Coming to Terms with Termination of Public Organizations

Why do some public organizations survive and others do not? The bureaucratic retrenchment efforts since the 1980s showed public administration scholars that the structure of the state has its own demography. Yet studies on the survival of public organizations tested different hypotheses using different methods and definitions. This review article reflects on the consequences of different takes on termination, it compares and reports on the main findings thus far and argues that we should study organizational survival focusing on transitions to build on existing empirical work.     

Trends in age at marriage in postwar Ireland

Age at marriage in the Republic of Ireland has declined substantially from the very high level that prevailed in 1946. Between 1946 and 1969 the median age of grooms fell from 32 to 26 and of brides from 27 to 24. To some extent this is a reflection of the declining importance of the rural population but to a much greater extent it is due to the falling age at marriage among all sections of the population. Simultaneous with the decline in age at marriage, the frequency distributions of brides' and grooms' ages have become both more skewed and more peaked. Thus earlier marriage has also meant greater uniformity in age at marriage, but the phenomenon of first marriage at a fairly advanced age persists. There has been a marked trend towards greater equality between husbands' and wives' ages over the postwar period: the proportion of marriages in which there was less than five years' gap between the ages of the bride and groom rose from 49 percent in 1946 to 71 percent in 1969. The percentage of marriages in which the groom was ten or more years older than the bride has fallen from 22 to seven percent. The evidence suggests that the “marriage market” became less favourable to males (especially older males) over the period and that part of the narrowing in the gap in relative age of brides and grooms has been due to the greater willingness of younger males to marry. It also seems that changes in the age structure of the unmarried population has had an impact on the age distribution of grooms.     

Dual‐earner parent couples’ work and care during COVID‐19

COVID‐19 and the associated lockdowns meant many working parents were faced with doing paid work and family care at home simultaneously. To investigate how they managed, this article draws a subsample of parents in dual‐earner couples (n = 1536) from a national survey of 2722 Australian men and women conducted during lockdown in May 2020. It asked how much time respondents spent in paid and unpaid labour, including both active and supervisory care, and about their satisfaction with work–family balance and how their partner shared the load. Overall, paid work time was slightly lower and unpaid work time was very much higher during lockdown than before it. These time changes were most for mothers, but gender gaps somewhat narrowed because the relative increase in childcare was higher for fathers. More mothers than fathers were dissatisfied with their work–family balance and partner’s share before COVID‐19. For some the pandemic improved satisfaction levels, but for most they became worse. Again, some gender differences narrowed, mainly because more fathers also felt negatively during lockdown than they had before.     

Parsimonious Gaussian mixture models

Parsimonious Gaussian mixture models are developed using a latent Gaussian model which is closely related to the factor analysis model. These models provide a unified modeling framework which includes the mixtures of probabilistic principal component analyzers and mixtures of factor of analyzers models as special cases. In particular, a class of eight parsimonious Gaussian mixture models which are based on the mixtures of factor analyzers model are introduced and the maximum likelihood estimates for the parameters in these models are found using an AECM algorithm. The class of models includes parsimonious models that have not previously been developed. These models are applied to the analysis of chemical and physical properties of Italian wines and the chemical properties of coffee; the models are shown to give excellent clustering performance.     

Gender Segregation,Size of Workplace and the Public Sector

Gender segregation is considered to be a key structuring factor in the labour market, and is central to explanations of phenomena as diverse as the everyday experience of men’s and women’s employment to the underachievement of women and the limited impact of equal pay legislation. Studies of occupational segregation by gender tend to be polarized between qualitative and quantitative extremes. At the quantitative end, a primary focus of research has been to quantify segregation to a single index, permitting simple comparisons between countries and over time. However, detailed case studies of particular occupations have often hinted at ways in which breakdowns in occupational segregation have been replaced by other forms of gender segregation. This paper will present data showing that even within occupational categories there is still significant gender segregation and concentration by public/private sector and by size of workplace. For instance, female pharmacists are very over-represented, and female gardeners very under-represented, in the public sector. And the general tendency for women to work in smaller workplaces is severe for some occupations (e.g. office managers) and reversed in other occupations (e.g. production fitters). These analyses question the usefulness of single indices which take account only of segregation or concentration by occupation and therefore underestimate the gendering of job opportunities even within mixed occupations.     

Life Satisfaction Across the Lifespan: Findings from Two Nationally Representative Panel Studies

Two large-scale, nationally representative panel studies (the German Socio Economic Panel Study and the British Household Panel Study) were used to assess changes in life satisfaction over the lifespan. The cross-sectional and longitudinal features of these studies were used to isolate age-related changes from confounding factors including instrumentation effects and cohort effects. Although estimated satisfaction trajectories varied somewhat across studies, two consistent findings emerged. First, both studies show that life satisfaction does not decline over much of adulthood. Second, there is a steep decline in life satisfaction among those older than 70. The British data also showed a relatively large increase in satisfaction from the 40s to the early 70s. Thus, age differences in well-being can be quite large and deserve increased empirical and theoretical attention.     

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Abstract

This paper describes a content analysis in which 902 television commercials were coded for religious symbolism, science and professional expertise. Evidence obtained from this exploratory study is neither definitive nor exhaustive, but it is suggestive and provocative. Data show that religious symbolism is rarely found in television ads, and commercials using science or professional expertise constituted only nine percent of the sample. Apparently, television advertisers do not view appeals to religion or science as especially helpful for selling products.     

The Achilles' heel of scale service design in social security administration: The case of the United Kingdom's Universal Credit

This article takes a critical view of the United Kingdom government's design for the delivery of the Universal Credit (UC) benefit reforms. It is argued that the UC is destined to fail because of the policy's extension into specifying the means (“digital by default”) of delivery for such services. The authors argue that an unseen but ubiquitous set of “scale” management assumptions has been allowed to infiltrate the means by which the government intends to enact its headline policy objective to “make work pay”. Following Seddon's “Vanguard Method”, a practical example of how a better service was designed in a local authority housing benefits service is then examined. Results from this service include being able to deal with up to 50 per cent more demand, with fewer resources, in half the official target time. Finally, the article will conclude with a call for more evidence‐based policy.