WebStress: A web interface to explore a multidatabase bibliographic corpus on occupational stress

A bibliographic study on a multidisciplinary subject, such as occupational stress, requires a multidatabase query facility. Given this, we searched eight databases belonging to different fields (medicine, psychology, etc.) and from different countries. Thus, more than 26000 references on occupational stress were gathered. A bibliographic corpus of this sort is unusable because of the heterogeneous format of the records and the number of duplicate entries. Considering the limitations of commercial programs, we have developed a system, called WebStress, for reformatting the data and removing duplicates. The huge number of references and the research needs of updating and searching have necessitated the addition of several other functions to WebStress. Therefore WebStress comprises a web interface that makes it possible to search the corpus with advanced features (using clustering, a specialized thesaurus on stress and Boolean queries). In addition to the usual bibliographic queries on a specific database such as Medline, WebStress provides bibliometric analysis of the corpus, which might contribute to a detailed analysis on occupational stress in order to highlight the networks of researchers and to find the main topics studied in this area. WebStress is not yet available to researchers in general. It is being further developed, and also permission needs to be obtained from the eight commercial bibliographic databases that it consults.     

Humour in the Ancient World

Since the ending of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations, the international concept of racism, first initialised in the 1930s, has been inscribed in an unacknowledged conceptual double bind. Western political culture has inherited a hegemonic concept of racism that foregrounds those meanings associated with the anti‐fascist critiques of the Jewish Holocaust, while foreclosing subaltern anti‐colonial critiques centred on Western Imperialism. This can be taken to suggest a divergence within a western tradition of critical thought that in one of its guises occurs between the view that ‘‘race’ thinking’ resembles ideological exceptionality and the contrary view that ‘race relations’ approximates colonial conventions. The present essay explores the extent to which these views are constituted conceptually and dialogically in opposition and divergence. This is defined as racism's conceptual double bind. In other words, the international concept of racism is doubly bound into revealing its imprints in nationalism and concealing its anchorage in liberalism; or recognising extremist ideology while denying routine governmentality. The essay, therefore, asks the following: is it im/plausible to deny that there is an inescapable conceptual double bind between these differing conceptualisations of racism that has been ignored by the dominant social science traditions in the West? The idea of a double bind in the concept of racism, reiterated throughout this essay, is not to be confused with the proposition that there are two concepts of racism. On the contrary, during the twentieth‐century conceptualisation of racism, there have rather been two distinct orientations, the hegemonic Eurocentric and the subaltern De/colonial, based on conflicting yet dialogical paradigmatic experiences of the referent of racism.     

Social background,emotionality, and belief as predictors of punitiveness toward deviants

This research addresses the general question of which factors other than evidence determine the outcomes of criminal justice processing. Specifically, it investigates the relationships between social background factors, beliefs and emotions, and punitiveness toward deviants. The results offer support for the proposition that differing backgrounds are systematically linked with different views about human nature and society. The results also support the proposition that these variations in belief are linked to punitiveness toward deviants.     

Do Nonprofit Organisations Manage Earnings? An Empirical Study

Earnings management by nonprofit organisations is not very frequently studied in the academic literature. The present paper presents an overview of the existing literature, and derives a number of hypotheses as to nonprofit organisations’ inclination to manipulate earnings. In a sample of 844 financial statements (2007) of Belgian nonprofit organisations accounting manipulations of earnings towards zero are clearly present. Furthermore, the potential presence of agency conflicts between board and management induces these manipulations, as well as the presence of debt. Finally, larger organisations seem to be more inclined to manipulate earnings to reach earnings levels close(r) to zero.     

Does Culture Affect Divorce? Evidence From European Immigrants in the United States

This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.     

Characterizing referenda with quorums via strategy-proofness

The paper works with a formal model of referenda, where a finite number of voters can choose between two options and abstention. A referendum will be invalid if too many voters abstain, otherwise the referendum will return one of the two options. We consider quorum rules where an option is chosen if it is preferred by the majority of voters and if at least a certain number of voters (the quorum) votes for the alternative. The paper characterizes these rules as the only referenda which are strategy-proof over certain preferences.     

Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America

R. Po‐chia Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618? (1984), xiv+306 (Yale University Press, £22.50).

David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (1984), x+250 (Cambridge University Press, £22.50).

William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth‐Century France. State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (1985), xvii+375 (Cambridge University Press, £30.00).

K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (1985), x+464 (Cambridge University Press, £30.00). Alun Howkins, Poor Labouring Men. Rural Radicalism in Norfolk 1870–1923 (1985), xiv+225 (Routledge &; Kegan Paul for History Workshop Series, paperback £7.95).

William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture. The French Textile Trade, 1750–1900 (1984), viii+406 (Cambridge University Press, £25.00).

Neville Kirk, The Growth of Working‐Class Reformism in Mid‐Victorian England (1985), xiii+369 (Croom Helm, £22.50).

Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz‐Gerhard Haupt (eds), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth‐Century Europe (1984), xii+283 (Methuen, £17.50).

Marzio Barbagli, Sotto lo Stesso Tetto: Mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo (1984), 5+557 (I1 Mulino, Bologna, n.p.)‐ (Under the Same Roof: Changes in the Family in Italy from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century.)

David I. Kertzer, Family Life in Central Italy, 1880–1910: S hare cropping, Wage Labor and Coresidence (1984), vii+250 (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, n.p.).

Rose L. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (1984), xiii+325 (University of California Press, £26.20).

David J. Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography (1984), I and II, 878 and 690 (Butterworths, £65.00 per volume).

John Turner (ed.), Businessmen and Politics: Studies of Business Activity in British Politics, 1900–1945 (1984), 200 (Heinemann, £18.50).     

Comprehensive definitions of breakdown points for independent and dependent observations

Summary. We provide a new definition of breakdown in finite samples, with an extension to asymptotic breakdown. Previous definitions centre on defining a critical region for either the parameter or the objective function. If for a particular outlier configuration the critical region is entered, breakdown is said to occur. In contrast with the traditional approach, we leave the definition of the critical region implicit. Our proposal encompasses previous definitions of breakdown in linear and non-linear regression settings. In some cases, it leads to a different and more intuitive notion of breakdown than other procedures that are available. An important advantage of our new definition is that it also applies to models for dependent observations where current definitions of breakdown typically fail. We illustrate our suggestion by using examples from linear and non-linear regression, and time series.     

Expressive Vocabulary in Language Learners From Two Ecological Settings in Three Language Communities

This study compared multiple characteristics of girls' and boys' vocabulary in 6 different linguistic communities—1 urban and 1 rural setting in each of 3 countries. Two hundred fifty‐two mothers in Argentina, Italy, and the United States completed vocabulary checklists for their 20‐month‐old children. Individual variability was substantial within each linguistic community. Minimal cross‐linguistic differences were found in children's vocabulary size; however, differences among languages in the composition of children's vocabularies appeared possibly related to cultural valuing of different categories of words. Ecological setting differences within cultures appeared in children's vocabulary size, even when the composition of children's vocabularies was examined: Children living in urban areas were reported by their mothers to say significantly more words than children living in rural areas, particularly for Argentine and U.S. children. Girls had consistently larger vocabularies than boys. These findings are discussed in terms of contextual and child factors that together influence first language learning.     

Modelling forces of infection by using monotone local polynomials

Summary. On the basis of serological data from prevalence studies of rubella, mumps and hepatitis A, the paper describes a flexible local maximum likelihood method for the estimation of the rate at which susceptible individuals acquire infection at different ages. In contrast with parametric models that have been used before in the literature, the local polynomial likelihood method allows this age-dependent force of infection to be modelled without making any assumptions about the parametric structure. Moreover, this method allows for simultaneous nonparametric estimation of age-specific incidence and prevalence. Unconstrained models may lead to negative estimates for the force of infection at certain ages. To overcome this problem and to guarantee maximal flexibility, the local smoother can be constrained to be monotone. It turns out that different parametric and nonparametric estimates of the force of infection can exhibit considerably different qualitative features like location and the number of maxima, emphasizing the importance of a well-chosen flexible statistical model.