Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

In this paper, I present an autoethnographic story about my experiences of expressing breast milk at a Dutch university department. My story illustrates how interrelated and conflicting discourses about gender, motherhood, breastfeeding, embodiment and professionalism raised issues about (in)visibility, embodied control, spatiality and discipline of my body and shaped my experience as a newly maternal employee. This paper thus aims to include bodies and embodied experiences in organization studies and highlights the need to consider spatiality as an important topic of research. I address these issues in my writing and use insights from feminist poststructuralism to show how the experiences I describe are part of a larger cultural framework of power structures that produce the ‘leaky’ maternal body as the Other, subject to (self-)discipline and marginalization. I hope my story inspires reflexivity and empathic understanding of the complex reality of experiences related to expressing breast milk in the workplace.     

The Co-Evolution of Marriage and Parental Rights of Gays and Lesbians

ABSTRACT

Historically, federal and state legislation placed different conditions on same- and opposite-sex couples' ability to marry, adopt, or exercise their parental rights. Given the historical intertwining of marriage and parenting, legal issues remain hinged on differing conceptions of marriage and what constitutes a legal family in the United States, especially for same-sex partners compared to their different-sexed couple counterparts. This article provides a historical review of decisions that serve as the foundation for queer parenting rights in the United States. A key focus is on the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) marriage decision on queer parenting and its relevance to researchers and practitioners whose work involves queer families. State discrepancies continue to exist for the treatment of parental rights in spite of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Finally, suggestions are provided for future directions for the field.     

Citizenship education for a pluralistic world: the selection of children’s literature in Dutch Protestant primary schools

The goals of citizenship education are often contested in Protestant schools with an ethnically heterogeneous population of pupils in multicultural European societies today. This is connected to the tension between the inclusive goal of citizenship for a pluralistic world and the exclusive goal of education in the Christian faith. This paper presents an explorative study on citizenship education. It describes the opinions of teachers and parents on the selection and use of children’s literature in Dutch ‘liberal’ Protestant primary schools. The results show that most teachers favour the avoidance of books that might not fit in with the Protestant identity of the school or possibly raise objections from orthodox parents. There is considerable diversity in the positions parents take on the issue.     

Embodying who we are: Leader group prototypicality and leadership effectiveness

Leadership is a process enacted in the context of a shared group membership, and leadership effectiveness is contingent on followers' perceptions of the leader as a group member. Addressing this role of group membership, the social identity theory of leadership puts leader group prototypicality, the extent to which the leader is perceived to embody group identity, center-stage in leadership effectiveness. I review empirical research in leader group prototypicality, concluding there is a robust empirical basis for the key propositions of the social identity theory of leadership. I also identify newer developments that extend and enrich the social identity analysis of leadership, including attention to the roles of uncertainty, leader fairness, leader–follower relationship, leader self-perceived prototypicality, and leadership of creativity and innovation.     

Spouse “Together Time”: Quality Time Within the Household

During the last decade more and more time-use data were gathered on a household level in stead of on an individual level. The time-use information of all members of the household provides much more insight in research fields that until now largely used data gathered at the individual level. One of these research fields is the study of quality of life, based on the (quality) time partners within a household spend together which in turn is often linked to studying the associations between the amount of time spent together and relationship satisfaction. The amount of face-to-face spousal interaction is considered to be critically important for marital quality and is assumed to be violated within dual-earner couples, especially those with women working long hours. In this contribution we analyze the time-use of couples in the Belgian Time Use Surveys of 1999 and 2005. We identify which activities couples do together and which they do apart, and what household characteristics predict couples’ together time. Working times in general seem the most decisive factor influencing the amount of together time. The increased labor market participation of women, on the other hand, seems not to be so much a threat for the time a couple spends together.     

