Short Term Gain, Long Term Pain

This paper examines the role of informal job search methods on the labour market outcomes of displaced workers. Informal job search methods could alleviate short-term labour market difficulties of displaced workers by providing information on job opportunities, allowing them to signal their productivity and may mitigate wage losses through better post-displacement job matching. However if displacement results from reductions in demand for specific sectors/skills, the use of informal job search methods may increase the risk of job instability. While informal job search methods are associated with lower wage losses, they lead to increased job instability and increased risk of subsequent job displacement.     

Remembrance of things not past

Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Pp.xv + 216. £20 (hardback); £9.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 300 04 96 68 and 05 24 72.

Debórah Dwork, Children With a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Pp.xlvi + 354; illus. £19.95 (hardback); (paperback forthcoming). ISBN 0 300 05 0542 and 05 44 75.

Dalia Ofer, Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to Israel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Pp.xiii + 408; illus. £30. ISBN 019 506 3406.     

Robust Methods—Some Examples of Their Use

We describe several analyses in which robustness considerations have proved relevant. These examples exhibit the importance of (a) graphic displays as aids to formulating a preliminary model; (b) summary statistics that reduce the influence of outliers, that (c) give added opportunities of detecting relationships, and (d) are not unduly sensitive to granularity in the observations; and (e) techniques that pay due attention to anomalies in the data that superficially may appear to be negligible but that can obscure important effects. Finally, we make some general comments on the advantages and disadvantages of robust methodology.     

Contextualizing LMX within the workgroup: The effects of LMX and justice on relationship quality and resource sharing among peers

While leader–member exchange (LMX) has evolved, a richer understanding continues to evade scholars due to the sustained focus on the leader–member dyad. We argue that LMX theory remains incomplete until contextual factors surrounding these pivotal relationships are accounted for including the impact of coworker exchange relationships, peer exchange, and perceptions of justice regarding individual LMX relationships. A fully crossed experimental design manipulating participant LMX and distributive justice and coworker LMX and distributive justice was employed to understand how these constructs affect coworker exchange relationships. Support was found for a causal model which specifies that justice moderates the causal relationship between LMX similarity and CWX, which subsequently leads to increased sharing of resources among coworkers. The data suggest that workgroup members are savvy to differences within individual leader–member relationships, where the sharing of resources among peers is determined by their own LMX, the LMX of their coworker and perceptions of justice of their respective LMX levels. These findings are contextualized in extant leadership research and practice.     

Structure, Agency, and Context: The Contributions of Geography to World-Systems Analysis

The interaction of geography and world-systems theory has created two groups of work. The first body of work uses world-systems theory as its theoretical framework with minor levels of critique or change. The second body of work attempts to inform world- systems theory by explicitly including a geographical perspective. Human geographers attracted to world-systems theory provide a perspective that highlights the role of agency in what is widely perceived to be a rigid structuralist approach. Key geographical concepts of region and place are viewed as social constructs created within an overarching context of structural imperatives. By conceptualizing places, states, and the macroregions of core, semiperiphery, and periphery as geographical scales, the role of agency in creating and maintaining the important structures and institutions of the capitalist world-economy, such as hegemony, is illustrated. The geographer's interest in the creation of geographical scales results in analysis of the dynamism of the contemporary world-system.