The Walking Wounded: Employees’Perspectives on Mergers and Acquisitions*

Several popular and academic works have reiterated Marx's concern over the issue of social class polarization in capitalist societies. Marx characterized this polarization as the increasing concentration of wealth and poverty in the upper and lower classes, respectively, coupled with a disappearing middle class. Building on these ideas, other work suggests a process of fragmented polarization with an increasing economic, political, social, and psychological diversity within each social class. This paper illustrates this process of class fragmentation, and shows that even though the upper class is gaining overall, there are segments which are beginning to feel the effects of economic restructuring. We address corporate restructuring in the form of mergers and acquisitions and how upper- and-middle managers perceive these processes and outcomes. We conducted 33 interviews with individuals from different organizational levels, involved in four different mergers or acquisitions. We focus on the meaning these individuals attribute to these processes and changes. Although most respondents remained with the new company, all were faced with major changes in their work environment. Respondents often experienced a breach of social contract, a dramatically altered perception of managerial control and decision making, a shift from corporate loyalty to self-interest, and new forms of power and resistance. We conclude by discussing the implications of such class fragmentation, and suggest directions for future research and policy.     

Additional Components of the Still‐Face Effect: Commentary on Adamson and Frick

Adamson and Frick (2003/this issue) provide an informative and often fascinating history of the still‐face paradigm and its applications in infancy research. With benefit of their review, one can identify several potentially important components of the still‐face paradigm that have been neglected in past research. These are the influence of the still face on parent and infant behavior during the reunion episode and expanded measurement of the still‐face effect to include theoretically important components of facial expression and the temporal organization of parent and infant behavior and physiology. In particular, by expanding what is meant by the still‐face effect to encompass aspects of the reunion episode, we may discover robust probes into the parent–infant relationship and individual differences in infant attachment and emotion regulation extending across infancy and childhood.     

The topography of medieval popular protest

ABSTRACT

Assumptions about the topography of popular revolt have been essential in constructing sociological and historical models that demarcate a ‘pre-modern’ from the ‘modern’ period. In Charles Tilly’s words, the ‘repertoires of collective action’ before the mid-nineteenth century were ‘parochial, particular, and bifurcated’, while afterwards, they became ‘cosmopolitan, autonomous, and modular’ (2008). By relying on primary sources across the Italian peninsula, France, Flanders and Britain and for the early modern period across German-speaking regions into Russia, this article shows that the plethora of late medieval revolts were rarely, if ever, confined to a neighbourhood or bounded by local religious congregations or family ties. Instead, they were citywide and north of the Alps fused alliances with the peasantry and other cities. With popular protest pushing eastward in the early modern period, these long-distant dimensions became more extensive, crossing linguistic boundaries and thousands of kilometres. In addition, this article raises new questions, such as why peasants and urban rebels in Italy, in contrast to northern Europe, resisted cross-mural alliances, and to what extent late medieval popular insurrection differed from those of the early modern period. The article ends with a call for new models to understand these differences.     

Getting your partner to use condoms: Interviews with men and women at risk of HIV/STDs

Data from individual semistructured interviews with 90 young heterosexual couples were analyzed to identify strategies that men and women at risk of HIV/STDs would use to influence their partners to use condoms for the purpose of disease prevention. In addition, we explored whether participants thought influencing strategies would differ for pregnancy prevention. Content analysis of the interview data indicated that participants would use the following verbal strategies: persuading/suggesting, commanding/asserting, and threatening to withhold sex. Several participants, particularly those who had recently used condoms with their partners, reported that they would also use non‐verbal strategies involving condoms themselves (e.g., putting a condom on, buying or getting condoms, or presenting a condom to their partner). Many participants believed that they would use a different strategy for pregnancy prevention because it would be easier to convince a partner to use condoms for that purpose.     

Automated Measurement of Facial Expression in Infant–Mother Interaction: A Pilot Study

Automated facial measurement using computer vision has the potential to objectively document continuous changes in behavior. To examine emotional expression and communication, we used automated measurements to quantify smile strength, eye constriction, and mouth opening in two 6‐month‐old infant‐mother dyads who each engaged in a face‐to‐face interaction. Automated measurements showed high associations with anatomically based manual coding (concurrent validity); measurements of smiling showed high associations with mean ratings of positive emotion made by naive observers (construct validity). For both infants and mothers, smile strength and eye constriction (the Duchenne marker) were correlated over time, creating a continuous index of smile intensity. Infant and mother smile activity exhibited changing (nonstationary) local patterns of association, suggesting the dyadic repair and dissolution of states of affective synchrony. The study provides insights into the potential and limitations of automated measurement of facial action.     

New Methods for Resolving Conflicting Requests with Examples from Medical Residency Scheduling

In scheduling medical residents, the objective is often to maximize resident satisfaction across the space of feasible schedules, relative to the many hard constraints that ensure appropriate patient coverage, adequate training opportunities, etc. A common metric of resident satisfaction is the number of time‐off requests that are granted. Simply maximizing this total, however, may lead to undesirable schedules since some requests have higher priority than others. For example, it might be better to grant one resident's request for a family member's wedding in place of two residents’ requests to attend a rugby game. Another approach is to assign a weight to each request and maximize the total weight of granted requests, but determining weights that accurately represent residents’ and schedulers’ preferences can be quite challenging. Instead, we propose to identify the exhaustive collection of maximally feasible and minimally infeasible sets of requests which can then be used by schedulers to select their preferred solution. Specifically, we have developed two algorithms, which we call Sequential Request Selection Via Cuts (Sequential RSVC) and Simultaneous Request Selection Via Cuts (Simultaneous RSVC), to identify these sets by solving two sequences of optimization problems. We present these algorithms along with computational results based on a real‐world problem of scheduling residents at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Pediatric Emergency Department. Although we focus our exposition on the problem of resident scheduling, our approach is applicable to a broad class of problems with soft constraints.     

Adolescents' Expenditure On Alcohol: A Pilot Study

Minimal research has examined the extent to which underage youth access and purchase alcohol. This pilot study investigated adolescents' expenditure on alcohol, and the circumstances in which underage youth access alcohol. A street intercept survey was used to interview 187 young people aged 13 to 17 years in shopping centres in metropolitan and rural Victoria, Australia. Seventy percent of the sample self‐reported that they drink alcohol. Young people were more likely to report that they were drinkers as their income increased. More than one‐third of the sample and over half of drinkers purchased alcohol with their own money, spending on average $22 when they last purchased alcohol. Drinkers obtained their alcohol from a variety of other sources including friends over 18 years old and their parents. This study shows that underage youth have access to and pay for alcohol even if they do not purchase it personally. Further research in this area with a larger sample is clearly warranted to inform both prevention strategies and effective practice.