Rival Paradigms at Work: Work Reorganization and Labour Force Impacts in a Staple Industry*

Des changements dans l'organisation du travail, et plus particulièrement l'adoption de relations de production postfordistes, ont fait l'objet d'interprétations nouvelles. Certaines ont permis de déceler de nouveaux systèmes de gestion qui ont favorisé la mise en valeur des compétences et la création d'emplois plus intéressants et plus humains. D'autres ont allégué que les nouvelles relations au sein du lieu de travail entraînent une intensification de l'effort ouvrier qui n'a que peu à voir avec la production d'une meilleure qualité d'emploi. Cet article compare deux entreprises d'une même industrie - la production de potasse -, dont l'une à adopté les nouvelles pratiques de gestion et l'autre demeure traditionnelle, afin d'évaluer la validité de ces arguments opposés. Changes in the organization of work, and specifically the adoption of post-Fordist production relations, have been subject to alternative interpretations. Some have identified the new management systems with skill enhancement and the production of more interesting, humane jobs. Others have argued that the new workplace relations represent an intensification of work effort that has little to do with the production of better quality employment. To assess the validity of the competing claims, this article compares two firms in one industry, potash production: one has bought into the new managerial practices, while the other has remained traditional.     

Anticipatory Eye Movements Reveal Infants' Auditory and Visual Categories

We introduce a new paradigm for the assessment of auditory and visual categories in 6‐month‐old infants using a 2‐alternative anticipatory eye‐movement response. Infants were trained by 2 different methods to anticipate the location of a visual reinforcer at 1 of 2 spatial locations (right or left) based on the identity of 2 cuing stimuli. After a training phase, infants were presented with a series of generalization trials in which novel (untrained) stimuli served as the cue to the anticipatory eye movement. Four experiments illustrated that infants can learn the 2‐choice discriminative response during training. Infants also showed anticipatory eye movements to novel stimuli, indicating sensitivity to variations along a variety of stimulus dimensions (e.g., color, shape, orientation, spatial frequency, pitch, and duration). In addition, the paradigm can be used to assess categorization in individual infants, thereby revealing the stimulus dimensions to which infants naturally attend.     

Recovering from Illness or Recovering your Life? Implications of Clinical Versus Social Models of Recovery from Mental Health Problems for Employment Support Services

Although valuable research has been undertaken in the United States little is yet known about the processes engaged in by supported employment projects for people with mental health problems. The study reported here explored these processes using semistructured interviews with employment project clients, their project workers and workplace managers. Of five projects involved in the research, two exemplified radically different approaches, one implicitly underpinned by a clinical model of recovery and the other by a social recovery model. In this article we draw on data from the seven cases studied from these projects to describe the two approaches and to consider their strengths and limitations. We conclude that approaches based on the social recovery model hold more promise, although such approaches would be enhanced through greater liaison with mental health professionals. In addition, funding structures are required that take account of job retention rates, rather than placement rates alone.     

Automated Corneal‐Reflection Eye Tracking in Infancy: Methodological Developments and Applications to Cognition

Since the mid‐1800s, experimental psychologists have been using eye movements and gaze direction to make inferences about perception and cognition in adults (Müller, 1826, cited in Boring, 1942). In the past 175 years, these oculomotor measures have been refined (see Kowler, 1990) and used to address similar questions in infants (see Aslin, 1985, 1987; Branson, 1982; Haith, 1980; Maurer, 1975). The general rationale for relying on these visual behaviors is that where one is looking is closely tied to what one is seeing. This is not to deny the fact that we can detect visual stimuli in the peripheral visual field, but rather that there is a bias to attend to and process information primarily when it is located in the central portion of the retina. Thus, although the direction of gaze is not perfectly correlated with the uptake of visual information (e.g., as in a blank stare or a covert shift of attention), there is a strong presumption that the direction of gaze can provide important information about visual stimuli even in newborn infants (Haith, 1966; Salapatek, 1968; Salapatek & Kessen, 1966).     

Mental health service users' experiences of returning to paid employment

Research into mental health and employment has focused largely on people who are unemployed. This paper reports the experiences of 20 clients of employment support agencies who had succeeded in returning to work. A number of barriers to getting back to work were identified, but receiving employment support could enable people to overcome them. There was consistency with previous studies of factors associated with high and low levels of job satisfaction. Even those participants who were less satisfied with their jobs identified benefits and none described any negative effects. The quality of the employment support provided was important, including advice and counselling during the job search, enabling informed choice about disclosure and support in work. Job retention targets are required for funding programmes in addition to placement targets. Further research into the timing and processes of disclosure and into occupational health screening processes would be helpful.     

Mapping the Bit Girl

This paper examines the fan movement surrounding Lara Croft, a computer- generated character who has appeared in computer games, comic books, men' s magazines, promotional tours, music videos, calendars, action figures and motion pictures. A fixture of the pop-culture landscape since 1996, Croft embodies or incarnates a nexus of cultural, economic, and technological forces, whose shared characteristic is their powerful hold on a vast audience base. Lara Croft is nothing without her fans. As the founding member of a new mode of celebrity system featuring female digital stars, Croft's essentially technological nature - the mode of her signification and circulation - produces continuities and ruptures with traditional fan practices, reframing our understandings of categories such as "fan', "audience', "character', and "text' in relation to a mediascape whose speed and multiplicity mark not just postmodernism, but adaptive responses to postmodernity. From this perspective, Lara Croft is less a singular entity than a coping strategy, a mediation of media. The concerns of this project are, first, to examine Lara Croft as a conjunction of industrial and representational forces intended to promote certain types of reception and consumption; second, to assess the ways in which her peculiar semiotic status - simultaneously open-ended and concrete - renders her available for appropriation and elaboration by fans; and, finally, to discuss the ways in which Croft's fandom opens up new debates about the relationship between texts, audiences, and technology.     

Disablement in the Informational Age

There is considerable evidence to suggest that at this point in history, we are in the midst of a global economic revolution. There is also a considerable literature to suggest that the industrial revolutions have shaped and constructed the nature of disablement in the twentieth century. This paper examines employment data from the USA and UK on the process of informationalisation, in order to ascertain if it is having a particular impact on the construction of disablement. It finds that disabled people are more likely to be excluded from employment in the informational sector and that the current reforms of welfare may remove some of the safety net provision that have been part of the hegemony of care established under industrialisation. It concludes by suggesting that social exclusion, which removes the notion of deservingness, may replace disability as a social process in the twenty-first century.     

The voices people read: Orthography and the representation of non-standard speech

Combining features of matched guise tests with sociolinguistic interviewing and oral performance, this study investigates the social meanings carried by non-standard orthographies. Participant evaluations of the personas represented by non-standard orthographies showed that people connected orthography to social identities. Specifically, we found that people uncritically and spontaneously read non-standard orthographies as indices of low socioeconomic status. When we asked participants to read texts out loud, we found marked shifts in their reading performances of texts in standard versus non-standard orthographies. Through a case study analysis of participants' readings and attitudes, we identify two kinds of stances taken by participants towards stigmatized identities indexed by non-standard orthographies. Finally, we use these case studies to argue for the necessity of contextually rich qualitative research methods for the study of language attitudes.