Children as Witnesses: Understanding Their Capacities,Needs, and Experiences

Historically the law regarded children as inherently unreliable and made it difficult for them to testify. Since 1975 awareness of child abuse has increased and research has established that children can be reliable witnesses. Governments began to recognize the needs and capacities of children and enacted legal reforms to facilitate prosecutions for child abuse. This paper reports on a survey of victim witness workers and other justice system professionals which reveals some of the continuedfailings of that system in dealing with children. Althoughrelatively rare, there are cases of false allegations of abuse, usually a result of investigations by poorly trained professionals. Further legal reforms and better human supports are required to ensure that the needs of children are met and their capacities as witnesses are fully appreciated.     

THE ACADEMIC FLOW MODEL: A MARKOV-CHAIN MODEL FOR FACULTY PLANNING*

A Markov-chain faculty planning model to be used with institution-specific data is presented to describe and better understand the complex phenomena of faculty movement through an institution and on its relationship to salary costs, composition of the faculty, and faculty turnover rate. The model updates the earlier work done at Stanford University and Oregon State University by the addition of states for fixed-term appointments and for part-time FTEs to reflect accurately the current hiring trends at many institutions. The model is implemented and tested at two different institutions. The findings suggest that the model is a viable means of gaining useful insights and quantitative data on the faculty profile, salary costs, expected departures, and part-time trends. And further, when used as a planning tool, and the model apparently is comprehensive and flexible enough to analyze the probable effects, both in the short and long run, of alternative personnel policies on the faculty composition.     

Thinking possibilistically in a probabilistic world

We cannot live on the knife edge of disaster all the time. We cannot even think about disastrous extremes with any clarity, says Lee Clarke . For 300 years we have equated thinking probabilistically with thinking rationally, but is that enough for thinking about terrorism, air crashes—or even God?     

Who Is to Blame for Deviance in Organizations? The Role of Scholarly Worldviews

This paper explores two of the most important challenges facing contemporary scholars who seek to assign blame for deviance in organizational contexts. The first concerns the selection of an appropriate level of analysis. The second focuses on the social meaning of intent, or willfulness, also called mens rea in criminal trials. We suggest that scholarly worldviews play a central role in determining how these issues are discussed in the literature, thereby impacting the assignment of blame. Throughout, we use the case of the Tuskegee syphilis study to illustrate key issues.     

Becoming Self-Employed

This study explored how persons become self-employed. In critical incident interviews (Flanagan, 1954) with 5 self-employed persons, the critical events that assisted or hindered progress toward self-employment were elicited in chronological order. First, the 108 incidents were organized into 22 categories. Next, using the chronological order of categories of events, 2 basic patterns or plots for becoming self-employed were identified. Last, 8 distinctive themes of personal progress in the patterns were described. In general, becoming self-employed involved establishing conditions of action that enhanced a sense of agency, enabling each person to make a decision.     

Boardroom Operational and Financial Control: an Insider View*

This study examines the control processes and their dynamics at the board level of two non‐profit organizations with a view to penetrating and exploring directors' control orientations, discourse and decisions in their holistic context. In comparison with the predominantly survey‐ and interview‐based prior research on board‐level control, this study offers a distinctly processual view through its employment of a longitudinal complete member researcher participant observer methodology. Three primary themes of boardroom control focus are identified and analysed. These are control reporting, director's control orientation and the board's budgetary control approach. Directors' strategic orientation is found to be the primary driver of their exercise of control, with reporting systems and routine monitoring emerging as adjuncts to their primary strategic control focus. Strategy‐triggered control activity exhibits itself largely via directors' cost–benefit and risk management analyses communally developed in the course of board meeting exchanges.     

International public relations as a predictor of prominence of US news coverage

This study aims to test the public relations efforts of other countries as a predictor of their newsworthiness in the US news media, after controlling for national traits and social significance. Based on a content analysis of US newspaper and television news coverage (New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN) of 97 countries, this study found that the public relations of other countries’ governments is a significant predictor of these countries’ prominence in the US news coverage.     

Who Cares If Police Become Violent? Explaining Approval of Police Use of Force Using a National Sample

Understanding police violence is important in part because police violence, if generally tolerated, could transform a society based on law into one governed by political and personal whim. This research asks whether the conflict perspective can explain which groups are more likely to approve of police use of force, and whether several dimensions of power are at issue or just a few. Previous studies have found that race is the most important factor in determining approval of police use of force. Gender, age, class, and other variables have shown mixed results. Using a national sample (1998 General Social Survey), this paper contributes a more comprehensive examination of this issue to the small body of literature in this area. We look at approval of police use of force in five scenarios. Our findings show that minorities and women are more likely to disapprove of police use of force. Supporting a narrow application of conflict theory, other dimensions of power appear not to affect attitudes toward police hitting citizens. Context of violence matters too. When situations are not actively threatening for officers, by near consensus, violence is unacceptable. Disagreement comes from less clear-cut circumstances.     

Perception of Multisensory Gender Coherence in 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants

One of the most salient social categories conveyed by human faces and voices is gender. We investigated the developmental emergence of the ability to perceive the coherence of auditory and visual attributes of gender in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. Infants viewed two side‐by‐side video clips of a man and a woman singing a nursery rhyme and heard a synchronous male or female sound track. Results showed that 6‐month‐old infants did not match the audible and visible attributes of gender, and 9‐month‐old infants matched only female faces and voices. These findings indicate that the ability to perceive the multisensory coherence of gender emerges relatively late in infancy and that it reflects the greater experience that most infants have with female faces and voices.