Applying a barriers approach to monitoring disabled people's employment: implications for the Disability Discrimination Act 2005

The year 2005 witnessed the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 through Parliament. The Act responds in part to the perceived need for more proactive legislation that seeks to encourage good employer and service provider practice from the outset and diminish discriminatory action. This article focuses on the employment provisions of the 2005 Act. The article is based on a scoping study carried out during the gestation of the Act that looks at the challenges of applying a barriers approach to a disability employment monitoring schemes. Monitoring schemes have been a key part of recent anti-discriminatory legislation. The text of the Act and its Guidance might suggest that the future of monitoring as an explicit feature of proactive employer practice is uncertain. The article makes clear however the importance of disability employment monitoring if disabled people are to be better represented and receive equitable treatment in the workplace.     

Sociology as a vocation: Reputations and group cultures in graduate school

Graduate training in sociology involves more than meeting organizationally imposed demands such as satisfying departmental requirements, taking exams, and completing a dissertation. More central is the development of identity through institutional and interactional forces. We examine the experience of graduate students as tied to the social psychological processes associated with professional training. We consider the faculty-student relationship, identifying how student identities as future sociologists are negotiated and constructed within a reputation market linked to status politics. Through this process, graduate students construct frames of interpretation that make sense of a status system in which criteria for evaluation are often variable, uncertain, or undisclosed. To recognize how graduate students fit into their occupational routines, we build upon three core disciplinary constructs: identity, reputation, and group culture. This perspective permits graduate education to be grounded in sociological understandings, underlining the role of a sociological imagination. We propose strategies that sociology departments might follow to facilitate the professional socialization of graduate students, emphasizing the establishment of group culture and presentational norms. In the absence of these changes, we offer advice to graduate students on navigating their current programs.     

The Construction of Historical Equivalence: Weighing the Red and Brown Scares

Whether two events “belong together,” cognitively and in terms of collective memory, requires that we develop classification strategies. Historical equivalence refers to the perception that two events, separate in space and time, belong to the same cognitive category, or speak to the same issues. They are “good to think together.” Rejecting a radical constructionism that suggests that everything is a matter of ontological preference, I argue, following Gubrium (1993) , that interactionists should prefer a cautious naturalism. While interests and resources affect the presentation of historical claims, an obdurate reality permits the evaluation of empirical claims of comparability. To determine historical equivalence, we need to examine events in light of their magnitude, metaphorical continuity, analogous causation, and comparative effects. To examine the construction of historical equivalence, I discuss the similarities and differences between the Red Scares of 1919 and the late 1940s and the Brown Scare of the early 1940s. What you choose as an historical analogy begins and ends the conversation. —Elazar Barkan, “On Accepting Historical Responsibility: Refugees and the Right of Return” (2004)     

International Business Cycle Asymmetry and Time Irreversible Nonlinearities

Using tests of time reversibility, this paper provides further statistical evidence on the long-standing conjecture in economics concerning the potentially asymmetric behaviour of output over the expansionary and contractionary phases of the business cycle. A particular advantage of this approach is that it provides a discriminating test that is instructive as to whether any asymmetries detected are due to asymmetric shocks to a linear model, or an underlying non-linear model with symmetric shocks, and in the latter case is informative as to the potential form of that nonlinear model. Using a long span of international per capita output growth data, the asymmetry detected is overwhelmingly consistent with the long standing perception that the output business cycle is characterized by steeper recessions and longer more gentle expansions, but the evidence for this form of business cycle asymmetry is weaker in the data adjusted for the influence of outliers associated with wars and other extreme events. Statistically significant time irreversibility is reported for the output growth rates of almost all of the countries considered in the full sample data, and there is evidence that this time irreversibility is of a form implying an underlying nonlinear model with symmetrically distributed innovations for 15 of the 22 countries considered. However, the time irreversibility test results for the outlier-trimmed full sample data reveal significant time irreversibility in output growth for around one half of the countries considered, predominantly in Northern Europe and North America, and of a form implying a nonlinear underlying model in only a further half of those cases.     

Developmental Outcomes for Children of Young Mothers

This study tested the association between mother’s early age at first birth and various life outcomes for her children in later adolescence and early adulthood. Data were analyzed from the Rochester Youth Development Study, an ongoing panel study of adolescents enrolled in seventh or eighth grade in Rochester Public Schools in 1988 (N =729). Boys born to mothers who began childbearing before age 19 had elevated risks of drug use, gang membership, unemployment, and early parenthood. Girls born to young mothers only had elevated risks of early parenthood. Of the mediators tested, low maternal education had the largest mediating effects. The findings suggest that the risks associated with being born to a young mother are substantial but perhaps disproportionately so for boys.     

Imagined Irish Communities: Networks of Social Communication of the Irish Diaspora in the United States and Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The discussion in this essay clarifies three neglected aspects of the comparative destinies of the Irish in America and Great Britain. First, it explores an apparent if generally unrecognised discrepancy between theories of nationalism and those of ethnicity, attempting to close a loophole in the literature. Secondly, it assesses what being Irish meant to the networks bridging the diasporic experience in the old country and adopted lands. Thirdly, it looks at tours overseas, mainly to the United States, by nationalist figures from the vantage point of the formation of an imagined community or network. It is suggested that the disjunction and a degree of misunderstanding about the networking process arises because the literature presumes an already existing or nearly formed Irish Catholic identity among the immigrants on arrival in new lands. Charles Stewart Parnell's trip in early 1880 also allows elucidation of theoretical paradigms. This linkage of theory and a specific form of ethnic networking yields a fresh dimension to the debate about immigration. Finally, in conclusion the analysis offers a new angle on the curious phenomenon of a resurgence or expansion of Irish 'ethnicity' or purported 'new Irishness' in the United States and elsewhere from around 1960.     

Sociology at the University of Kansas, 1889–1983: An Historical Sketch

Sociology at the University of Kansas began in 1889, making it one of the oldest departments in the country. This paper sketches its first 94 years, with special attention given to courses offered, faculty development, and the expansion of its graduate program. Suggestions for further research are made regarding sociology not only at this university, but others as well.