Early Childhood Education Centre Director Perceptions of Challenging Behaviour: Promising Practices and Implications for Professional Development

Given their key role in overall programme quality, it is critical to examine how early childhood programme centre directors in the United States perceive challenging behaviour. Participants completed a survey asking which behaviours they perceive to be most problematic, the number of children dismissed or expelled from the programme during the last year, and the most commonly used strategies for addressing challenging behaviours. Results point to several promising practices and highlight the variability in access to evidence‐based practices based on programme type. Areas that warrant more targeted professional development are discussed, and findings are situated within the larger early childhood context.     

Skills-Based Volunteering as Both Work and Not Work: A Tension-Centered Examination of Constructions of “Volunteer”

The Corporation for National and Community Service defines professional skills-based community service as “the practice of using work-related knowledge and expertise in a volunteer opportunity.” Traditional definitions of volunteer work in organizational communication scholarship, however, are typically based on (1) the bifurcation between work and volunteer activity; (2) low barriers to volunteer entry and exit; (3) the lack of managerial power/control over volunteers; and (4) the altruistic focus of volunteer work. An analysis of interviews with 19 skills-based volunteers highlights the identity and role tensions inherent in professional volunteering and serves as the basis for a proposal for a new way to visualize volunteering characterized by spectrums of tension rather than by the traditional lens of “not work.”     

The Impact of Migration on the Gendering of Service Work: The Case of a West London Hotel

This article responds to a call from Kerfoot and Korczynski to investigate the gendering of service sector employment. As a characteristic of many post‐industrial economies in the global North is the growing significance of migrant workers, this article investigates the impact of migration for work on the gendering of service work. Taking the embodied and emotional labour of workers to be fundamental to service work, it describes how these are refracted and produced through migration. The article draws on 60 interviews with workers in a west London hotel who were born abroad and the human resources staff and managers who are responsible for the recruitment and promotion of the workforce. We argue that migration is an important process in the construction of the contemporary workforce in post‐industrial service economies and that migration status should be understood as intersecting with gender in the production of a gendered performance at work.     

Social influences on sorority and fraternity member smoking

Objective: To understand how the Greek system uniquely influences smoking attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among college students who belong to a social sorority or fraternity. Participants: Active members of sororities (n = 16) and fraternities (n = 17) were interviewed between February 2013 and October 2015. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted examining the social influences of the Greek system on member smoking. Transcribed interviews were coded and analyzed for themes. Results: Sorority and fraternity members experienced different social influences on smoking. Sorority stigmatization of smoking outside bars or parties caused sorority members to hide their smoking. Fraternity members had no social penalties for smoking and allowed smoking at the fraternity house. Fraternity members influenced both fraternity members and sorority members to smoke by sharing cigarettes and smoking at parties. Conclusions: Sororities and fraternities have created social environments that both promote smoking and stigmatize it, presenting unique challenges in college student smoking prevention and cessation efforts.     

Bitch,slut, skank,cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics

Resistance to women’s public voice and visibility via street harassment and workplace sexual harassment have long constrained women’s use of and comfort in physical public spaces; this gender-based resistance now extends into digital arenas. Women face extreme hostility in the form of digital sexism in discussion rooms, comment sections, gaming communities, and on social media platforms. Reflecting on two years of in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of gender-based digital abuse (n?=?38), conversations with industry professionals working in content moderation and digital safety, the extant literature, and news stories about digital attacks against women, I offer a lens to think through the prominent patterns in digital sexism, showing (1) that aggressors draw upon three overlapping strategies – intimidating, shaming, and discrediting – to limit women’s impact in digital publics, (2) the way femininity and femaleness are used to undermine women’s contributions, and (3) men call attention to women’s physicality as a way to pull gender – and the male advantage that comes with it – to the fore in digital exchanges. Finally, I argue that when digital sexism succeeds in pressing women out of digital spaces, constrains the topics they address publicly, or limits the ways they address them, we must consider the democratic costs of gender-based harassment, in addition to the personal ones.