Managerial prerogatives,employee expectations,and property rights in job security: Institutionalizing the “new equity”

Changes in the structure and provisions of the employment relationship create substantial challenges for the management community. The employer-manager's traditional prerogatives to terminate at will are being eroded in response to changing socioeconomic values that recognize the emergence of an employee's reasonable expectations of job security. The United States lags far behind the international community in protecting these expectations. The authors survey the erosion of the employment-at-will doctrine, and review the concepts of corporate due process and property rights relating to employment. To ensure the institutionalization of this new equity, the authors call on the management community to take the initiative in crafting progressive legislation that strikes a sensible balance between managerial prerogatives and employee expectations of job security.     

Institutional change from within the informal sector in Indian rural labour relations

The paper applies a theory of institutional change enriched with mezzorules, fluidity and agency to India's informal sector institutional evolution using two illustrative examples. The concrete examples are rooted in unfree labour and rural casual labouring in India, a country which has a high degree of informality. Section 1 introduces some concepts, and section 2 examines processes of institutional change in the informal sector. In section 3, two illustrations are explored: (1) the norms for girl child bonded labour; (2) the individualisation of women labourers. Section 4 concludes. The fluidity of institutional rules demands a recognition of the supra-economic nature of the context within which economic-institutional change occurs. We propose the analysis of mezzorules in a dialogic research context, i.e. interactions among workers and collective agents – as a helpful and transformative approach for sociologists specialising in the informal economy.     

Agricultural multifunctionality and farmers' entrepreneurial skills: A study of Tuscan and Welsh farmers

The process of agricultural restructuring in Europe has been strongly influenced both by CAP support of multifunctional agriculture and by market liberalisation, and farmers are exhorted to become more entrepreneurial in response. This paper explores the interaction of these policy goals in two regions where a rural development form of multifunctionality is favoured.     

Cost-effectiveness of family-based substance abuse treatment

In order to compete in a financially sensitive health care system, family systems-based treatments must demonstrate effective clinical results as well as cost-effectiveness. Cost-effectiveness research can demonstrate to health care insurers and policy makers which treatments are viable options for implementation. The present literature review identified eight cost-effectiveness family-based substance abuse treatment studies. The results suggest that certain family-based treatments are cost-effective and warrant consideration for inclusion in health care delivery systems.     

The Multilevel Nature of Customer Experience Research: An Integrative Review and Research Agenda

Over the last three decades, customer experience (CE) has developed from a burgeoning concept to a widely recognized phenomenon in terms of both research and practice. To account for the complexity of consumption decisions, the CE literature encompasses both the rational information processing approach to consumer decision‐making and the experiential approach, which includes emotions, feelings and sub‐consciousness. The authors classify and examine CE research on two levels. Studies on static CE analyze experiences during touchpoints at one point in time, while studies on dynamic CE assess how experiences evolve over time. Furthermore, both static and dynamic CE research take place from two distinct theoretical perspectives: the organization and the consumer. As both theoretical perspectives essentially deal with the same phenomenon – the organizational perspective with the creation of CEs and the consumer perspective with the perception of customer experiences – there is potential for a productive symbiosis between them. The authors propose that connecting insights from both perspectives can contribute to a better understanding of what constitutes a CE for consumers and how firms can effectively manage it. First, the authors discuss the development of CE and argue that it has evolved into a broad and fragmented ‘umbrella construct’. Second, after distinguishing and defining static and dynamic CE, they systematically evaluate the state of knowledge in both the organizational and consumer perspectives. Finally, they develop an agenda for future research that integrates the consumer perspective into organizational CE research.     

Post‐socialist language ideologies in action: Linking interview context and language ideology through stance

Changes associated with the post‐socialist period in Albania have complicated the legacy of language ideologies grounded in Ottoman‐era and socialist‐era politics. In this article, I analyze two metalinguistic interviews with young adults in the Albanian capital of Tirana in order to investigate the status of standardizing and anti‐standardizing language ideologies while also raising a methodological question regarding interview context and researcher role as persistent issues in sociolinguistic research. As acts of evaluation, language ideologies can be linked to interactional positionings and alignments via stance, which is significant for understanding aspects of identity and context in the interview. I argue that this framework provides a better understanding of interview dynamics than previous style shifting approaches, as any explanation of differences in interview interactions must simultaneously consider macro‐level influences of ideology and micro‐level interactional developments.     

Examining individual‐level academic risk and protective factors for foster youth: School engagement,behaviors, self‐esteem,and social skills

Students' school engagement is widely regarded as critical for positive school adjustment and overall academic success. Foster youth persistently face poorer educational outcomes than peers and demonstrate lower levels of school engagement and higher levels of academically threatening behaviors. The goals of the present study were (a) to explore relationships amongst various child‐level correlates of school engagement and problem behaviors—namely, self‐esteem and social skills—and (b) to respectively investigate the protective potential of self‐esteem and social skills in the association between school engagement and behavior problems that threaten educational trajectories. Results indicate significant associations between school engagement and problem behaviors, as well as between self‐esteem, social skills, and school engagement. Further, self‐esteem mediated the association between school engagement and both youth‐ and foster parent‐reported externalizing behavior, and social skills mediated the association between school engagement and both youth‐ and foster parent‐reported externalizing behavior. Implications for future practice, research, and policy are discussed.     

Leveraging identities: the strategic manipulation of social hierarchies for political gain

Much scholarship on boundary-making focuses on dyadic relationships between “us” and “them.” Yet the presence of multiple categories within societies allows for complex interactions among more than two potentially relevant groups. To capture this phenomenon and its dynamics better, we develop the concept of leveraging: the strategic manipulation of social distance among three or more constructed groups for political gain. The use of one group as a lever against another may involve stigmatizing or elevating categories of people along boundaries of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, class, sexual orientation, or other salient social markers. We theorize these processes and identify the motivations of the initiators of leveraging as well as the range of possible responses to it. We use a pair of empirical case studies drawn from contemporary Europe and additional examples from other settings to demonstrate the relevance of the concept. Conceptualizing leveraging both improves our scholarly understanding of group-making processes and offers political actors tools for interpreting and responding to a common set of strategic practices.