Spaces of Participation in Pre‐School: Arenas for Establishing Power Orders?

This article reports an ethnographic study of pre‐school children's social knowledge domains. Results show how the children's shared knowledge concerning social status and social differentiation in the group was strengthened and confirmed during a traditional teacher‐led ring game, where they were supposed to choose a friend. We suggest that from the perspective of the children, the game situation may be understood as, at the same time, a space of participation and an arena for establishing the power order. From the perspective of the teacher, pedagogical intentions may be challenged as they encounter and are mediated and interpreted by children's peer‐cultures.     

General Job Satisfaction From a Developmental Perspective: Exploring Choice—Job Matches at Two Career Stages

The authors explored predictions of general job satisfaction at early and middle adulthood and uncovered several findings about developmental processes associated with job satisfaction. Tests of life‐span career theory propositions revealed that neither choice‐job congruence nor gender added significantly to predictions of job satisfaction at 2 career stages. Earlier occupational choice and current job added to predictions of midcareer (modal age 43 years) job satisfaction, especially for men. The predictability of job satisfaction is apparently influenced by the career stage when satisfaction is appraised.     

Mission attachment and satisfaction as factors in employee retention

Nonprofit organizations rely on the mission to attract resources and guide decision making. Increasingly, mission statements are recognized as a strong management tool that can motivate employees and keep them focused on the organization's purpose. This research investigated employee attitudes toward the mission in a youth and recreation service organization. In general, the employees expressed positive attitudes toward the organization's mission, and those attitudes were related to employee satisfaction and intentions to remain with the organization. However, dissatisfaction with pay tended to override employee's mission attachment as explanation of why they may leave the organization. The implication is that mission might be salient in attracting employees but less effective in retaining them.     

‘I hereby come out’: What sort of speech act is coming out?

The process of coming out linguistically as a lesbian or as a gay man is occasionally referred to as a speech act (e.g. Harvey 1997: 72; Liang 1997: 293). This analogy is taken as a starting point to explore the extent to which coming out is a performative act, and what sort of speech act coming out may be. The discussion draws on the perspective of both the speaker and the hearer to consider how the acts involved in coming out are open to interpretation. Parallels are drawn between the act of coming out as a lesbian or a gay man and other instances of self–disclosure or of individuals' constructions of new facets of their identities.     

Bootstrap Estimation of Benchmark Doses and Confidence Limits with Clustered Quantal Data

The benchmark dose (BMD) is an exposure level that would induce a small risk increase (BMR level) above the background. The BMD approach to deriving a reference dose for risk assessment of noncancer effects is advantageous in that the estimate of BMD is not restricted to experimental doses and utilizes most available dose-response information. To quantify statistical uncertainty of a BMD estimate, we often calculate and report its lower confidence limit (i.e., BMDL), and may even consider it as a more conservative alternative to BMD itself. Computation of BMDL may involve normal confidence limits to BMD in conjunction with the delta method. Therefore, factors, such as small sample size and nonlinearity in model parameters, can affect the performance of the delta method BMDL, and alternative methods are useful. In this article, we propose a bootstrap method to estimate BMDL utilizing a scheme that consists of a resampling of residuals after model fitting and a one-step formula for parameter estimation. We illustrate the method with clustered binary data from developmental toxicity experiments. Our analysis shows that with moderately elevated dose-response data, the distribution of BMD estimator tends to be left-skewed and bootstrap BMDL s are smaller than the delta method BMDL s on average, hence quantifying risk more conservatively. Statistically, the bootstrap BMDL quantifies the uncertainty of the true BMD more honestly than the delta method BMDL as its coverage probability is closer to the nominal level than that of delta method BMDL. We find that BMD and BMDL estimates are generally insensitive to model choices provided that the models fit the data comparably well near the region of BMD. Our analysis also suggests that, in the presence of a significant and moderately strong dose-response relationship, the developmental toxicity experiments under the standard protocol support dose-response assessment at 5% BMR for BMD and 95% confidence level for BMDL.     

Formalization of grievance procedures: A multi-firm and industry study

This study examines how two aspects of formalization of grievance procedures affect grievance procedure effectiveness: written versus oral presentation of grievance and the level of union and management authorized to resolve grievances at the first step. Several demographic variables were controlled for: size of bargaining unit, percentage of organization represented, number of grievances filed, and industry. A sample of 46 firms, representing a broad cross-section of unionized companies in the private sector, was obtained with the help of the American Arbitration Association. Results indicate that more formal grievance procedures (e.g., written presentation) are positively related to resolution rates at the first step. The number of grievances field and the size of the bargaining unit were positively related to total resolution rates prior to arbitration. We thank the American Arbitration Association for making this study possible.