Lean production of intensive cities: Using the power of Italo Calvino's imagination to grasp organizational change

This article analyses the introduction of Lean Production to ‘the Procurement Office’ (the Procurement Office is made anonymous due to promises of confidentiality in the research project ‘Lean without stress’), a work place marked by continuous organizational changes, unfavourable image and high turnover. This is analysed in terms of Italo Calvino's Invisible cities. It is argued that Calvino's themes and prose help us understand change as a multiplicity of temporal intensities producing ambivalence and affect. We describe this use of literary abstractions as a ‘hyperbolic social epistemology’. Through the depiction of four intensifications of Lean Production, the metaphors of Calvino's cities show how reality and illusion; hope and poverty; dreams and death and utopia and dystopia are intricately mingled and produce temporary and equally ambivalent affects of alienation, hypocrisy, self-governance, job-satisfaction, antagonisms and empowerment.     

Youth Unemployment and Opportunities in the Labour Market – The Myth of Lifelong Hysteresis

This paper examines whether the level of risk of unemployment for recently trained youths in the labour market has lasting effects upon their employment opportunities: will a cohort that enters the labour market during a period of high unemployment have a permanently higher rate of unemployment than one that joins the labour market during a period of low unemployment? The connection between occupational choice and employment status after graduation is also examined The analysis encompasses teachers, engineers and unskilled workers. The conclusion is that troughs and highs in the labour market have a significant but not necessarily permanent effect upon unemployment and placement in different industries.     

A Cross‐country Comparison of Attitudes Towards Mothers Working and their Actual Labor Market Experience

In this paper, we use data from the International Social Survey Project to present a cross‐country comparison of attitudes about the labor force participation of mothers. We also estimate earnings functions and probits for full‐time work and examine whether there is a link between attitudes and women’s actual labor market experience across countries. We find that while a woman’s own attitude about work does not directly influence her wage, it does influence the probability that she works full time.     

The magic in the (extra)ordinary: Intensive validation to recalibrate the life-worlds of adolescents exposed to abuse

This qualitative case study aimed to explore environmental circumstances and interactional processes that appeared to be relevant for the dynamics of resilience in adolescents exposed to child abuse. Fieldwork at a learning and coping centre for children and their families was combined with semi-structured interviews with adolescent participants aged 12 to 18 years. A critical realist approach was used to unpack what has been called the ‘ordinary magic’ of resilience. We found that intensively validating qualities of both the environment and relationships seemed to be driving components for resilience. Borrowing ideas from the sociometer theory, we propose that particularly the consistent intensiveness may offer a recalibration of the adolescents' immediate life-worlds, in terms of how they perceive the people they meet and the environments they step into. In keeping with the transactional-ecological model of resilience, we suggest that such a recalibration leads to altered social agency that becomes visible through their immediate social participation.     

Choice and constraint in budget-making

A theory of the budgetary process within public resource allocation has to recognize that decision rules may vary over time and program. Our findings based on a new econometric approach indicate that various different decision mechanisms operate in different categories of public resource allocation. Variation over time is particularly difficult to accommodate within the incrementalist approach as incremental decision rules imply structural stability over time. We find the opposite to be true of the programs analysed.A model of the public expenditure process has to take choice into account to a larger extent. The attempt to make budget-making a function of constraints violates the occurrence of shiftpoints that is typical of the data. The existence of a base and the resort to mechanical rules for the derivation of the yearly increments implies a deterministic interpretation of budgetary behavior. Budgets are made in choice processes where the principal actors employ various decision rules meaning that budget-making is more voluntaristic than deterministic. The choice rules employed for the derivation of requests and appropriations are not mechanistic decision rules.     

A Generalized View on Continuum Regression

ABSTRACT. We generalize the relationship between continuum regression (Stone & Brooks, 1990) and ridge regression, by showing that any optimization principle will yield a regressor proportional to a ridge regressor, provided only that the principle implies maximizing a function of the regressor's sample correlation coefficient and its sample variance. This relationship shows that continuum regression as defined via ridge regression ("least squares ridge regression") is a more generally valid methodology than previously realized, and also opens up for alternative choices of its second and subsequent factors.     

Qualitätsmanagement und Qualitätssicherung im Coaching

Quality management and quality assurance in coaching Presently, there is an apparent discrepancy between the demand for and the lack of quality discussion in coaching. In both the professional continuing education or staff development respectively and in psychotherapy these quality discussions have been led for a long time. These quality discussions are investigated according to a benchmarking. This article aims at transferring applicable knowledge from these working fields to coaching. Additionally it is focused on minimal standards in coaching which are already recognizable. Finally, conclusions are drawn with regard to urgent objectives around quality management in coaching which have to be achieved in future.     

A psychosocial and biomedical comparison between men in six contrasting service occupations

A study of psychosocial job factors and physiological states was conducted using 150 men, aged between 25 and 60, working in six widely different occupations—freight handlers, aircraft mechanics, air traffic controllers, physicians, waiters and symphony musicians. The aim of the study was to characterize any differences in physiological parameters in relation to differences in psychosocial job characteristics. Analyses of variance were used to test differences between groups. The results indicated that waiters, the group reporting the most unfavourable working conditions, tended to have many cardiovascular risk factors. Physicians, who had relatively few cardiovascular risk factors, reported high decision latitude and many emotional reactions in their daily life and had relatively high cortisol and low prolactin levels in plasma.