Safety sans Frontières: An International Safety Culture Model

The management of safety culture in international and culturally diverse organizations is a concern for many high‐risk industries. Yet, research has primarily developed models of safety culture within Western countries, and there is a need to extend investigations of safety culture to global environments. We examined (i) whether safety culture can be reliably measured within a single industry operating across different cultural environments, and (ii) if there is an association between safety culture and national culture. The psychometric properties of a safety culture model developed for the air traffic management (ATM) industry were examined in 17 European countries from four culturally distinct regions of Europe (North, East, South, West). Participants were ATM operational staff (n = 5,176) and management staff (n = 1,230). Through employing multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, good psychometric properties of the model were established. This demonstrates, for the first time, that when safety culture models are tailored to a specific industry, they can operate consistently across national boundaries and occupational groups. Additionally, safety culture scores at both regional and national levels were associated with country‐level data on Hofstede's five national culture dimensions (collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long‐term orientation). MANOVAs indicated safety culture to be most positive in Northern Europe, less so in Western and Eastern Europe, and least positive in Southern Europe. This indicates that national cultural traits may influence the development of organizational safety culture, with significant implications for safety culture theory and practice.     

Unions and the structure of earnings inequality: Cross-national patterns

We examine differences in the structure of earnings inequality for men in four advanced western industrialized nations that differ in the nature and extent of unionism: the United States, Canada, Norway, and Sweden. We argue that the economic effects of unionism depend on whether (1) the bargaining structures of labor markets are centralized or fragmented; and (2) the political organization can be characterized as a corporatist or a pressure-group system. We find some support for our principal hypotheses that cross-national differences in systems of collective bargaining and political institutions affect the size of the earnings gap between male union and nonunion members, as well as the extent of wage dispersion among unionized workers.     

Writing the names: Marriage style,living arrangements,and first birth interval in a Nepali society

Using data from a Nepali population, this analysis argues that marriage style and postmarital living arrangements affect coital frequency to produce variations in the timing of first birth after marriage. Event history analysis of the first birth interval for 149 women suggests that women’s autonomy in marriage decisions and marriage to cross-cousins accelerate the pace of entry into first birth. Extended-household residence with reduced natal kin contact, on the other hand, significantly lengthens the first birth interval. These findings are consistent with previous arguments in the literature while offering new evidence for the impact of extended-family residence on fertility.     

Football ‘fanzines’ and football culture: a case of successful ‘cultural contestation’*

‘Fanzines’– magazines produced by fans for fans on photocopiers or small presses and circulated by other means than through mainstream commercial channels – provide an alternative to the products of mass publishing and the mass entertainment industry, although often in ‘dialogue’ with these. In England fanzines – like Sniffin’ Glue or When Saturday Comes– have proliferated over the last fifteen years or so, dealing especially with rock and pop music and also, most recently, with football. Fanzines can be seen as enabling a ‘users’ view’ and -sometimes – a radical reinterpretation (or defence) of popular cultural forms to be expressed by people who would otherwise be excluded from any usual means of written expression about, or control over, mainstream institutions in the production of mass culture. This article focuses on the phenomenon of football fanzines (and the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) – a movement closely associated with fanzines), suggesting (i) that football fanzines and the FSA can be viewed as a particularly potent example of the existence of continued ‘contestation’ over cultural institutions of the kind suggested in relation to sport by Gruneau (1982 and 1983), Donnelly (1988) and others, including ourselves (Jary and Horne 1987 and Horne, Jary and Tomlinson 1987), (ii) that a consideration of football fanzines and the FSA illustrates the value of moving to a wider substantive and theoretical focus in the sociological analysis of football culture than that which has been uppermost in recent years.     

General liberalism and social change in post World War II America: A summary of trends

There has been a general shift towards liberalism during the post World War II period. A plurality of attitude trends have moved in the liberalism direction. There is, however, some evidence that this liberal shift has weakened, but not reversed during the last decade. Topical disaggregation show that the liberal movement has not been uniform across subjects. Attitudes towards abortions, civil liberties, race relations, and religion have moved most consistently in the liberal direction while crime/violence and spending/taxation items have showed more conservative trends. The main causes of the general liberalism trend were modernization and liberal idealism assisted by the New Deal Realignment and institutional leadership. The main countervailing forces to liberalism were found to be stagflation, taxation level, and crime. Despite the waning of liberalism in recent years there is no evidence to support the idea that most liberal advances over the past four decades will be reversed in the immediate future.     

Decision-making and informed consent: A study of the impact of disclosed information

This paper is an empirical and normative study of several problems about informed consent in the law and in biomedical ethics. Its particular focus is on the adequacy of prevailing standards of informed consent in medicine and law. These standards generally govern adequate disclosure on the physician's part, to the relative neglect of the equally significant question, ‘What constitutes a valid consent on the patient's part?’ New empirical data regarding the actual decision-making behavior of patients is presented. It was gathered by studying patients considering whether to consent to the use of nonsurgical contraceptive techniques. Three hypotheses are examined regarding how disclosed information affects the decision-making process. Results indicate that disclosed information is not avowed as the prime determinant of the consent decision, that disclosed information does have some effect on the decision-making process, and that disclosed information does not impair or confuse the decision-making process. In conclusion, a number of implications for major areas of ethics and law are pointed out, with special emphasis on three areas of law: the materiality standard, causation, and the therapeutic privilege.     

Wither or whither London? An application of industry structure analysis

Industry structure analysis provides a tool for managers and leaders to more clearly understand the context in which day-by-day decisions are to be taken. It encourages a systematic analysis of ‘whither an enterprise?’ in the sense of ‘in what direction’ and ‘wither an enterprise?’ in the sense of ‘to what purpose’. Industry structure analysis applied to London reveals those forces which may doom current approaches to the solution to inner city problems to early failure and suggests new areas for the application of effort. As we enter a decade in which economic, political and social upheaval will be the norm, such a tool could be of use in helping managers in other enterprises to chart a surer course through uncertainty.