The Slaughtered and the Survivors: Collaboration Between Social Economy Organizations as a Key to Success in Times of Financial Crisis

The objective of this study is to analyze the aspects that allowed a critical part of Social Economy Organizations (SEOs) to survive a recession period, especially participation in collaborative networks. The financial stress of an SEO will depend on the resources and capabilities available to the organization. To analyze the financial stress of Spanish SEOs, we defined a sample of 714 SEOs. Approximately half of these organizations suffered from financial stress in the analyzed period (2009–2012). The results obtained in this study reveal the existence of three factors that distinguish organizations under financial stress: (a) a high dependence on government funding; (b) changes in the relationship between staff and volunteers; and (c) a lack of access to markets. The combination of these three elements results in an unsustainable situation for the organization. The development of a collaborative profile increases the SEO’s probability of surviving the adverse manifestations of its environment.     

Does transformational leadership predict group emotional intelligence in work settings? / ¿Es el liderazgo transformacional un predictor de la inteligencia emocional grupal en los contextos laborales?

Contagion of emotions is a widely accepted characteristic of transformational leaders. However, the impact they may have on the Emotional Intelligence of their subordinates is an open question. In this paper, we analyse whether Transformational Leadership (LTF) perceptions influence the Emotional Intelligence of their groups (GEI). This is a novel approach within the actual interest on emotional intelligence and its role in group results. The participants were 272 subordinates from 52 groups that belonged to different private and public organizations in Spain. They completed a questionnaire including the variables of interest. Our study helps to clarify the relations between TFL perceptions and GEI, showing that TFL and GEI relate at the group level and that TFL is one of the predictors of the perception of GEI in work settings. Thus, the development of emotionally competent transformational leaders will produce emotionally competent groups that might increase their performance, efficiency and other processes (i.e., engagement).     

Economic Crisis and Job Quality in Spain: A Multi-dimensional and Micro-data Empirical Approach

Through a representative sample of 9,100 and 8,755 employees in 2008 and 2010, and a using two-stage structural equation model, this article empirically analyses the multi-dimensional determinants (direct effects) of job quality in Spain. The research concludes that: #1 despite the economic crisis, job quality improved over the analysis period; #2 there was a shift in job quality explanation towards a more complete model with greater preponderance of the dimensions connected with the workplace relationships, work intensity, working conditions and work–life balance in detriment to dimensions connected with the intrinsic job quality and extrinsic rewards. These results suggest the importance of the working environment and social relationships, beyond the quality of the workplace, as important tools of employment public policy to improve labor markets and to overcoming the economic crisis.     

Audiovisual Correlates of Interrogativity: A Comparative Analysis of Catalan and Dutch

Languages employ different strategies to mark an utterance as a polar (yes–no) question, including syntax, intonation and gestures. This study analyzes the production and perception of information-seeking questions and broad focus statements in Dutch and Catalan. These languages use intonation for marking questionhood, but Dutch also exploits syntactic variation for this purpose. A production task revealed the expected language-specific auditory differences, but also showed that gaze and eyebrow-raising are used in this distinction. A follow-up perception experiment revealed that perceivers relied greatly on auditory information in determining whether an utterance is a question or a statement, but accuracy was further enhanced when visual information was added. Finally, the study demonstrates that the concentration of several response-mobilizing cues in a sentence is positively correlated with the perceivers’ ratings of these utterances as interrogatives.     

Quality of Life in the European Union: An Econometric Analysis from a Gender Perspective

Social Indicators Research - This paper provides an approach to measure the quality of life in the European Union from a multiple perspective: individual, socioeconomic and territorial by creating...     

The gender gap in pensions in Latin America

Lower female lifetime labour market participation rates, greater interruptions during their working lives, and wage gaps contribute to create gender gaps in pensions at the time of retirement. The design of social security systems may reinforce or attenuate these gaps. This article provides new evidence on gender gaps in access to pensions and in pension income in four Southern Cone countries in Latin America and analyses their evolution between 2000 and 2013, showing significant improvements in both gaps, with differential patterns by countries. The decrease in the gender gap in pension income has been particularly significant in Argentina and Brazil. In both cases, the largest increases in pension values during the period correspond to the lowest income percentiles, where women are overrepresented. The application of redistributive policies in these countries, aimed at reducing poverty and inequality but not necessarily focused on gender equity, has had positive and probably unintended consequences in terms of reduction in gender gaps in pensions.     

Bayesian monitoring of local residual autocorrelations taking into account the run-length

This paper proposes new two-sided monitoring algorithms for detecting the presence of first order residual autocorrelations in Dynamic Normal Models. The methodology uses a Bayesian decision approach with loss function which takes into account the run-length of the process. The power and mean run-length of the proposed algorithms are analysed by Monte Carlo methods. The results obtained improve those corresponding to the monitoring algorithm for residual autocorrelations proposed in Gargallo and Salvador [2003. Monitoring residual autocorrelations in dynamic linear models. Comm. Statist. Simulation Comput. 32(4), 1079–1104.] with respect to the run-length, and also exhibit more homogeneous behaviour.     

Mutual Contributions of Individuals, Partners, and Institutions: Planning to Remember in Girl Scout Cookie Sales

This paper argues that planning entails distributed, mutual contributions of individuals, their social partners, and their community institutions. We suggest that these mutually involved contributions can be viewed through shifts in focus of analysis, contrasting with analyses of cognitive development that treat individuals as though they exist apart from their social and cultural worlds. We illustrate this argument with a study examining the distributed nature of planning to remember in a complex everyday task. We investigated the personal, interpersonal, and institutional cognitive contributions of 16 Girl Scouts, their mothers and customers and other companions, and institutions (the national organization and the cookie company) in keeping track of deliveries and planning collection of money in Girl Scout cookie sales and deliveries. The article also discusses an analytic methodology (Functional Pattern Analysis) for abstracting findings from the details of rich ethnographic data. Individual scouts, their mothers, customers, and the scouting organization and cookie company all played significant roles in keeping track of progress. In particular, tools and supports provided by the cookie company played a key role in organizing the cognitive tasks, and the scouts collaborated in planning with other people (usually their mothers and customers). Our findings illustrate the importance of examining contributions beyond those of the individual, while still recognizing the active roles of individuals in thinking. We argue that conceiving of individual, interpersonal, and institutional/cultural contributions as mutually constituting aspects of cognitive activities supports this aim beyond the usual focus on separate individual and ‘external’ factors.