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Routine-biased technological change has emerged as the dominant explanation for the differential earnings growth of occupations at greater risk of automation, such as machine operators or office clerks, relative to less routine occupations. In contrast, this paper finds that the declining earnings returns to an occupation's routine task intensity (RTI) can largely be attributed to the decline of organized labor. Using individual-level data on 3.3 million employed adults across the United States from 1983 to 2017, this paper finds that organized labor has two countervailing effects on occupations at greater risk of automation. First, higher union coverage within a state and industry inhibits the decline in earnings returns to an occupation's RTI. Second, higher union coverage hastens the decline in employment shares of occupations with higher RTI. The result is that occupations at greater risk of automation experience more favorable earnings growth where unions are more resilient, but at the cost of accelerated declines in their employment shares. Counterfactual analyses demonstrate that if union coverage in the United States had remained stable at 1983 levels, the earnings returns to an occupation's RTI might not have declined from 1983 to 2017, and the observed pattern of occupational earnings polarization in the 1990s might not have occurred. However, the mean RTI of occupations might have declined by an additional 21 percent from 1983 to 2017 relative to the observed decline. The findings suggest that the social consequences of automation are conditional on the strength of organized labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives There is growing interest in the role of airborne mycotoxins in occupational environments, however, their impact on human health still remains poorly investigated. This review aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing literature on the occurrence of inhalable mycotoxins in working environments to investigate which sectors and tasks are at greater risk of exposure. Methods We have performed a systematic search in the PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science databases from 2010 to date, without limitation of geographic location. Results Database searches yielded 350 articles. After the removal of duplicates and applying our inclusion and exclusion criteria, 31 papers remained. Results show that the most exposed workers are those engaged in activities related to animal care and management and, in particular, in feeding tasks, while harvester cleaning seems to be the activity with the highest levels of exposure in agriculture. In healthcare settings mycotoxin concentrations are low but HVAC systems can be a source of contamination and this reinforces the relevance of further studies in this sector. The most common scenario is the exposure to multiple mycotoxins with variable concentrations depending on the working environment, the products handled or the tasks performed by workers. Some authors emphasize the importance of multi-approach sampling and analysis protocols to achieve an accurate and more realistic risk characterization. Conclusions Results brought forward by this review can be utilized by health and safety professionals to recognize activities in which workers may be potentially exposed to airborne mycotoxins and thus undertake suitable preventive and protective measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Currim, Weinberg, and Wittink (1981) noted that attribute importance weights inferred from conjoint analysis results may be influenced by the number of levels on which an attribute is defined.
For a main-effects part-worth model, attribute importance is typically computed by taking the difference between the "best" and "worst" levels' estimated utilities. Currim, Weinberg, and Wittink argued that the minimum weight obtainable for a three-level attribute is higher than the rain hum weight for an attribute with only two levels, if forced tank order or equivalent preference judgments are collected. However, they recognized that the empirical finding could also be due to a "managerial" reason (attributes perceived as critical are defined on a greater number of levels) or a "psychological" phenomenon (respondents may pay more attention to attributes as the number of levels increases). In this paper, we investigate in more detail the possible relation between derived importances and number of attribute levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers structural change in post-Famine Ireland through an examination of changes in the allocation of the labour force across three broad production sectors: primary, secondary and tertiary. To do so, it makes extensive use of the Irish Census of Population from 1821 to 1911 as a source of occupational information. While there are a number of concerns with these returns, outlined and explored here, the Irish census remains the most complete source of information available on male and female labour force activity and occupations in Ireland during this period. The outcome of this exercise is a picture of Irish primary, secondary and tertiary sector employment during the latter half of the nineteenth century that is consistent with that of an economy undergoing a development transition: modernising albeit slowly. While Ireland was the poorest region of the UK economy, it was one of the richer European economies in terms of GDP per head and undergoing a development transition similar to a number of European economies during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some scholars, bureaucratic contracts (i.e. low-powered and highly regulated) mitigate problems of time inconsistency between public employees who have undertaken costly asset-specific investments, and potentially opportunistic governments. For others, bureaucratic contracts exacerbate information asymmetries between bureaucratic experts and political dilettantes. This paper aims to reconcile these views by proposing two testable propositions: while bureaucratic impartiality has a positive effect because it reduces time inconsistency problems in the relationship between principals (governments) and agents (public employees), a bureaucratic