Work, family, and managerial attitudes and practices in the European workplace: comparing Dutch, British, and Slovenian financial sector managers

Managers are key actors shaping employees’ capabilities to utilize work–life policies. However, most research on managers’ implementation of these policies has been conducted in liberal welfare states and ignores the impact of institutional context. In this study, we situate managers within specific workplace and national layers of context. We investigated how managers in financial organizations in the Netherlands, UK, and Slovenia talk about the utilization of work–life policies. Managers’ discourses stressed disruption and dependency considerations in these case studies, as in the US research. However, a further management discourse of the moral case or right thing to do also emerged. The lack of resources for replacing staff on leave creates disruption and reduces managers capability to support the use of work–life policies, even when they are statutory or if managers are inclined be supportive (dependency or moral argument). This is likely to impact on parents' capabilities.     

Sharing Rule Identification for General Collective Consumption Models

We propose a method to set identify bounds on the sharing rule for a general collective household consumption model. Unlike the effects of distribution factors, the level of the sharing rule cannot be uniquely identified without strong assumptions on preferences across households. Our new results show that, though not point identified without these assumptions, strong bounds on the sharing rule can be obtained. We get these bounds by applying revealed preference restrictions implied by the collective model to the household's continuous aggregate demand functions. We obtain informative bounds even if nothing is known about whether each good is public, private, or assignable within the household, though having such information tightens the bounds. We apply our method to US PSID data, obtaining narrow bounds that yield useful conclusions regarding the effects of income and wages on intrahousehold resource sharing, and on the prevalence of individual (as opposed to household level) poverty.     

Pattern classification for diagnostic purposes

Behavioral information acquisition strategies in a diagnosis problem are formulated and examined and the effects on these strategies of both information presentation and user training are tested. Twenty-five subjects participated in an experiment in which the decision maker was required to solve a set of medical diagnosis problems. A matrix of 7 illnesses and 11 possible tests was presented on a micro-computer; the task was to diagnose the correct illness with the minimum number of tests. The results were analyzed using verbal protocols and a computerized record of the user's responses. The results confirm the use of certain behavioral strategies, in particular concentration on a small subset of classes in a regular pattern, and a positional effect on the choice of tests was also detected. The implications of these results on the design of management information systems are discussed.     

Stress at work, social support and companionship: Towards an event-contingent recording approach

After outlining a taxonomy of perspectives on social support, the literature on the direct and buffer effects of social support with respect to occupational stress is reviewed. It is noted that negative direct and buffer effects of support are frequently observed. Methodological and theoretical explanations for these contradictory findings are presented. It is argued that a different methodological approach is needed to examine such explanations. Three studies-among police officers, secretaries, and correctional officers-are briefly described in which the Daily Interaction Record in Organizations (DIRO) was used. With this event-contingent recording method, social interactions and stressful events are assessed over a period of 5 days, allowing the detailed examination of the processes involved in supportive interactions, and of the effects of such processes.     

Extramarital sex in the Netherlands

This investigation of the social psychological and demographic variables associated with extramarital sexual and erotic involvement was carried out on a heterogeneous sample of 250 subjects. About one-quarter of the men and one-fifth of the women reported extramarital coital experience during the past year. The results indicate that subjects with higher educational backgrounds and no church attendance are relatively more involved in extramarital relations. Determinants of extramarital sexual and erotic behavior appear to be quite similar for both sexes.     

Leaders' Attitudes and Computer Use in Religious Congregations

This study explores the attitudes of leaders of religious congregations toward computers. We uncover attitudes toward information (and thus toward computers) that are different from those reported for leaders in other organizational contexts. In short, clergy felt that systematically collecting and storing information and trying to serve as many people as possible could distract them from what is distinctive about their jobs—that the job in a religious congregation is accomplished through personal rather than transactional relationships.     

Why do Socioeconomic Differences in Women’s Living Standards Converge After Union Dissolution?

Union dissolution is a critical event for women’s living standards. Previous work has found that women in high-income unions lose more from union dissolution than women in low-income unions. This study proposes two mechanisms to explain this “convergence” in living standards. The compensation mechanism concerns the ability to compensate the loss of partner earnings with alternative sources of income, whereas the partner independence mechanism concerns how much women stand to lose from dissolution in the first place. To test these mechanisms, the author drew on a unique administrative dataset from the Netherlands, covering women who experienced dissolution within ten years after union formation (N = 57,960). A decomposition analysis showed that convergence was not driven by compensation: women from all income groups decreased their household size and re-partnered, women from low-income unions increased transfer income, and women from high-income unions increased personal earnings and decreased tax payments. Instead, convergence was driven by partner independence: women from lower-income unions depended relatively less on their partners because they relied more on transfer income prior to dissolution. These results demonstrate how partners’ interdependence moderates the consequences of life events. The welfare state plays a crucial role in this process.     

The inverted-U relationship between stress and performance: A field study

To investigate the shape of the relationship between stress resulting from excessive demand and performance, 306 officer cadets in the Israel Defence Forces completed stress questionnaires during their training. Stress was consistently negatively related to various measures of performance. The prediction derived from the inverted-U hypothesis, that those whose ability exceeded demand and those who felt that demands taxed their ability would perform worse than those whose ability matched their demands, was not supported. Until all the requisite conditions for testing the inverted-U hypothesis are met, the authors propose relegating it to the laboratory.