Structure,agency, and the Nicaraguan Revolution

Theory and Society -     

Violence at work: An issue for the 1990s

Violence and conflict appear to be increasingly common aspects of everyday life, to the point where people take them into consideration when planning their activities and feel anxious about their possible occurrence. It is not only actual violence which offers a contemporary source of stress but also the threat of violence, although subjective estimates of risk are not always accurate. For example, it would appear that while the elderly feel the most threatened, the greatest risk is to those in their late teens and early twenties. This discrepancy between objective and subjective risk is understandable in terms of the different factors which have been shown to drive the subjective assessment of risk: availability of information, controllability and magnitude of outcome. Often it is the media which provides us with the information that we have on violence, and it is that presentation of information which helps shape our assessment of risk. For example, attacks by young persons on the elderly may be more dramatic and newsworthy than, albeit more frequent, attacks on other young persons. Thus they are reported to a greater extent and a distorted impression of risk begins to develop, which may be reinforced by realistic feelings of potential helplessness by the elderly in the face of any such attack, and fear of the magnitude of the consequences of violence. Whatever the real basis for a fear of violence, the available statistics in most European and North American countries suggests that, even taking into account the effects of reporting bias, acts of violence are increasing.     

Investigating the link between the Pill and cancer

Does the contraceptive pill increase the risk of cancer? The question has been asked ever since the pill was introduced, and is one that must worry almost every woman in the country. Small wonder that when the results of a long-term study, which began 40 years ago, came out in the autumn it made front-page headlines. As Phil Hannaford explains, answering the question was not straightforward.     

ESTIMATING EQUATIONS AND NON-LINEAR FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

A nonlinear functional relationship is defined as an R-dimensional manifold in P-dimensional space. The formulation of the model may be explicitly in terms of R-dimensional vectors of incidental parameters or implicitly by a (P-R)-dimensional vector function of constraints. The objective is to estimate and make inference about a K-vector of parameters θ which defines the manifold. Each observed P-vector has its expectation lying on the manifold, and the error vector has a variance matrix defined in terms of a further vector of parameters The theory of estimating equations in the presence of incidental parameters is extended and applied to the explicit formulation, to give equations suitable for estimating θ given knowledge of only the first two moments. The method has a geometrical interpretation. Estimating equations for are chosen to be those which would be optimal if the normality assumption were true. First order corrections to the biases of these estimates are included. An example where the manifold is a circle centred on the origin is used to illustrate the theory. Further examples incorporate more general features, including the estimation of two variance parameters and estimation in higher dimensions.     

Job Insecurity and Employee Commitment: Managers' Reactions to the Threat and Outcomes of Redundancy Selection1

Increases in managerial redundancies have followed in the wake of recession and fiercer competition. Although popular accounts have warned of a growing disaffection among managers, few studies have examined the effects of abandoning their traditional job security. This article examines changes in the work attachments of long-service managers under the threat of redundancy. Over a 12-month period, interviews were conducted with 42 middle managers who, at the beginning of the research, had been warned of possible redundancy. Initially, most of the managers experienced significant threats to their established views about themselves and their employers. The development of these early perceptions into altered work attachments depended largely on outcomes of the redundancy process. For reprieved managers organizational commitment was quickly re-established. In contrast, those demoted to engineering roles or re-employed by other companies became less trusting and developed new explanations of their past employment experiences. These findings illustrate the tension between the need of managers to be assured of their place within the organizational structure and recent threats to their traditional careers and employment security. Also we may expect difficulties in the development of organizational commitment to emerge as the personal risks to managers increase.