career has, on the contrary, a negative effect because it reduces incentives. We test these hypotheses with three samples of countries (worldwide, OECD and EU) using scientific productivity as a proxy for public employees' performance that can be compared across countries. The results show how, controlling for levels of development and investment, proxies for bureaucratic impartiality show a significant positive effect on scientific productivity while the existence of bureaucratic careers significantly diminishes scientists' performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MapReduce is a popular distributed programming framework for large-scale data processing. To prevent MapReduce jobs from being interrupted by node failures that occur frequently in a MapReduce cluster consisting of a set of commodity machines/nodes, the most well-known MapReduce implementation, i.e. Hadoop, adopts a task re-execution policy (TR policy). When a map/reduce task of a job crashes, the TR policy assigns another node to reperform the task. However, the impact of the TR policy on MapReduce jobs in terms of reliability, job turnaround time (JTT) and energy consumption are not clear, particularly when jobs have different features, e.g. different filtering percentages, different input-data sizes, and different numbers of reduce tasks. In this paper, we formally analyze the job completion reliability (JCR) of a job based on Poisson distributions, and then derive the expected JTT and job energy consumption (JEC) based on the universal generation function. Extensive analyses are further conducted to explore the impact of the TR policy on JCR, JTT and JEC of jobs with different features. The results show that employing the TR policy can dramatically improve JCR for a large MapReduce job. Moreover, if the JCR of a job is highly improved by the TR policy, the expected JTT and JEC will not be significantly prolonged and increased, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once it is recognized that many risks have a temporal structure, some natural questions arise on the role of risk taking in a temporal setting, and on the influence of impatience on risk taking. This paper develops a general equilibrium model of occupational choice in order to make precise one particular role of risk taking in a temporal framework, and uses this framework to characterize the relationship between risk taking and the pattern of impatience in a society. In a model of entrepreneurship with ability uncertainty, we envisage a situation where by entering a risky activity an agent can acquire information about his ability, which is useful for future occupational choice. This informational value has to be set against the costs of risk taking. A general equilibrium between risky and safe activities is then characterized and a relationship is derived between risk taking and the pattern of impatience in the society. The plan of this paper is as follows. The next section develops the model and characterizes general equilibrium in the case where preferences are homogeneous. Section 3 extends the model to the case where time rates of discount within a society are heterogeneous. Section 4 considers the implications of the theoretical framework for standard empirical techniques which are used to estimate occupational rates of return. Section 5 concludes this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stratification and inequality are among the most central concepts in sociology, and although related, they are fundamentally distinct: inequality refers to the extent to which resources are distributed unevenly across individuals or between population subgroups, whereas stratification refers to the extent to which population subgroups occupy distinct hierarchical layers within an overall resource distribution. Despite the centrality of stratification in theories of class structure, prior empirical studies have focused exclusively on measures of inequality, which do not accurately capture the degree of class stratification and suffer from a variety of methodological limitations. In this paper, we employ a novel rank-based index of stratification to measure the degree to which occupational classes inhabit distinct, non-overlapping, and hierarchically arranged layers in the distribution of personal market income. The stratification index is nonparametric, both scale and translation invariant, and independent of the level of inequality. Based on this index, our results show that the US income distribution is highly stratified by occupational class and that the degree of class stratification increased substantially from 1980 to 2016. Moreover, we find that this trend is almost entirely due to growing stratification among aggregate occupational classes rather than among the disaggregate occupations nested within them. Finally, a set of counterfactual analyses indicate that the rise of occupational class stratification is driven by increases in the income returns to education, deunionization, and deindustrialization, although the relative importance of these factors varies by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information regarding engagement of aliens in occupations in the U.S. Throughout the U.S. there is today a consistent attitude among business-men and law-makers alike, that has for its announced purpose the refusal to aliens of the right to engage in certain, and many, occupations. These foreigners are being denied the opportunity to work, despite the fact that they were legally admitted to this country and with the fore-knowledge by the government, in most instances, that they would seek to earn their own living. In May of this year, when the index of employment showed a slight upturn, a very large factory in the Mid-West increased its force by too per cent, but refused to re-employ former workers who were still aliens. In thousands of cases, foreigners are being dismissed because of this "all American" policy. This program has failed however to often produce the compensating factor of employing Americans in the place of these discharged aliens, in altogether too many cases, the alien having been dismissed, none is taken on in his place and as a result there have been found two persons on the breadline in place of the former one.

