Keeping a close watch– the rise of self-surveillance and the threat of digital exposure

Digital technologies have given rise to increased occurrences of self-surveillance and forms of 'virtual vigilantism'. This has progressed from key moments such as the video recording of the Rodney King incident, to recording human rights abuses, to citizen grassroots surveillance. From this has emerged the phenomenon known as citizen journalism where recent urban crises have been recorded on mobile phones by the individuals involved. Also on the increase are forms of mob vigilantism, or 'participatory panopticon'; examples here include phone images spread over the Internet as severe forms of 'community punishment'. I argue that these unmediated forms of bottom-up surveillance – sousveillance – show the early signs of a new type of civil responsibility that stands unregulated and without restraint. This paper addresses the issues of increased individualised self-surveillance and asks whether this is the consequence of a personalised resistance to an ever increasing surveillance society.     

Outsourcing human resource management: A comparison of Russian and U.S. practices

Our objective is to determine the current state of outsourcing of HRM functions at companies operating in Russia, both Russian and Russian-based foreign com-panies, and compare and contrast the results with the findings of the Society for Human Research Management (SHRM) study of outsourcing practices at American companies in the United States. The comparison reveals the differences and similarities in terms of reasons for outsourcing as well as the obstacles and problems in implementing HRM outsourcing decisions to a foreign setting.     

Hexavalent Chromium and Lung Cancer in the Chromate Industry: A Quantitative Risk Assessment

The purpose of this investigation was to estimate excess lifetime risk of lung cancer death resulting from occupational exposure to hexavalent-chromium-containing dusts and mists. The mortality experience in a previously studied cohort of 2,357 chromate chemical production workers with 122 lung cancer deaths was analyzed with Poisson regression methods. Extensive records of air samples evaluated for water-soluble total hexavalent chromium were available for the entire employment history of this cohort. Six different models of exposure-response for hexavalent chromium were evaluated by comparing deviances and inspection of cubic splines. Smoking (pack-years) imputed from cigarette use at hire was included in the model. Lifetime risks of lung cancer death from exposure to hexavalent chromium (assuming up to 45 years of exposure) were estimated using an actuarial calculation that accounts for competing causes of death. A linear relative rate model gave a good and readily interpretable fit to the data. The estimated rate ratio for 1 mg/m3-yr of cumulative exposure to hexavalent chromium (as CrO3), with a lag of five years, was RR=2.44 (95% CI=1.54-3.83). The excess lifetime risk of lung cancer death from exposure to hexavalent chromium at the current OSHA permissible exposure limit (PEL) (0.10 mg/m3) was estimated to be 255 per 1,000 (95% CI: 109-416). This estimate is comparable to previous estimates by U.S. EPA, California EPA, and OSHA using different occupational data. Our analysis predicts that current occupational standards for hexavalent chromium permit a lifetime excess risk of dying of lung cancer that exceeds 1 in 10, which is consistent with previous risk assessments.     

Remarriage patterns among recent widows and widowers

Remarriage is one of the most important determinants of physical and economic well-being among the widowed. The goal of this study is to estimate how hazard rates for remarriage vary among widows and widowers on the basis of both observable and unobservable characteristics. The remarriage estimates rely on nationally representative samples of widows and widowers from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Continuous-time hazard rate regressions indicate strong age and duration dependence effects for middle-aged widows and widowers and for older widowers. Among middle-aged widows, blacks and those with dependent children in the home have lower rates of remarriage. For middle-aged widowers, living in urbanized areas limits the prospects of remarriage. For older widowers, education and, to some extent, economic status appear to have positive effects on the remarriage rates. Overall, age and time since widowhood have the strongest and most consistent effects on remarriage rates for different widowed groups.     

Majority voting rules and the union success rate in national labor relations board representation elections

This paper simulates how the union success rate in representation elections would be affected if the NLRB reverted from its current simple-majority voting rule to its original majority-in-unit voting rule. Such a rule change would have altered 21 percent of decertification and 16 percent of certification victories over the period 1977–81, resulting in the loss of 180,400 actual or potential bargaining unit members for the union movement. Abstentions play an important role in election outcomes. Under the present voting rule unions have no clear advantage to “get out the vote” in decertification elections, but a clear disadvantage in certification elections. Under a majority-in-unit rule unions hold an advantage when they “get out the vote” in all representation elections. I would like to thank Mike Bognanno, Jim Dworkin, Paul Schumann, two reviewers, and the editor for helpful comments and David Wilson for excellent research assistance. I would also like to thank the NLRB for providing the election data tape.     

Playing Well with Others in Kindergarten: The Benefit of Siblings at Home

There are many reasons to expect that children gain something by growing up with siblings, yet there is surprisingly scant evidence of this advantage. Indeed, the vast majority of research assessing the consequences of siblings reports negative effects: Children with many siblings do not perform as well in school as children with few siblings. By focusing almost exclusively on educational outcomes, however, previous studies have neglected ways in which children might benefit from siblings. One possibility, for example, is that siblings promote children's social and interpersonal skills. In this study, we analyze a sample of kindergartners (N = 20,649) from The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 to replicate the often‐noted negative relationship between number of siblings and cognitive outcomes, and then demonstrate that this pattern does not extend to social skills. Findings are consistent with the view that children negotiate peer relationships better when they grow up with at least one sibling.