Educational credentials and external effects: A test for the Netherlands

This paper proposes and uses a new test to discriminate between on the one hand the human capital model and on the other hand the credentialists and signalling models. Previous tests used only one source of variation between years spend in education and obtained degrees. Most use the variation among degree holders in the number of years they spend at school and some use the variation in the degrees obtained given the years spend in school. This paper uses both sources of variation in a combined method. It further tests the Stiglitz model of signalling, which hypothesizes that signalling will have positive external effects against other signalling and credentialist model, which hypothesize that signalling, will have negative external effects. Dutch data from the Amenities and services utilisation surveys of 1999 and 2003 (AVO’99, AVO’03) conducted by the ‘Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau’ of the Netherlands is used to test the hypotheses.The main findings of the analysis is that on the one hand degrees are seen as a credential, i.e. the effects of educational degrees outweigh the effect of years of education, but that on the other hand investments in education lead to positive external effects. So the social return of education is higher than the private return, supporting Stiglitz (1975) idea of signalling.     

The Anglo‐Russian military convention and the Lithuanian immigrant community in lanarkshire,Scotland, 1914–20

This paper describes for the first time in any detail the implementation of the Anglo‐Russian Military Convention of 1917, a measure designed specifically to deal with the problem of Russian Jewish opposition to military service. Special attention is given to the impact of the Military Convention on a non‐Jewish section of the Russian immigrant population: the Lithuanian (Catholic) immigrants of Lanarkshire, Scotland. The role of the government and the police is critically examined and, using previously unpublished Home Office records, it is argued that the treatment of the Lithuanians was determined by factors external to the immigrant community. The paper challenges the view that the state in Britain has been the protector and guarantor of minority rights.     

A validation of a computer-assisted randomized response survey to estimate the prevalence of fraud in social security

Summary.  In the Netherlands, there is a research tradition that measures fraud against regulations by interviewing eligible individuals using a survey. In these studies the sensitive questions about fraud are posed by using a randomized response method. The paper describes the results of a Dutch study into the consequences of replacing home interviews by trained interviewers with Internet-delivered interviews in a survey on fraud in the area of disability benefits. Both surveys used computer-assisted self-interviews with randomized response questions. This study has three goals: first to present the research tradition that makes use of randomized response, second to compare the results of home interviews and the Internet survey and finally to introduce an adapted weighted logistic regression method to test the relationship between the probability of fraud and explanatory variables. The results show that there are no systematic differences between modes of interview, either for estimates of the prevalence of fraud or for the identification of associated variables. These outcomes result in the conclusion that the Internet survey is a useful and cost-effective instrument for measuring fraud in a population, and that it is unlikely that replacing home interviews with the Internet survey will result in a significant break with tradition.     

The Smothering Embrace: Competition in the Implementation of Social Policy

One element of recent welfare state reform has been the introduction of market coordination in the implementation of social policy. The authors of this article have conducted a comparative study of social security, health care and housing policy implementation in the Netherlands, focusing on the conditions necessary for an effective mechanism of competition. The most important condition is that clients should be able to switch between providers without difficulty. Evidence shows that the providers in these fields of social policy engage in activities that undermine the potential for future competition. While this is not uncommon in itself, the new markets in social policy appear to be particularly vulnerable to such activities. This can be explained on the basis of two variables: (1) the institutional characteristics of the policy fields as they existed before the introduction of market coordination, and (2) the characteristics of the products that providers distribute. The combination of path dependency and product characteristics strengthens efforts to reduce competition.     

Measuring Young Children's Perceptions of Support, Control, and Maintenance in Their Own Social Networks

Thirty‐eight children (aged 3;7–7;6) and one of their parents took part in a study concerning children's perceptions of their social networks. The study made use of a newly developed instrument—the Support, Control and Maintenance Pictures Interview (SCAMPI). The SCAMPI offers an individualized testing environment, employing computer presentation of questions based on photographs of significant persons familiar to the child. SCAMPI is designed to allow data analysis to be carried out with the aid of built‐in statistical procedures based on permutation and bootstrap techniques that are optimally adapted to the requirements of individualized testing. The study examines the differentiations young children make between persons in their social networks and the functions they fulfil, the level of agreement between children and their parents and the stability of the children's responses.