humanities

The term “biodiversity” is often used to describe phenomena of nature, which can be studied without a reference to the socially constructed, evaluative, or indeed normative contexts. In our paper, we challenge this conception by focusing particularly on methodological aspects of biodiversity research. We thereby engage with the idea of interdisciplinary biodiversity research as a scientific approach directed at the recognition and management of contemporary society in its ecological embedding. By doing this, we explore how research on and assessments of biodiversity can be enhanced if meaning, aspiration, desires, and related aspects of agency are methodically taken into account. In six sections, we substantiate our claim that the discourse on biodiversity (including the IPBES (Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) debate) is incomplete without contributions from the social sciences and humanities. In the introduction, a brief overview of biodiversity’s conceptual history is provided showing that “biodiversity” is a lexical invention intended to create a strong political momentum. However, that does not impede its usability as a research concept. Section 2 examines the origins of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) by way of sociological discourse analysis. Subsequently, it proposes a matrix as a means to structure the ambiguities and tensions inherent in the CBD. The matrix reemphasizes our main thesis regarding the need to bring social and ethical expertise to the biodiversity discourse. In Section 3, we offer a brief sketch of the different methods of the natural and social sciences as well as ethics. This lays the groundwork for our Section 4, which explains and illustrates what social sciences and ethics can contribute to biodiversity research. Section 5 turns from research to politics and argues that biodiversity governance necessitates deliberative discourses in which participation of lay people plays an important role. Section 6 provides our conclusions.     

Improving the detection of unusual observations in high‐dimensional settings

Multivariate control charts are used to monitor stochastic processes for changes and unusual observations. Hotelling's T² statistic is calculated for each new observation and an out‐of‐control signal is issued if it goes beyond the control limits. However, this classical approach becomes unreliable as the number of variables p approaches the number of observations n, and impossible when p exceeds n. In this paper, we devise an improvement to the monitoring procedure in high‐dimensional settings. We regularise the covariance matrix to estimate the baseline parameter and incorporate a leave‐one‐out re‐sampling approach to estimate the empirical distribution of future observations. An extensive simulation study demonstrates that the new method outperforms the classical Hotelling T² approach in power, and maintains appropriate false positive rates. We demonstrate the utility of the method using a set of quality control samples collected to monitor a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry apparatus over a period of 67 days.