Popular Culture and Workplace Gendering among Varieties of Capitalism: Working Women and their Representation in Japanese Manga

Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Being the most developed non‐western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender worldwide. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. We draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular culture — in this case manga — in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. We present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are depicted. We argue that the hyper‐mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. Our research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.     

Systemische Aufstellungen und lösungsfokussierte Beratung in der Schulpraxis

Systemic sculpturing and solution oriented counseling is a possibility to help students to improve their teaching competencies when problems with teaching may be ascribed to unfavorable mental modells about teaching in general and their roles as teachers. After clarifying some basic assumptions about systemic formations and solution oriented counseling, the steps of such a process are described and illustrated by means of a case study. The mode of action and effect of systemic sculpturing are described at the end.     

Chinese Women as Transnational Migrants: Gender and Class in Global Migration Narratives

This paper argues that the debates on transnationalism are gender implicit, and the discourse shaped by the emergence of Pacific Asian economies as key players in the global economy sees men as the dominant representative of these global forces. Belief in a real or imagined global bonding has become a dominant and problematic discourse that can empower some, while marginalizing others. It is important to examine how women of Chinese ancestry position themselves within their personal and global environments and to give agency to women in these narratives fashioned by tropes of global capitalism and world markets.
Women now outnumber male immigrants to the major immigration countries of Australia, the United States, and Canada, and this shift is due to the increased migration of women from Asian countries. Yet their position in transmigration and settlement patterns has largely been ignored. This paper argues that the global perspective of Chinese diasporic women has significant implications for both Western and non-Western global patterning. The site of the investigation is Australia in the post 1970s and the focus is on women of Chinese ancestry re-migrating from East and South-East Asia.     

Demographic and health-related predictors of the incidence of sudden infant death

This report employs several demographic and health-related variables to predict the incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (or SIDS) in 324 census tracts of the city of Philadelphia during the years 1970–1975. Two types of multivariate statistical procedures — multiple regression and classification by linear discriminant function — provide significant and strongly predictive results. While a number of new univariate findings are also presented and some limitations of the use of census tracts are noted, a major emphasis is on the incremental effects that occur when variables are entered into multivariate equations in a predetermined order to remove the influences of confounding demographic predictors. The presence of significant incremental relationships between pregnancy-related health variables and SIDS frequencies and rules provides encouragement for future research into common predictive and etiological strategies across SIDS and other types of infant deaths. Additional applications of the methods and results are indicated.     

A Bayesian Inventory Model Using Real‐Time Condition Monitoring Information

Lack of coordination between machinery fault diagnosis and inventory management for spare parts can lead to increased inventory costs and disruptions in production activity. We develop a framework for incorporating real‐time condition monitoring information into inventory decisions for spare parts. We consider a manufacturer who periodically replenishes inventory for a machine part that is subject to deterioration. The deterioration is captured via condition monitoring and modeled using a Wiener process. The resulting degradation model is used to derive the life distribution of a functioning part and to estimate the demand distribution for spare parts. This estimation is periodically updated, in a Bayesian manner, as additional information on part deterioration is obtained. We develop an inventory model that incorporates this updated demand distribution and demonstrate that a dynamic base‐stock policy, in which the optimal base‐stock level is a function of some subset of the observed condition monitoring information, is optimal. We propose a myopic critical fractile policy that captures the essence of the optimal policy, but is easier to compute. Computational experiments indicate that this heuristic performs quite well relative to the optimal policy. Adaptive inventory policies such as these can help manufacturers to increase machine availability and reduce inventory costs.     

Asymptotic Confidence Intervals for a New Inequality Measure

This work aims at assessing, by simulation methods, the performance of asymptotic confidence intervals for Zenga's new inequality measure. The results are compared with those obtained on Gini's measure, perhaps the most widely used index for measuring inequality in income and wealth distributions. Our findings show that the coverage accuracy and the size of the confidence intervals for the two measures are very similar in samples from economic size distributions.