. We have previously described the content of a text by Woods and Russell, An Introduction to Medical Statistics, compared it with Principles of Medical Statistics by Hill and set both volumes against the background of vital statistics up until 1937. The two books mark a watershed in the history of medical statistics. Very little has been recorded about the life and career of the first author of the earlier textbook, who was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society for at least 25 years, an omission which we can now rectify with this paper. We describe her education, entry into medical statistics, relationship with Major Greenwood and her subsequent career and life in Ceylon, Kenya, Australia, England and South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been growing concern in Europe about the lack of an established comparable measure of job quality to complement the widely accepted quantitative indicators in the formulation and evaluation of European employment policies. The aim of this paper is to offer a guided tour around the different views and existing proposals of job quality indicators, mainly from a European perspective. First, we discuss the methodological decisions that have to be made in the process of designing an indicator of job quality, from both a theoretical and methodological/technical perspective. Second, these arguments are used to discuss critically the different empirical approaches to the measurement of job quality proposed in the literature. We finish by presenting some recommendations for the construction of a job quality index for policy purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper empirically studies the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using data for more than 100 US occupations over the period 1997–2006. A model of firm behaviour based on separability allows derivation of the labour demand elasticity with respect to service offshoring for each occupation. Estimation is performed with quasi-maximum likelihood, to account for high degrees of censoring in the employment variable. The estimated elasticities are then related to proxies for the skill level and the degree of tradability of the occupations. Results suggest that service offshoring is skill-biased, because it increases employment in more skilled occupations relative to less skilled occupations. At a given skill level, however, service offshoring penalizes tradable occupations relative to non-tradable occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human capital is increasingly being recognized as crucial to the sustained growth of British cities, and the population census is unrivalled as a source of data on the characteristics of people moving to and from cities. Taking advantage of new features in the 2001 census, the paper examines how successful 27 of Britain's largest cities and their regions are in maintaining their labour force complement, giving particular attention to young adults and people working in high level occupations. Considerable variation is apparent between city regions, but the interpretation of results is somewhat hampered by limitations in the census data, prompting recommendations for future data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The aim of this paper is to compare three models for exploring the links between different measures of adult socioeconomic position (SEP)-education, occupation, income-and psychosocial health. Model I is a basic univariate regression model with psychosocial health as the outcome and a measure of SEP as the predictor. Model II is a multiple regression model with psychosocial health as the outcome with all three measures of SEP allocated the same temporal position as predictors. Model III treats education, a distal measure of SEP, as antecedent to the proximal measures of SEP in the prediction equations linking SEP to health.Methods: Participants were drawn from the Whitehall II study, a prospective cohort study of British civil servants. Data analysed here are from Phase 5 (1997-1999) of data collection, 7830 individuals in all. The measures of SEP and psychosocial health were assessed via a self-administered questionnaire.Results: The three models can lead to completely different conclusions. Model III, our preferred model, shows education to have a stronger indirect effect on psychosocial health when compared to its direct effect. The indirect effect is due to the effect of education on proximal measures of social position, occupation, and income in this case.Conclusions: Results reported here support the hypothesis that a comparison of the relative importance of the different measures of social position in predicting health is meaningless if the causal relationships among these measures are not accounted for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary. Analyses using either time series or longitudinal data can be complicated by having to disentangle real changes from the artefactual effects imposed by the reclassification of key variables. In this paper the Warwick occupational conversion program is used to create adjustment tables which correct for the artefactual effect of the 1980 reclassification, along with coder errors, on 1971-1981 patterns of occupational sex segregation in longitudinal data from the Office for National Statistics's Longitudinal Study. The crowding of large numbers of women into a few occupational groups, which is consistent through the reclassification, arises in part because classification schemes fail to recognize the diversity in their work. This reflects past practice and the undervaluation of women's skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relations between United Nations development measures of gender equality and segregation levels across a range of countries to question the assumption that occupational segregation is a structure of gender inequality in the labor market. There is a clear and universal tendency for men and women to be employed in different occupations from one another. The extent to which this occurs varies from country to country, and over time, but the differentiation is always present. As concern increased over inequalities between men and women, researchers began to focus attention on the gendering of the occupational structure as a causal explanation. This paper challenges the orthodoxy which has grown up concerning this topic. After a brief explanation of concepts and measures, the paper presents an analysis of a recent International Labour Organization cross-national dataset which provides much more detailed occupational categories than have been available to past researchers who have measured gender segregation trends in cross-national data. The analysis includes the application of a standardization procedure to control for the number of occupations in a dataset, without such control a segregation index tends to vary directly with the number of occupational categories.

This article examines the model for career concerns of individuals trying to manipulate the market assessment of their future productivity. The information flow from current actions to market assessment is therefore crucial in determining the nature of these incentives. The impact of information provides a major distinction between the explicit and implicit incentives model. The paper derives general results on comparisons of information structures which serve as counterparts to the standard results on information structures in the principal-agent model.

