Public sector managers: the decision to leave or remain in a job

The public sector faces a grave problem as far as managerial retention as the result of the increasing number of retirements and of voluntary resignations. Despite the vital interest in managerial turnover in the public sector, research is scarce. This study, which increases our understanding of why public sector managers leave their positions, takes a qualitative and narrative research approach in examining voluntary turnover. Interviews were conducted with operations managers (in education, social care, and technical activities) at three Swedish municipalities. We identify a multitude of environment push and pull factors with a focus on administrative support, supervisory support and illegitimate tasks. The narratives of managerial turnover reveal the complexity of the decision to leave or remain in a job, containing a mixture of push and pull factors, negative feelings, unmet expectations and extraordinary events. Three possible HRD actions to decrease undesirable managerial turnover are identified: re-work organizational structures; re-model job characteristics; and re-examine managerial turnover decisions as a long and complex process. Our hope is that the findings are used for ultimately create healthy organizations.     

Determinants of recent immigrants’ location choices: quasi-experimental evidence

This paper exploits a Danish spatial dispersal policy on refugees, which can be regarded as a natural experiment to investigate the influence of regional factors on recent immigrants’ location choices. The main push factors are lack of co-nationals and immigrants. Additional push factors are lack of rental, including social, housing and lack of institutions for qualifying education, which explain why recent immigrants are attracted to large cities. Finally, placed refugees tend to leave locations with relatively high regional unemployment, and there is indirect evidence of welfare seeking.

Continuity and Change in the Family System Across the Transition from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood

As adolescents move into emerging adulthood, their social networks shift toward a focus on peers and romantic partners, yet parents and siblings remain important sources of support. The present review takes a family systems approach to integrate the growing body of literature examining longitudinal continuity and change in both positive (e.g., intimacy, support) and negative (e.g., conflict, rivalry) qualities of parent–child and sibling relationships as adolescents transition to emerging adulthood. In general, contact with family members decreases, yet the quality of family relationships appears to improve or, at the very least, stabilize across this transition. These pathways are interpreted within the lens of several prominent theories, and a discussion of the limitations of the current literature and ideas for future research are presented.     

The effect of number of siblings on adult mortality: Evidence from Swedish registers for cohorts born between 1938 and 1972

Demographic research has paid much attention to the impact of childhood conditions on adult mortality. We focus on one of the key aspects of early life conditions, sibling group size, and examine the causal effect of growing up in a large family on mortality. While previous studies have focused on low- or middle-income countries, we examine whether growing up in a large family is a disadvantage in Sweden, a context where most parents have adequate resources, which are complemented by a generous welfare state. We used Swedish register data and frailty models, examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality between the ages of 40 and 74 for the 1938–72 cohorts, and also a quasi-experimental approach that exploited multiple births as a source of exogenous variation in the number of siblings. Overall our results do not indicate that growing up in a large family has a detrimental effect on longevity in Sweden.     

The “what” and “who” of co-optation: gendered racialized migrations,settler nation-states and postcolonial difference

In this article, I focus on the management of postcolonial difference and the production of belonging in a white settler nation-state in order to rethink the notion of co-optation. I first develop a theoretical framework for understanding co-optation by separating the “who” and the “what” of co-optation: actors who embody diversity in public, political debate become the “who” of co-optation, as their agency is shaped by gendered and racialized processes of subject making. The “what” of co-optation revolves around particular conceptualizations of practices, rights and freedoms, associated in this case with “gender equality,” which is rendered an empty signifier in the process. I then illustrate this framework by drawing from research on the Sharia-based arbitration debate that took place in Ontario, Canada, between late 2003 and early 2006. I focus on the claims of two Canadian Muslim women activists to show that co-optation occurs as attempts to further liberation instead advance illiberal practices.     

Asymptotic behaviour of proportions of observations in random regions determined by central order statistics from stationary processes

In this paper, we show that proportions of observations that fall into a random region determined by a given Borel set and a central order statistic converge almost surely, provided that the corresponding population quantile is unique. We also describe three types of possible asymptotic behaviour of these proportions in the case of non-unique population quantile. As an application of our findings we establish limiting properties of numbers of ties with a central order statistics in a discrete sample. Our results are derived not only for independent and identically distributed observations but more generally for strictly stationary and ergodic sequences of random variables.     

A simulation study of the Bennett test and Miller test for coefficients of variation

In the article, properties of the Bennett test and Miller test are analyzed. Assuming that the sample size is the same for each sample and considering the null hypothesis that the coefficients of variation for k populations are equal against the hypothesis that k ? 1 coefficients of variation are the same but differ from the coefficient of variation for the kth population, the empirical significance level and the power of the test are studied. Moreover, the dependence of the test statistic and the power of the test on the ratio of coefficients of variation are considered. The analyses are performed on simulated data.     

Decomposition of the main effects and interaction term by using orthogonal polynomials in multiple non symmetrical correspondence analysis

The multiple non symmetric correspondence analysis (MNSCA) is a useful technique for analyzing a two-way contingency table. In more complex cases, the predictor variables are more than one. In this paper, the MNSCA, along with the decomposition of the Gray–Williams Tau index, in main effects and interaction term, is used to analyze a contingency table with two predictor categorical variables and an ordinal response variable. The Multiple-Tau index is a measure of association that contains both main effects and interaction term. The main effects represent the change in the response variables due to the change in the level/categories of the predictor variables, considering the effects of their addition, while the interaction effect represents the combined effect of predictor categorical variables on the ordinal response variable. Moreover, for ordinal scale variables, we propose a further decomposition in order to check the existence of power components by using Emerson's orthogonal polynomials.