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.     

Parenting capacity

We describe an approach to the assessment of parenting for families in which child abuse has been established to have occurred. Neither the category of abuse nor its physical severity adequately predicts the future wellbeing or safety of an abused child. The critical variable in determining the child's future is the level of disturbance in parenting. We argue against the most common approach to assessments of parenting, which is to generate a non‐hierarchical list of issues with the emphasis on relatively concrete and readily measurable dimensions such as social support, parental knowledge about parenting and the child's developmental status. We enhance the standard approach to assessment by organizing it around parenting capacity. We do not attempt to operationalize parenting capacity, de?ning it as the parents' ability to empathically understand and give priority to their child's needs. Adequate parenting requires that the parents be able to meet the challenges posed by their particular child's temperament and development (which may be shaped by the abusive experience) and also to accept and be prepared to address their own intrinsic characteristics which impede their parenting capacity. Parenting capacity is more dif?cult to assess than the more concrete and commonly measured aspects of parenting, but we argue that its assessment should be central to child protection management decisions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bachelorhood and Late Marriage: An Interactionist Interpretation*

This paper summarizes an exploratory investigation of the interactional careers of forty bachelors (men who had reached the age of 35 without marrying), twenty of whom later married. Depth interviewing was used to collect life history data establishing major career lines of specific heterosexual dyads as well as developments in preceding and paralleling universes of interaction. The findings support the contention that continuing social pressures rather than personal abnormalities of individual bachelors ultimately determine marital careers in that bachelorhood and late marriage are interactional products stemming from differential socialization and situational contingencies.     

An Assessment of the Determinants of Religious Participation*

Variations in patterns of church attendance are examined for a 1974 national sample of American Protestants and Catholics. Contrary to past results, socioeconomic status and alienation contribute little, but sociodemographic variables contribute more to the explained variance in church attendance. Region and sex affect church attendance more than education, occupation, or income. Religiosity and confidence in the clergy are the most important determinants of church attendance and together account for half of the total variance explained in church attendance.     

THE FREE-LANCE MUSICIAN AS A TYPE OF NON-PERSON: AN EXTENSION OF THE CONCEPT OF NON-PERSONHOOD

Free-lance musicians are professionally trained artists who lack permanent membership in any musical organization. Although trained to be creative artists, most frequently free-lancers play supporting music for operas, ballets and solo performers on stage, or provide background music for dinners or receptions. As a consequence, their technical skills are devalued by audiences; they often play music below their skill level; spontaneity in interpretation is extremely limited or impossible; they are anonymous to the audience and their playing generally receives an impersonal response; performances serve a functional rather than an aesthetic purpose; and players are interchangeable between groups. As a result of treatment as non-persons, free-lancers hold a sense of low prestige for themselves, and the occupation in many ways serves as a negative reference group for its members. Wide implications regarding non-personhood are drawn for an increasingly mechanized society. Contrary to Goffman's examples, non-personhood is not tied to occupations of limited skill, but rather, can occur in any occupational group under conditions in which individual interpretation, decision making, and power are nullified.     

Discrepancies in Perceived Organizational Control: their Incidence and Importance in Local Churches*

The effects of discrepancies between preferred and perceived control among church members are investigated in terms of amount and distribution of control. For each dimension of control, three categories of respondents are identified: those who preferred a greater amount or wider distribution of control than they perceived to exist within their churches (deficit); those whose preferred and perceived control scores were identical (balance); and those who preferred a lesser amount or more concentrated distribution of control in their churches than they perceived to exist (surplus). For both amount and distribution of control, a perceived deficit is more common than a surplus. Respondents experiencing discrepancies in either direction are more dissatisfied and alienated than those with a balance in desired and perceived organizational control. A deficit is associated with more dissatisfaction (but not necessarily more alienation) than a surplus. Subsample comparisons show these findings hold for both officers and non-officers. Regression analyses show that discrepancies regarding organizational control are important even after other aspects of control have been introduced.     

The Perceived Threat of Nuclear War, Salience, and Open Questions

The most serious problem facing the United States, accordingto many scientific and political leaders, is the threat of nuclearwar. Yet the standard survey question on the most importantproblem facing the country has often shown little public concurrencewith this assumption. Our article uses experimentation in nationalsamples to test whether this difference can be traced to limitationsin either the form or the wording of the standard question.The results indicate that there are some important systematicdifferences between open and closed versions of the question,and also differences that result from reference to the nationas distinct from the world, but neither type of difference accountsfor the infrequent mention of nuclear war on the standard question.Instead, other evidence indicates that most Americans believethat nuclear war is not going to happen at all, or that if itdoes happen it will be too far in the distant future to be ofpressing concern to them personally.     

Alienation: a Discrepancy Approach*

A discrepancy measure of job-related alienation, labeled power discrepancy, is introduced. Power discrepancy was measured by the difference between the amount of job-related power workers feel they are able to exercise on their present jobs and the amount of power they feel they should be able to exercise. Three types were derived: workers whose perceived power was less than the amount they felt that they should have (deficit power); workers with as much perceived power as they felt they should have (balanced power); and workers whose perceived power exceeded what they believed they should have (surplus power). It is found that power deficit increases with the degree of functional specialization at work and that power deficit is the most common experience regardless of the extent of functional specialization. Instrumental work orientation and isolation from organizational goals is the most pronounced among workers with deficit power. Workers with surplus job-related power are on a par with those with a balance between perceived and desired power in terms of consummatory work orientation and commitment to organizational goals. Among workers with less job-related power than they feel they should have, instrumental work orientation and isolation from organizational goals are higher among less affluent, younger, and loss educated workers. Introduction of a measure of the importance of work-related power did not help in explaining this last finding.     

Academic incentives for students can increase participation in and effectiveness of a physical activity program

The authors sought to determine whether a greater academic incentive would improve the effectiveness and student adherence to a 12-week voluntary exercise program designed to decrease students' percentage of body fat. They randomly assigned 210 students to 1 of 2 groups with different academic reward structures. The group with the greater reward structure showed better exercise adherence and lost more body fat than those without the additional incentive. These findings suggest that an academic incentive can increase overall student adherence to a voluntary exercise program and can boost the effectiveness of the program in a university environment. The findings also have potential implications for on-campus promotion of physical activity.