The German vocational education system, especially its dual system of apprenticeship training, is often praised for providing vocational skills geared to current practices in specific occupations. Yet only about half of all Germans currently have jobs that match their vocational education. This paper uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, a nationally representative household panel study, to examine a variety of individual and structural level variables hypothesized to influence the likelihood of an individual being employed in a position that fits his or her vocational training. It also identifies factors that influence the probability that an individual moves from a job that does not fit his or her training to a position that does. Finally, the paper examines earnings differences between persons with varying types of vocational education and considers if these differences depend on whether or not an individual is employed in a job that fits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on career mobility conceived as a sequence of job-shifts within and between firms, in this paper we compare Germany and Poland with regard to job-shift patterns found among men and women in these countries. The paper aims at testing a series of hypotheses on the comparative impact of labour-market segmentation (industrial sector, firm size, and social class) in welfare-capitalist and state-socialist systems. The hypotheses are tested against retrospective longitudinal data on job histories of the 1939-41 birth-cohorts from the 1981-2 German Life History Study and the 1972 Polish Life History Study. We find patterned differences between the two countries in regard to the effect of individual characteristics on career mobility, in regard to the impact of labour-market segmentation, and in regard to the effect of gender. To our knowledge, this is the first comparative investigation of this kind. Some implications of our findings for tracing the impact of current East European market reforms are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Techniques based upon odds ratios or log-linear modeling of status contingency tables are now almost universally accepted as providing adequate controls for `structural' changes in the size and job composition of the occupational structure, and thus permitting comparisons of the `process of mobility' or of `exchange' or `circulation' mobility unconfounded by structural effects. This paper questions whether the techniques are fully adequate. Formulae for odds ratios are derived for matrices generated by vacancy models, demographic manpower models and first-order Markov mobility models-the major approaches to explicitly modeling the `processes of mobility' that might underlie or generate status contingency tables of the sort analyzed in the literature. In each application odds ratios can differ, implying changes in the underlying process of mobility, when only, the availability of positions or the length of the cohort's exposure to opportunities has varied. The paper concludes that controlling for the size of marginals is not equivalent to controlling for the availability of positions, and that odds ratio controls must be interpreted with greater caution in trend and comparative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population ecology of organizations explores the effects of social and historical transformations on the world of organizations as well as the role of organizational population dynamics in shaping social change. This approach departs from mainstream theory by shifting focus from the organization to the population and from adaptation to selection. This paper examines the developments in this approach, particularly studies of the effects of social conditions and population composition on rates of founding and mortality. Studies of diverse populations over their complete histories reveal that these rates are shaped by competitive and institutional processes. The paper also considers three processes by which the dynamics of organizational populations might shape patterns of long-term social change. First, diversity affects the capacity of a society to respond to uncertain future changes. Second, increases in the diversity of organizations increases the diversity of careers, which in turn might decrease inequality. Third, processes that affect variations in numbers of organizations and forms affect levels of concentration of dominance and control in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on large national samples of male labour forces, the paper investigates differences in the amount and pattern of worklife mobility in France and Germany during the five year period 1965-70. The findings are compatible with the hypothesis of a dominantly organizational mobility space in France and a dominantly qualificational mobility space in Germany. In Germany, people are sorted into a narrow range of occupations and orderly career lines according to educational certification. In France, occupational placement during worklife is less dependent on generally valid credentials but more on specific work and training experiences and on attributes of the employing firm. In consequence, much more mobility occurs in France than in Germany, but mobility of a less orderly and directed kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing the North-Hatt method, scores for 52 jobs and occupations were calculated from responses of 129 university students in West Pakistan. Where comparisons were possible, these evaluations were examined alongside those reported by U.S. respondents. Ratings of a smaller number of occupations were also compared for Philippine, Pakistan and U.S. samples. The paper proposes that such inquiry can, under certain conditions, provide a useful measure of the relative capacity of an important segment of the population of a developing country to staff and operate a technically advanced, complex, industrial-commercial economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing the concepts of "license" and "mandate," this paper explores the implications of lay encroachment upon the presumed autonomy of a professional. A definition of a profession is suggested in terms of the degree to which an aspirant profession tolerates interference on the part of those whom it serves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Unintentional injuries represent a substantial public health burden among children and adolescents, and previous evidence suggests that there are disparities in injury by socioeconomic status (SES). This paper reports on a systematic review of literature on injury rates among children and adolescents by measures of SES. Methods A systematic literature search was conducted using six electronic databases: MEDLINE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, HealthSTAR, EMBASE, and SportsDiscus. This review considered children ages 19 years and under