When Working Hard Is Not Enough for Female and Racial/Ethnic Minority Apprentices in the Highway Trades

Drawing on employment records, qualitative interviews, and a survey, we explore the experiences of apprentices in the highway trades in Oregon. We demonstrate that female and racial/ethnic minority apprentices have lower rates of recruitment and retention and disproportionately face challenges with interpersonal interactions, hiring practices, and supervisory practices. Yet, we find a pervasive narrative that attributes apprentices' success to “hard work,” which contributes to the legitimacy of these inequalities. Consistent with the conceptualization of work organizations as inequality regimes, we argue that the apprenticeship system has policies, practices, and ideologies that are on the surface gender and race/ethnicity neutral, yet lead to the perpetuation of inequalities.     

Interracial rape: Examining the increasing frequency argument

A number of researchers have recently challenged the long-held notion among criminologists that rape, along with most other violent crimes, is an intraracial crime. Based on analysis of survey data they concluded that black rapists “prefer” or “seek out” white victims and that the likelihood of a black offender selecting a white victim has been increasing during recent years. Data presented here (1977–88 National Crime Surveys) refute the notion that black rapists “prefer” white victims. Moreover these same data fail to support the contention that rapes involving black offenders and white victims have been increasing. According to National Crime Survey estimates, the proportion of black offenders that victimize whites has been declining. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, November 1991.     

THE STRUCTURE OF FAMILY PARADIGMS: AN ANALYTICAL MODEL OF FAMILY VARIATION

The theory of family paradigms provides an integrative framework for under-standing and systematizing the diverse ways that families organize and make sense of family life. Using formal methods of analysis based on logical and geometrical arguments, the priecise implications of models of family types can be investigated and compared. The paradigmatic framework can thus be refined and extended to form a more rigorous theoretical grounding for family typologies is explored and a miltidimensional model is derived the geometry of which is equivalent to, but more succinctly captures, the underlying structure of uariation in family para-digms. In Part II, the resulting model is interpredtd and explored in terms of implications for family theory, theory construction, and family therapy. Clarifying the basic dimensions of the paradigmatic framework also permits more precise exploration of interrelationships among related models of family types, which can be understood as reduced models derivable from the complete geometry of the paradigmatic framework.     

Weakly implementable social choice rules

Previous investigations have shown that a social choice function which is partially implementable must be characterized by pervasive veto power. This paper investigates how much additional latitude in the design of social choice functions, and how much relief from this vetoers result, can be achieved by examining multi-valued social choice rules and relaxing the requirement of partial implementability to a requirement that we call weak partial implementability. We find that the power structures which characterize partially implementable social choice functions, including the veto properties, also characterize weakly partially implementable social choice rules. The conclusion is that invoking multi-valuedness and implementation of appealing social choice rules in strong Nash equilibria. Our results apparently exhaust the possibilities for implementation in strong Nash equilibrium. If any implementation possibility results are to be achieved, they can apparently come only by weakening the equilibrium requirement.     

Low dose risk estimation via simultaneous statistical inferences

Summary.  The paper develops and studies simultaneous confidence bounds that are useful for making low dose inferences in quantitative risk analysis. Application is intended for risk assessment studies where human, animal or ecological data are used to set safe low dose levels of a toxic agent, but where study information is limited to high dose levels of the agent. Methods are derived for estimating simultaneous, one-sided, upper confidence limits on risk for end points measured on a continuous scale. From the simultaneous confidence bounds, lower confidence limits on the dose that is associated with a particular risk (often referred to as a bench-mark dose ) are calculated. An important feature of the simultaneous construction is that any inferences that are based on inverting the simultaneous confidence bounds apply automatically to inverse bounds on the bench-mark dose.     

Benchmark Analysis: Shopping with Proper Confidence

We discuss the issue of using benchmark doses for quantifying (excess) risk associated with exposure to environmental hazards. The paradigm of low-dose risk estimation in dose-response modeling is used as the primary application scenario. Emphasis is placed on making simultaneous inferences on benchmark doses when data are in the form of proportions, although the concepts translate easily to other forms of outcome data.     

Alternative theory and utopian models

A theoretical model of human systems is presented based on the basic paradigms upon which families, groups, and social systems can be organized. Four fundamentally distinct paradigms are described and the interrelationships among them explored, with special consideration given to the social evolution of systems organized on these paradigms. Implications for the study of alternative lifestyles and utopian societies are discussed.Portions of this paper are based on a presentation at the Fifth Annual Conference on Utopian Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 11 October 1980. The author wishes to thank Rich Erlich, Barry Singer, and Kersti Yllo for valuable comments on earlier versions. Inquiries to the author: 22 Bulette Road, Acton, Massachusetts 01720.     

Mining the Periphery for New Products

Revolutionary products often come from upstart players or companies outside the industry, while mainstream operators follow a risk-averse path of concentrating on their current business. This article urges companies to channel resources into looking at the periphery for ideas that could be profit-drivers of the future. It suggests three strategies for finding new products: frame the landscape; develop game-changing hypotheses; and use targeted hunting. It concludes by saying that these approaches will encourage managers to combine broad searching and thinking with focused evaluation and execution.