Obstacles invisibles et représentation des femmes aux postes de décision en Espagne

Les auteurs présentent les résultats d'une étude sur les caractéristiques personnelles et les qualifications d'hommes et de femmes assumant des fonctions de direction dans des entreprises espagnoles, leur situation professionnelle et leur point de vue sur l'égalité des sexes. Par rapport à leurs homologues masculins, les Espagnoles occupant des postes à responsabilités sont plus jeunes mais aussi qualifiées, voire plus, et elles ont moins d'enfants. Cependant, elles sont toujours confrontées à des obstacles qui empěchent la pleine exploitation d'un capital humain précieux. Malgré les mesures adoptées, plus de neuf postes de décision sur dix sont toujours occupés par des hommes.     

Social exchange and common agency in organizations

We study the relation between formal incentives and social exchange in organizations where employees work for several managers and reciprocate a manager’s attention with higher effort. To this end we develop a common agency model with two-sided moral hazard. We show that when management attention is not contractible, the first-best can only be achieved by granting autonomy to employees together with incentive pay for both managers and employees. When neither attention nor effort are contractible, an ‘attention race’ arises, as each manager tries to sway the employee’s effort his way. While this may result in too much social exchange, the attention race may also be a blessing because it alleviates managers’ moral-hazard problem in attention provision. Lastly, we show how organizational structure can be used to motivate managers and employees in the absence of formal incentives.     

Making projects, making friends: online community as catalyst for interactive media creation

To become full and active participants in today's technologically saturated society, young people need to become creators (and not just consumers) of interactive media. Developing the requisite abilities and capacities is not a wholly individual process; it is important for young people to have access to communities where they can collaborate and share ideas. This article uses the Scratch online community for exploring how different forms of participation and collaboration can support and shape the ways in which young people develop as creators of interactive media. We describe participation in this community in terms of a spectrum ranging from socializing to creating and present examples of three forms of collaboration within the community. We argue that the most exciting interactive media creation and valuable learning experiences are taking place in the middle space, where participants draw on the best of socializing and creating practices.     

Violence against bisexuals, gays and lesbians in Mexico City

An essential premise of this work is that three dominant ideologies explain oppression against BGL, as a result of a gender system: adhesion to gender stereotypes, androcentrism and heterosexism. Three hundred eighteen bisexual and gay males (BG) and 188 bisexual and lesbian females (BL) were surveyed. By means of a self-applied questionnaire, variables of interest were researched. The following trends were observed: an important number of men and women interviewed suffered violence in their childhood and adolescence because they defied gender stereotypes, and not because of their sexual orientation; BG males were more often victims of violence than BL females. Within the BG group, those who challenged gender stereotypes were more frequently attacked than those who did not; men were identified as aggressors more frequently than women; and in the BG group, gender stereotype transgression was associated with the perception of suffering violence in the future.     

Subjective machines: Probabilistic risk assessment based on deep learning of soft information

For several years machine learning methods have been proposed for risk classification. While machine learning methods have also been used for failure diagnosis and condition monitoring, to the best of our knowledge, these methods have not been used for probabilistic risk assessment. Probabilistic risk assessment is a subjective process. The problem of how well machine learning methods can emulate expert judgments is challenging. Expert judgments are based on mental shortcuts, heuristics, which are susceptible to biases. This paper presents a process for developing natural language-based probabilistic risk assessment models, applying deep learning algorithms to emulate experts’ quantified risk estimates. This allows the risk analyst to obtain an a priori risk assessment when there is limited information in the form of text and numeric data. Universal sentence embedding (USE) with gradient boosting regression (GBR) trees trained over limited structured data presented the most promising results. When we apply these models’ outputs to generate survival distributions for autonomous systems’ likelihood of loss with distance, we observe that for open water and ice shelf operating environments, the differences between the survival distributions generated by the machine learning algorithm and those generated by the experts are not statistically significant.     

Voluntary childlessness in a society reluctant to change

Voluntary childlessness constitutes a social and generational rupture from tradition and culture, with significant effects on the reproduction of the so-called life and family cycle. This study aims at understanding the reasons why people decide to remain childless and the social pressures that this decision generates. A qualitative phenomenological study was conducted on the emerging decision of non-motherhood and non-fatherhood based on semi-structured interviews with 56 people who autonomously made the decision to opt out of parenthood. This paper underscores the multiple biographical situations involved in the decision, in addition to the concerns about personal development and future. The current social crisis context serves as a means of justification to lessen social and family pressure. We conclude that people who have made this decision promote a different meaning from that of reproduction as a mechanism of the social order.     

Putting experts in their place: Achieving policy impact as an outsider-academic in civil service reforms in Slovakia

This paper studies two processes of civil service reform in Slovakia during the period of 2014–2015 in order to reflect on the involvement of an ‘outsider-academic’ and her strategies to achieve policy impact. The context of such involvement are multi-level processes permeated by political interests and poor on evidence, which favour strategic interests, bargaining and political pressure and contestation (the mode of ‘powering’) and a mode of legal-based ‘puzzling’ as opposed to a conceptual, intellectual search for solutions friendly towards outside academics—and achieving only incremental results. We theorise on the success of these strategies (including helping serendipity, throwing ideas to see what sticks, mobilising allies, anchoring a non-binding concept, and finding and developing long-term connections) and sketch analogies and differences between the position of an outsider-academic and a policy entrepreneur. We rely on auto-ethnographic data and documentation of the work of the committees involved and their outputs.     

More than ideology: perceived unfairness differentiates supporters of a new anti-austerity party from supporters of traditional left-wing parties / Más que ideología: la injusticia percibida diferencia a los simpatizantes de un nuevo partido antiausteridad de los simpatizantes de los partidos tradicionales de izquierda

After the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008, anti-austerity parties in South Europe have gained prominence and dramatically transformed the political landscape. In Spain, the emergence of PODEMOS, a left-wing, anti-austerity party, has jeopardized the traditional two-party system. However, little is known about the psychological reasons that prompted more than one million Spaniards to vote for a newly created party in its first elections. To fill this gap the present study examines why people intend to vote for PODEMOS as opposed to traditional left-wing parties. We found that in addition to conventional predictors of voting behaviour (ideological orientation and party identification), perceived unfairness — a key variable within the collective action theory — critically influenced the preference for PODEMOS as opposed to traditional left-wing parties. A qualitative analysis of the reasons that participants reported in an open question yielded similar results. These findings suggest that supporting an anti-austerity party might be considered a collective action aimed at promoting social change.     

Personal psychological resources,resilience and self-efficacy and their relationship with psychological distress in situations of unemployment / Los recursos psicológicos personales,resiliencia y autoeficacia,y su relación con el malestar psicológico en situaciones de desempleo

According to Hobfoll’s conservation of resources theory (1989), psychological resources such as resilience and self-efficacy could mediate the effects of unemployment on well-being. The objective of this study is to analyse the mediating role of self-efficacy and resilience on the relationship between the amount of time unemployed and psychological distress. A sample of unemployed persons from the Region of Murcia was used (N = 280). With a transversal design and using the macro PROCESS for SPSS (2013), a multiple mediation model is proposed which analyses the mediating role of psychological resources in relation to the amount of time unemployed and self-perceived health. The explained variance of this model is 23.79%. The results show that only self-efficacy partially mediates in the relationship between the two variables (β = .18, SD = 0.06, p < .01). The main contribution of this article is showing that personal psychological resources are an effective tool to cope with life stressors, such as, in this case, unemployment.