“Choice” and Feminist Praxis in Neoliberal Times

This article addresses the visual debate around a new image of the autonomous woman emerging on satellite television in West Bengal, India, a region rapidly changing under the influx of multinational finance. While this image appears to promote a revolutionary vision of choice opposing gender stratifications, it responds to the sexual anxieties of a shifting postcolonial context by reconciling women's choices with patriarchal and communalist values. To justify its ostensible “feminist” revolution, the imagery draws upon indigenous oppositional traditions of gender portrayal while flexibly utilizing opposition in the services of an inequitable market.

Even as the neoliberal canon of (free) women and (unfree) labor is narrowcast on regional-language satellite channels throughout Bengal and its diasporas, this canon is being debated through critical embodiments of women, work, and choice in oppositional-feminist cinema. I look, on the one hand, at televisual adaptations of woman-centered works by a foremost gender-activist of the anti-colonial era, Rabindranath Tagore. The adaptive canon is read in tandem with a widely popular game show on Bengali satellite television called The Earning Homemaker. On the other hand, I consider how oppositional-feminist filmmaker Aparna Sen is undoing the prevalent canon of woman's autonomy in her recent films. My point overall is to explore how we could disentangle the oppositional from dominant neo-humanist communication patterns. I argue that we must situate various depictions of women's “choice” within specific relations of power, distribution, and technologies of persuasion—considering what differs and why the differences tend to be elided.     

Modelling the Inverse Association between Breastfeeding and Contraceptive Use

Previous studies of the inverse association between breastfeeding and contraceptive use have relied on current status data on at least one of the variables. In this paper we suggest a new way of modelling the joint temporal association of the adoption of contraception and the termination of breastfeeding over the course of a birth interval. The approach is implemented with survey data from rural Mexico. It involves first estimating a competing-risks model in which both hazards are considered simultaneous, together with a set of relevant covariates. Conditional analyses are then carried out to estimate the hazards of each event conditional on the timing of the other. By comparing the covariates, we gauge the extent to which the occurrence of one event raises or lowers the hazard of the other. The results show that, in rural Mexico, the timing of the termination of breastfeeding and that of starting contraceptive use are closely related, and that there exists a surprisingly neat interval of 120 days in which the action takes place.     

Risk factors of severity of abuse against older women in the home setting: A multinational European study

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ecological risk factors of abuse against older women. Data from 2,880 older women were randomly collected in five European countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Lithuania, and Portugal) using a standardized questionnaire. Results indicate that overall 30.1 % older women had at least one experience of abuse in the past year. The findings demonstrate that a single emphasis on personal risk factors (e.g., health, coping) is important but too simple: Abuse is multifaceted and is embedded in environmental (e.g., loneliness, household income) as well as macrocultural contexts (e.g., old age dependency ratio).     

Toward a Refined Insight Into the Importance of Volunteers’ Motivations for Need-Based Experiences,Job Satisfaction,Work Effort,and Turnover Intentions in Nonprofit Sports Clubs: A Person-Centered Approach

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Extensive variable-centered research guided by Self-Determination Theory (SDT) has provided insights into...     

自媒体时代网络热点事件的形成

近年来,以社交为基础的“自媒体”的迅猛发展使得政治、经济、文化等社会各个领域都进入了社交媒体时代,网民成为网络媒体的主体.网络成为社会民声民意集散地,当公共事件发生时,网民会通过自媒体进行意见的表达和情绪的宣泄,由此形成一些在网络上受关注的网络热点事件.本文试图从自媒体的角度探究网络热点事件的形成的基础,探索网络热点事件产生和传播的因素和规律.     

Delay analysis of a discrete-time GI − GI − 1 queue with reservation-based priority scheduling

In this paper, we study a discrete-time single-server queueing system where the arriving traffic consists of both delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant streams. We analyze the effects of a reservation-based scheduling discipline on the delay characteristics of both types of traffic. Under this discipline, a placeholder packet is inserted in the queue to accommodate future delay-sensitive arrivals, allowing them to bypass a part of the queue, without suppressing the delay-tolerant traffic.

On the basis of a probability generating functions (pgf) approach, we analyze the system state distribution and the delay distribution for either traffic type and present closed-form expressions for the expected delays as well as the tail probabilities of the packet delays. We illustrate the results comparing the delay performance of our reservation-based scheduling discipline to the performance achieved by the traditional Absolute Priority (AP) and First In First Out (FIFO) disciplines.     

The Changing Influence of Societal Culture on Job Satisfaction across Europe

This paper contributes to the growing multidisciplinary body of literature on subjective well‐being by investigating the longitudinal stability and impact of societal cultural values (SCVs) – as opposed to the more common organizational values – on job satisfaction. It is assumed that SCVs evolve slowly; hence, their impact on job satisfaction is likely to remain stable over time. False adherence to this assumption could cause misalignment between organizational policies/practices and expectations formed by societal culture, decreasing job satisfaction and adversely affecting productivity, competiveness and prosperity. Four waves of the European Values Study are used to examine whether SCVs have evolved and their impacts on job satisfaction over a relatively short time: 1981–2008. SCVs are parameterized through reference to traditional vs secular‐rational, and survival vs self‐expression value continuums. Results indicate that the strength of many SCVs has declined, the impacts of traditional societal values on job satisfaction have remained fairly constant, and the impacts of survival societal values on job satisfaction have declined substantially over this sample period. These reductions in SCVs amplify the importance of accounting for such changes when designing new or adjusting existing policies/practices to enhance job satisfaction and stimulate improvements in productivity, competitiveness and prosperity.     

The mediating role of frustration of psychological needs in the relationship between job insecurity and work-related well-being

Abstract

This study aims to test a new process underlying the negative relationship between job insecurity and work-related well-being. Specifically, based on Self-Determination Theory, frustration of the psychological needs for autonomy, belongingness and competence was expected to explain the associations between job insecurity and emotional exhaustion and vigour (i.e. the core energy-related components of burnout and work engagement, respectively). Structural equation modelling using data from a heterogeneous sample of 3185 Flemish employees confirmed that frustration of the three needs mediated the association between job insecurity and both outcomes. These results suggest that job insecurity is related to impaired work-related well-being, because it frustrates employees’ psychological needs. This study contributes to a rather small, but growing body of research on the theoretical explanations of the negative consequences of job insecurity for employees’ work-related well-being.     

Supplier code of conduct–state-of-the-art and customisation in the electronics industry

In the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR), one efficient way to improve the ethical behaviour of a company is the implementation of a code of conduct. When focused on suppliers, this code is referred to as the supplier code of conduct (SCoC). Specific, application-oriented research on SCoCs is rare. The main goals of the present article are to define the state-of-the-art in SCoCs and to show how this review can be used in industrial practice when defining a company-specific SCoC. This article uses the electronics industry as an example. The state-of-the-art review of the content of the SCoCs is structured in five main categories of issues: labour standards, health and safety, environment, ethics and compliance. The practical relevance of this review is demonstrated by applying it in the development of a customised SCoC for a company as a part of the company's corporate risk management activities. This review uses the content analysis of SCoCs based on the website disclosures of the Forbes Fortune 2000 (Technology Hardware & Equipment) companies; which yielded 24 SCoCs. The application was done in an action research framework with a partner company, and the results were verified with the help of a focus group consisting of 10 companies.