Engendering Response: Professional Gesture and the Assessment of Eyesight in Optometry Consultations

Many of the procedures undertaken within healthcare require specialized forms of participation that may be unfamiliar, even disturbing, to patients or clients. The practitioner has to encourage and enable participation in the investigation in an appropriate fashion while preserving the structure and integrity of the procedure. In this article, we consider optometry and the deployment of a vision test, known as subject refraction, that provides data to help determine the characteristics of any corrective lens that may be required by clients. The procedure's ability to establish robust and reliable data relies upon the optometrist's ability to encourage the client to respond to a series of stimuli without consideration or reflection. That is, the client is required to produce an unwitting response—conduct that might be considered nonsymbolic rather than symbolic. In this article, we also consider the optometrist's talk and bodily comportment during subjective refraction and how it serves to shape and determine the quality of the client's response and participation, and in turn to produce reliable test results.     

Veränderte KontinuitätAltered Continuity

Despite profound economic and social changes in recent decades, many school leavers in Germany still go through the dual system of vocational training. The stability of this educational institution raises the question of whether, and if so how, apprentices’ entries into employment have changed in this period. Applying the method of sequence analysis, we look at process-produced longitudinal data from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). It can be shown that the so-called standard pattern, that is the immediate hiring by the training firm on a full-time basis, has not been the norm at any time. Since the 1980s, we have observed a slight tendency for apprenticeship graduates to leave their training firms early. At the same time, continuation of employment within the training firm persists, and apprentices more frequently work part-time. We find the standard pattern of labour market entry to be most prevalent in large firms. Whereas women very often work part-time after their apprenticeships, foreign-born apprentices in particular suffer from disadvantageous labour market entry patterns, including longer periods of unemployment.     

Die Einstellung zur Einführung des „Doppelpasses“

In this study the attitude towards the new nationality law in Germany is explained by a value/expectancy theory of attitude. 215 standardized face-to-face-interviews were performed with a quota sample. The results of this survey show that the value and expectancy theory of attitude is extremely successful in explaining the attitude towards the new nationality law. Models explaining the predictor variable of the attitude theory and a feedback-model were tested.     

Beyond Agency

The reason why agency/structure and micro/macro debates remain unresolved is the bad essentialist habit of treating such pairs as opposite natural kinds. Once variation is allowed, agency and structure, or micro and macro, are temporary poles bracketing a continuum, with social entities moving along this continuum over time. Explaining these transformations from agency into structure, or micro into macro, and vice versa is the challenge for explanatory theory. This challenge is met by switching to a constructivist level of second-order observing. Then, agency and structure become variable devices or frames different observers might use to perform different sorts of cultural work.     

Demande et emploi dans les chaînes d'approvisionnement mondiales

L'essor des chaînes d'approvisionnement mondiales (CAM) éloigne l'emploi de la demande, géographiquement et sectoriellement. Pour mieux comprendre le phénomène, les auteurs mesurent l'emploi lié aux CAM selon sa localisation et celle de la demande, en se fondant sur les données de la base WIOD et en complétant les estimations déjà présentées par le BIT. L'analyse porte sur la période 1995–2013 et sur 40 économies. Elle montre que la Chine, principale bénéficiaire de la demande liée aux CAM autrefois, contribue maintenant à l'alimenter, tout comme les relations de production entre économies émergentes. En outre, le poids des services liés à une demande manufacturière augmente.     

Corporate social responsibility driven innovation

This study identifies the substantial relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and innovation activities of firms. Using the French Vigeo sustainability rating and the Thomson Reuters, we divided 619 firms into groups by their industry sectors, regions, and firm characteristics such as size and age. We premise that innovative investment is needed to prepare tomorrow's profits not only by considering investments in technology and in R&D, but also by dealing with sustainability to human, social, environmental, technical, and economic investments. Consequently, when the firm manipulates its short- and long-run business strategies, the consideration of the correlation between types of investment and CSR initiatives will lead to more cooperating effect on the outcome of investments. The findings provide a comprehensive understanding on the effect of sustainable management strategies on the innovation and sustainability of firms.     

Job quality,industrial relations and the crisis in Europe

This paper reports results from recent Eurofound research on the impact of the crisis on industrial relations and working conditions in Europe, based on the output of Eurofound's European Working Conditions Observatory and European Industrial Relations Observatory and data from the European Working Conditions Survey. Overall, the crisis – even if it is sometimes difficult to separate the effect of the crisis from megatrends in working conditions and industrial relations – seems to have had an impact on both domains. With reference to industrial relations, the impact of the crisis has influenced actors, processes, and outcomes. Regarding working conditions, the results appear to be in line with the literature on the topic, which relates the crisis to an increase in job insecurity, a decrease in work intensity, in working hours, and in anti-social working time arrangements, and a general improvement in terms of health risks and related outcomes.     

Flexible pair-copula estimation in D-vines using bivariate penalized splines

The paper presents a new method for flexible fitting of D-vines. Pair-copulas are estimated semi-parametrically using penalized Bernstein polynomials or constant and linear B-splines, respectively, as spline bases in each knot of the D-vine throughout each level. A penalty induce smoothness of the fit while the high dimensional spline basis guarantees flexibility. To ensure uniform univariate margins of each pair-copula, linear constraints are placed on the spline coefficients and quadratic programming is used to fit the model. The amount of penalizations for each pair-copula is driven by a penalty parameter which is selected in a numerically efficient way. Simulations and practical examples accompany the presentation.