Job‐related stress,social support,and work–family conflict among Mexican workers in a multinational company: A case study of a Korean‐owned,US‐branded former “sweatshop” in Mexico

Due to globalization and outsourcing of commodity production, an estimated 60 million workers are employed in the garment industry by multinational corporations, yet relatively little is known about the work–family tensions experienced by these workers. Building on role stress and job demands–resources theories, this study employed mixed methods to examine job stressors, support, and work–family conflict (WFC) in a sample of 168 Mexican workers in a multinational factory, a rarely studied and underserved population. As hypothesized, results of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that workers experienced high job stress and WFC. Social support from spouses, family, and friends increased the positive association between job stress and WFC, suggesting that culturally relevant obligations increased WFC. This study highlights the need for multinational corporations to implement culturally adaptive, family‐friendly policies. Implications for social workers in multinational work organizations and for future research are discussed.     

About estimation of ARIMA process with strong mixing MA part

A central limit theorem is provided for the least squares estimates of the autoregressive parameters in an ARIMA process with strong mixing moving average part.     

A Geometric Study of Shareholders’ Voting in Incomplete Markets: Multivariate Median and Mean Shareholder Theorems

A simple parametric general equilibrium model with S states of nature and K < S firms is considered. Since markets are incomplete, at a (financial) equilibrium shareholders typically disagree on whether to keep or not the status quo production plans. Hence each firm faces a genuine problem of social choice. The setup proposed in the present paper allows to study these problems within a classical (Downsian) spatial voting model. Given the multidimensional nature of the latter, super majority rules with rate are needed to guarantee existence of politically stable production plans. A simple geometric argument is proposed showing why a 50%-majority stable production equilibrium exists when K=S−1. When the degree of incompleteness is more severe, under more restrictive assumptions on agents’ preferences and the distribution of agents’ types, equilibria are shown to exist for rates ρ smaller than Caplin and Nalebuff (Econometrica 59: 1–23, 1991) bound of 0.64: they obtain for production plans whose span contains the ‘ideal securities’ of all K mean shareholders.Hervé Crès is a member of the GREGHEC, unité CNRS, UMR 2959.     

Estimation of Conditional Ranks and Tests of Exogeneity in Nonparametric Nonseparable Models

Consider a nonparametric nonseparable regression model Y = ?(Z, U), where ?(Z, U) is strictly increasing in U and U ～ U[0, 1]. We suppose that there exists an instrument W that is independent of U. The observable random variables are Y, Z, and W, all one-dimensional. We construct test statistics for the hypothesis that Z is exogenous, that is, that U is independent of Z. The test statistics are based on the observation that Z is exogenous if and only if V = F_Y|Z(Y|Z) is independent of W, and hence they do not require the estimation of the function ?. The asymptotic properties of the proposed tests are proved, and a bootstrap approximation of the critical values of the tests is shown to be consistent and to work for finite samples via simulations. An empirical example using the U.K. Family Expenditure Survey is also given. As a byproduct of our results we obtain the asymptotic properties of a kernel estimator of the distribution of V, which equals U when Z is exogenous. We show that this estimator converges to the uniform distribution at faster rate than the parametric n^{? 1/2}-rate.     

Of hyacinths

This essay comments on the state of publishing in the field of sexuality in the years since the publication of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), which I co-edited with Henry Abelove and David M. Halperin.     

Latent groups and latent traits of participation in bullying via factor mixture analysis: An exploratory study

In this study, we drew on a person-centred approach to explore forms of involvement and roles in bullying. More specifically, we applied Factor Mixture Analysis (FMA) to an in-depth measure of bullying roles, with a view to identifying latent dimensions of participation in bullying and latent groups characterised by differential behavioural patterns. Participants were 899 high school students (51% females) attending the 9th (49%) and 11th grades (51%). The data analysis revealed six latent behavioural dispositions. Four of these overlapped with behavioural patterns typical of previously identified forms of participation in bullying, while two factors shed new light on bullying behaviours. We also identified four latent groups, whose profiles were only partially aligned with the roles previously theorised in the literature.     

Being a Corporate Sociologist…an Insider’s View

This paper is aimed at giving light to the profession of corporate sociologist, based on a literary review of the field of scientific and occupational sociology. It is an empirical observation based on an inside look gained as a professional sociologist within an international Group in the telecommunications sector, O range. It defends the idea that it remains possible, despite the financial strains afflicting many companies engaged in a competitive global market, to explore new topics and thus bring a significant contribution to this discipline, especially since the industry has specific resources to offer, leading to a widened reflection regarding the status of researcher. This is by reusing notions specific to the norms of science while examining them in a corporate context. The article is written in the hopes of making a constructive contribution to the question of relating the worlds of industry, sociology and, more generally – science. As a matter of fact, although industrial science represents the largest share of the total science in France (over 60% of researchers work in the industry) – the complexity of the issues they face as well as their characteristics still needs to be documented and debated.     

On suicide bombings: questioning rationalist models and logics of gender

The theories of rational choice have been widely used in analysing suicide bombings. Such a use is here critically examined along three lines. First, the limits of this theoretical framework when applied to sacrificial violence are assessed and especially the internal contradictions which appear with the notion of ‘symbolic posthumous rewards’. Second, differences emerge in the use of rational choice theory when the focus is upon female suicide bombers. Indeed, deprivation theories come then to the fore, the idea of personal crisis and the impact of patriarchal social relationships. This switch in the analysis, which does not seem based on differences in the data, confirms gender studies which underline the specific difficulty to envisage female political violence. Finally, to go beyond both reductionisms, a compared analysis of suicide attacks in Chechnya, Iraq and Israel/Palestine is proposed. It aims at restituting the context of action and the narratives at work, making a clear distinction between two levels of analysis, the one of the organizations, which can largely be understood in terms of their strategic rationale, and that of the suicide bombers themselves, for whom it seems more heuristic to use the concepts of narratives and horizons of expectation.     

Nest design in a changing world: Great tit <Emphasis Type="Italic">Parus major</Emphasis> nests from a Mediterranean city environment as a case study

Investigations of urbanization effects on birds have focused mainly on breeding traits expressed after the nest-building stage (e.g. first-egg date, clutch size, breeding success, and offspring characteristics). Urban studies largely ignored how and why the aspects of nest building might be associated with the degree of urbanization. As urban environments are expected to present novel environmental changes relative to rural environments, it is important to evaluate how nest-building behavior is impacted by vegetation modifications associated with urbanization. To examine nest design in a Mediterranean city environment, we allowed urban great tits (Parus major) to breed in nest boxes in areas that differed in local vegetation cover. We found that different measures of nest size or mass were not associated with vegetation cover. In particular, nests located adjacent to streets with lower vegetation cover were not smaller or lighter than nests in parks with higher vegetation cover. Nests adjacent to streets contained more pine needles than nests in parks. In addition, in nests adjacent to streets, nests from boxes attached to pine trees contained more pine needles than nests from boxes attached to other trees. We suggest that urban-related alterations in vegetation cover do not directly impose physical limits on nest size in species that are opportunistic in the selection of nesting material. However, nest composition as reflected in the use of pine needles was clearly affected by habitat type and the planted tree species present, which implies that rapid habitat change impacts nest composition. We do not exclude that urbanization might impact other aspects of nest building behaviour not covered in our study (e.g. costs of searching for nest material), and that the strengths of the associations between urbanization and nest structures might differ among study populations or species.