WHO CAN SPEAK TO RACE AND NATION?

This article examines the production and publication of the Parekh Report (2000) by drawing upon two related current debates – the decline of the public intellectual and the necessity for a public sociology. It argues that both of these debates have failed to engage with concrete examples of public intellectual labour, with the complexities of public communication sociologically and have been reticent as to which particular intellectual voices are able to enter the public sphere. The article argues that the intellectually orientated, multiculturally constituted Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain Commission which authored the report and the report's moment of publication both offer sites in which these critiques can be developed. The article foregrounds the question as to who is entitled to inaugurate, participate in and shape public debates on race, nation, and national identity and evidences the difficulties of attempting to do so in a ‘race volatile’, anti-intellectual and heavily mediated political milieu.     

Servant leaders inspire servant followers: Antecedents and outcomes for employees and the organization

Despite widespread adoption of servant leadership, we are only beginning to understand its true utility across multiple organizational levels. Our purpose was to test the relationship between personality, servant leadership, and critical follower and organizational outcomes. Using a social influence framework, we proposed that leader agreeableness and extraversion affect follower perceptions of servant leadership. In turn, servant leaders ignite a cycle of service by role-modeling servant behavior that is then mirrored through coworker helping behavior and high-quality customer service, as well as reciprocated through decreased withdrawal. Using a multilevel, multi-source model, we surveyed 224 stores of a U.S. retail organization, including 425 followers, 110 store managers, and 40 regional managers. Leader agreeableness was positively and extraversion was negatively related to servant leadership, which was associated with decreased follower turnover intentions and disengagement. At the group-level, service climate mediated the effects of servant leadership on follower turnover intentions, helping and sales behavior.     

Precarious leisure: (re)imagining youth,transitions and temporality

ABSTRACT

The precarity of young people’s transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in youth studies. As Furlong and others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the ‘contamination’ of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of ‘leisure precarity’. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people’s experiences and understandings of leisure such that young people have come to fear ‘empty’ or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that most participants in our research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented between past, present and future. The paper argues that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing youth transitions into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century.     

That is What a Feminist Looks Like: Identification and Exploration of the Factors Underlying the Concept of Feminism and Predicting the Endorsement of Traditional Gender Roles

Gender Issues - The present studies identified the underlying attitudinal factor structure of the concept of feminism, providing a measure of what it means to be a feminist, and explored the...     

Implementing Fall Prevention Guidelines with Vulnerable Older Adults: The Social Work Role

Falls are the leading cause of injury among the older adult population, resulting in costly and devastating aftermaths. National fall prevention guidelines (FPGs) have been established to assist healthcare professionals with addressing fall risk, but little is understood about the extent to which FPGs have been implemented by social workers. Social workers, however, may beuniquely positioned to implement FPGs with older adults due to their expertise in care coordination and home- and community-based service settings. This conceptual paper addresses the timely issue of fall prevention and social workers’ potential role in implementing FPGs to address fall risk.     

Verteilt und doch verbunden: Virtuelle TeamarbeitFar from Distant: Virtual Teamwork

This article provides an overview of the current research on the topic virtual teamwork. Despite all the advantages (cost savings, increased flexibility etc.), this form of cooperation is confronted with a number of challenges. Since it is accompanied by a more difficult exchange of information, it represents a source for conflicts and loss of trust. This can severely impair performance and satisfaction within the team. Aside from pointing out potential challenges of virtual teamwork, research-based recommendations on preventing and handling these problems are also demonstrated.     

GAMMA-BASED CLUSTERING VIA ORDERED MEANS WITH APPLICATION TO GENE-EXPRESSION ANALYSIS

Discrete mixture models provide a well-known basis for effective clustering algorithms, although technical challenges have limited their scope. In the context of gene-expression data analysis, a model is presented that mixes over a finite catalog of structures, each one representing equality and inequality constraints among latent expected values. Computations depend on the probability that independent gamma-distributed variables attain each of their possible orderings. Each ordering event is equivalent to an event in independent negative-binomial random variables, and this finding guides a dynamic-programming calculation. The structuring of mixture-model components according to constraints among latent means leads to strict concavity of the mixture log likelihood. In addition to its beneficial numerical properties, the clustering method shows promising results in an empirical study.