Working beyond 65: predictors of late retirement for women and men MBAs

Comparisons of those who planned to continue working after the age of 65 with those who did not were made for 145 women and 414 men working in managerial fields. All received MBA degrees between the years of 1973 and 1982. About 20% definitely wanted to work after age 65. More positive views of work were predictive of wanting to continue working as was having nontraditional gender-role attitudes. Men who planned to continue working were particularly likely to have a spouse wanting to work past the age of 65. Several other factors appeared to operate differently for women and men.     

Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge

It is not uncommon for women researchers to experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. Nevertheless, these experiences are often left out of ethnographers’ “tales from the field” and remain unaddressed within our discipline. In this article, we use women's experiences with harassment in the field to interrogate the epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology within the discipline of sociology. Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews, we examine three “fixations” of contemporary ethnography that inform women ethnographers’ understandings of and reactions to harassment in the field. These fixations are solitude, danger, and intimacy. Our data show that these fixations not only put researchers in danger but also have implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. They contribute to silence surrounding sexual harassment, and are motivated by and reproduce androcentric norms that valorize certain types of fieldwork. We argue that acknowledging and analyzing experiences with harassment and other unwanted sexual attention in the field is part of a more fully developed understanding of ethnographic research itself.     

Using experimental design to define boundary manikins

When evaluating human-machine interaction it is central to consider anthropometric diversity to ensure intended accommodation levels. A well-known method is the use of boundary cases where manikins with extreme but likely measurement combinations are derived by mathematical treatment of anthropometric data. The supposition by that method is that the use of these manikins will facilitate accommodation of the expected part of the total, less extreme, population. In literature sources there are differences in how many and in what way these manikins should be defined. A similar field to the boundary case method is the use of experimental design in where relationships between affecting factors of a process is studied by a systematic approach. This paper examines the possibilities to adopt methodology used in experimental design to define a group of manikins. Different experimental designs were adopted to be used together with a confidence region and its axes. The result from the study shows that it is possible to adapt the methodology of experimental design when creating groups of manikins. The size of these groups of manikins depends heavily on the number of key measurements but also on the type of chosen experimental design.     

Automobility and site ontological analysis

Many scholars of mobility employ the concepts of assemblage, practice and intensive force. This paper argues that site ontological analysis is a productive way to understand the ways these phenomenon work together. The importance of practice organization to such a differential ontology is emphasized. A case study of an automobile journey on the Pennsylvania Turnpike illustrates how a momentary stranding in the driving event modified the site’s practices, temporalities, subjectivities and intensivities.     

The smell of distance: Wallace Stegner’s definition of western non-fiction

Wallace Stegner has argued that land, scale, and aridness are defining characteristics of both the American West and writings about the West. Stegner’s definition is analyzed using his own works and Mark Twain’s Roughing It.     

Deadbeat dads or inept states? A comparison of child support enforcement systems.

This article provides information on the effectiveness of state child support enforcement systems. We use individual level data from the Child Support Supplements of the Current Population Surveys (1978-1992) to create an index of state effectiveness that captures success at securing child support awards, setting award levels, and collecting obligations. We identify states that were performing above or below the national average in the late 1980s to early 1990s and states that showed substantial improvement or decline in child support effectiveness during the 1980s. Identifying successful states will help researchers to determine what policies and practices are associated with successful enforcement. These variations in state effectiveness also suggest that low levels of child support are not due to deadbeat dads alone but also to inept states.