Underemployment among Mexican-origin women

The authors compare the determinants of three forms of marginal employment between Mexican-origin and white women: unemployment, involuntary part-time employment, and working poverty. They address two main questions. First, are there differences between Mexican-origin and white women in the propensity for unemployment, involuntary part-time employment, and working poverty? Second, do the effects of personal characteristics and job location on underemployment vary by ethnicity? Data are drawn from the Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement File of the 2005 Current Population Survey (CPS). Using multinomial logistic regression models, we show that ethnicity matters in the likelihood of working poverty but not for the other forms of underemployment. Results also reveal that the effects of personal attributes and job location on the likelihood of unemployment, involuntary part-time employment, and working poverty vary for each ethnic group, leading to a double disadvantage for working poor Mexican-origin women.     

The multi‐professional approach: front‐line professionals' behaviours and interactions

Sousa L, Costa T. The multi‐professional approach: front‐line professionals' behaviours and interactions Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 444–454 © 2009 The Author, Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Given the complexity of social problems, the multi‐professional approach has been generally adopted in the Western world as a desirable work practice. This study aimed at identifying front‐line professionals' behaviours and interactions that significantly influenced (positively or negatively) multi‐professional processes and outcomes. The study was conducted using the critical incidents technique administered to 117 front‐line professionals involved in multi‐professional approaches from different agencies and areas of expertise. The main findings suggest that the multi‐professional approach among front‐line professionals is facilitated by the professionals' commitment and complementarity and inhibited by the absence of complementarity, professionals being aggressive and insensitive to other professionals, and incompetence. The multi‐professional approach emerges as a context in which it is necessary to articulate professionals' personal and professional similarities and differences. The results suggest that professionals need to develop new competencies, particularly interdependence, flexibility and reflection on the process and outcomes of the multi‐professional approach.     

Dynamic Models for the Time Series of Industrial Conflict in the Labour Market

ABSTRACT: In the aim to investigate the behaviour of some indicators for the industrial conflict and to detect the relation between such variables and the cost of labour in Italy, this paper suggests the use of Box-Jenkins’time series analysis. By fitting a different stochastic process for each series, it can be shown that every indicator gives a different kind of information about the industrial conflict, so that they can't be indifferently substituted by each other. In a second step, cross correlation function estimates between cost of labour and each indicator suggest the different role played by 'strike frequency’and strike duration during any contract renewal.     

The queen bee: A myth? The effect of top-level female leadership on subordinate females

We investigate the effect of female leadership on gender differences in public and private organizations. Female leadership impact was constructed using a quasi-experiment involving mayoral elections, and our research used a sample of 8.3 million organizations distributed over 5600 Brazilian municipalities. Our main results show that when municipalities in which a woman was elected leader (treatment group) are compared with municipalities in which a male was elected leader (control group) there was an increase in the number of top and middle female managers in public organizations. Two aspects contribute to the results: time and command/role model. The time effect is important because our results are obtained with reelected women – in their second term – and the command/role model (the queen bee phenomenon is either small, or non-existent) is important because of the institutional characteristics of public organizations: female leaders (mayor) have much asymmetrical power and decision-making discretion, i.e., she chooses the top managers. These top managers then choose middle managers influenced by female leadership (a role model). We obtained no significant results for private organizations. Our work contributes to the literature on leadership by addressing some specific issues: an empirical investigation with a causal effect between the variables (regression-discontinuity design – a non-parametric estimation), the importance of role models, and how the observed effects are time-dependent. Insofar as public organizations are concerned, the evidence from our large-scale study suggests that the queen bee phenomenon may be a myth; instead, of keeping subordinate women at bay, our results show that women leaders who are afforded much managerial discretion behave in a benevolent manner toward subordinate women. The term “Regal Leader” instead of “Queen Bee” is thus a more appropriate characterization of women in top positions of power.     

Corporate Governance mechanisms as drivers that enhance the credibility and usefulness of CSR disclosure

The aim of this paper is to examine what kinds of CG mechanisms (institutional, firm or group level) are driving getting an Assurance or a GRI application level, like CSR disclosure decisions linked with credibility and usefulness of the information disclosed, in the particular context of energy companies. Previous evidence is scarce and does not jointly consider all levels of CG mechanisms. Our sample is composed by 176 energy companies worldwide which currently report about CSR through a sustainability report. On the basis of our findings, we could support the idea that the credibility of the CSR report of the utilities companies will be greater if the company listed in a Relation-Based country has an Assurance report. In addition, those companies that have a concentrated ownership and the fewer insiders sitting in the BoD present more probabilities of having an Assurance. Moreover, the usefulness of the CSR information provided by this kind of firms will be higher, the greater the efficiency of the BoD will be. The enhancement of the credibility and the usefulness of the information reported is essential for companies involved in this sector due to the frequent claim of window-dressing behaviours.     

How obstetricians and pregnant women decide mode of birth in light of a recent regulation in Brazil

Background

In Brazil, 88% of births among women with private insurance are caesarean sections, even though a caesarean rate above 15% is associated with greater maternal and child morbidity and mortality. Aiming to reduce unnecessary caesarean sections in the private sector, in July 2015 the Brazilian government enacted Resolução Normativa 368, a regulation requiring the use of partograms, pre-natal cards to document pregnancies, and consent forms for elective caesareans, and recommending that obstetricians provide women with an informational letter about birth.

Facebook in Brazilian Schools: Mobilizing to Fight Back

In this article, we analyse how students used social media as a form of human–technology interaction for the organization, development, and expansion of activities in 4 social movements in Brazil. We analysed 122 Facebook pages maintained by the Four Movements using the cultural-historical activity theory framework and focused on the notion of collaborative agency in the development of the movements. We performed a qualitative analysis of this data to understand both how the movements developed and the results that the students obtained. Our findings suggest that by acting collaboratively, students expanded activities to other contexts.     

Nature as nurture: Rural older women’s perspectives on the natural environment

ABSTRACT

Rural older women are surrounded by nature, a dynamic context for human development. Informed by place attachment and attention restoration theory, and guided by a life course perspective, this qualitative study focused on the perceived influence of nature in the lives of 34 rural older women. Using grounded theory techniques to analyze in-depth interviews, two primary findings emerged: (a) nature was integral to the women’s identity; and (b) interactions with nature were motivated by prior positive spiritual and psychological outcomes. Findings revealed the power of the natural environment as a resource for coping with the challenges associated with aging.     

Work Conditions,Social Incorporations,and Foodborne Diseases Risk: Reflections About the (Non)Compliance of Food Safety Practices

The number of foodborne diseases has increased in all continents, and efforts must be made to control this urgent and expressive public health problem. This article aims to present and discuss situations related to the compliance and noncompliance of food safety practices (FSPs) in light of Bourdieu's social theory. This qualitative study was conducted in commercial restaurants in two cities in São Paulo, Brazil. Participant observation was used in the restaurants, and notes referring to the kitchen workers and their bosses’ work processes were registered in field journals. Thematic type content analysis was used to determine the meaning cores of field journals. It was found that aspects inherent to convenience and haste at work, deficient infrastructure, lack of employees, negative boss examples, exposure to noise, and body pain experienced by workers can contribute to noncompliance of FSPs and consolidate in the habitus and practical sense some dispositions that can increase the risk of foodborne diseases. This study highlights the necessity of creating environments that address food safety, which means being able to perform a service properly.     

Latent class models for ecological inference on voters transitions

This paper introduces some new models of ecological inference within the context of estimation of voter transitions across elections. In particular, we assume that voters of a given party in a given occasion may be split into two latent types: faithful voters, who will certainly vote again for the same party and movers, who will reconsider their choice. Our models allow for unobserved heterogeneity across polling stations both in the weights of the two latent classes within each party and also when modelling the choice of unfaithful voters. Different ways of modelling the unobserved heterogeneity are considered by exploiting properties of the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution and the Brown Payne model of voting transitions can be seen as a special case within the class of models presented here. We discuss pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation and present an application to recent elections in Italy.