and publications between 1997 and 2017—representing an update since the last systematic review examined this specific question. Fifty-four articles were summarized based on study and participant descriptions, outcome and exposure, statistical tests used, effect estimates, and overall significance. Results Most articles addressed risk factors across all injury mechanisms; however, some focused particularly on burns/scalds, road traffic injuries, falls/drowning cases, and playground/sports injuries. Other studies reported on specific injury types including traumatic dental injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and fractures. The studies were of moderate quality, with a median of 15.5 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 15.34 to 15.66) out of 19. Thirty-two studies found an inverse association between SES and childhood unintentional injury, three found a positive association while twenty were not significant or failed to report effect measures. Conclusion Given the variability in definition of the exposure (SES) and outcome (injury), the results of this review were mixed; however, the majority of studies supported a relationship between low SES and increased injury risk. Public health practice must consider SES, and other measures of health equity, in childhood injury prevention programming, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration is integral to most scientific research today, and it has certainly been important in my career and for my career path. However, not all collaborations are "equal". Most, in fact, are short term or transient, with collaborators working on one project and then moving on to other projects and perhaps other collaborations. There are, however, a few collaborations, such as the three I describe here, that are long term and that not only resulted in a large number of collaborative projects but that also strongly influenced career paths. Indeed, these three collaborations resulted in all of us undertaking new paths that we were not likely to have taken alone or without the stimulation of working with someone we know well and have learned to trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of diplomats in the international book trade of the first half of the eighteenth century, which has received very little attention. For most diplomats, purchasing books for correspondents in their home country was only a part of what today might strike modern diplomats as rather ancillary occupations. Diplomats were also privileged procurers for their masters. Several diplomats were involved in the purchase of books. Horace Walpole, British envoy to Paris in the 1720s, returned to Britain in 1730 with a noble collection of books, which he had collected at Paris, France.

A correction to the article "'Social Workers Failed to Heed Warnings': A Text-Based Study of How a Profession is Portrayed in United Kingdom (UK) Newspapers" in a 2021 issue is presented.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the People's Republic of China successfully waged a series of public health campaigns to control the infectious diseases that were ravaging them as a nation. This included a campaign that targeted the social roots of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). China is now facing a new disease profile that includes emerging epidemics of chronic disease as well as reemerging epidemics of STIs. Many of these diseases are strongly associated with gender and occupation, suggesting need for a critical model of health literacy that recognizes the role of social risk in promoting risky behaviors rather than focusing on a simple model that disseminates knowledge about biomedical risk. Such a model is useful for explaining why people armed with knowledge about biomedical risk continue to engage in risky behaviors. This article focuses on the social risks that wealthy Chinese businessmen and government officials negotiate on a daily basis. It highlights the concept of guanxi that is so central to building relationships in China and explains the traditional process of yingchou used to establish and maintain relationships among this cadre of men who depend on one another for political and economic success. This process, which has become pervasive in China's era of market reform, requires men to engage in frequent practices of smoking, drinking, eating and female-centered entertainment that are contributing both to their success and to their increasing vulnerability to chronic disease and STIs. The paper concludes by offering some alternative approaches to addressing this emerging disease pattern among this particular segment of China's population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to present the first estimates of the housework-wage relationship in Britain. Controlling for permanent unobserved heterogeneity, we find that housework has a negative impact on the wages of men and women, both married and single, who work full-time. Among women working part-time, only single women suffer a housework penalty. The housework penalty is uniform across occupations within full-time jobs but some part-time jobs appear to be more compatible with housework than others. We find tentative evidence that the housework penalty is larger when there are children present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout its history, social work has been marked by disputes about its identity, especially in the 'global North'. The question of where boundaries, if any, should be drawn around the profession is one that apparently has not been resolved. In particular, should the focus of social work be on 'micro' or 'macro' issues and what problems are at stake in such debates? As professional social work continues to develop in many countries, these questions continue to be posed and to be contested. This paper reviews the core issues of such debates, noting that they are important because they show the inevitably contested nature of social work and arguing for a breadth of vision in discussions about this. It suggests that by considering a common thread but, at the same time, recognizing diversity, the profession will be able to maintain and further develop a coherent broad identity. In particular, it is suggested that countries of the 'global North', where modern social work first began to professionalize, can gain by considering development of different 'authentic' forms of social work in the 'global South'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a state-of-the-art assessment for a small but burgeoning research approach, use of curricula vitae in research evaluation. The accumulated research remains sufficiently modest for us to consider nearly all published studies and the full range of research purposes to which CV analysis has been applied. CV analysis has been theory-driven, and theory and tools have increasingly converged. Advances in method and technique have been abetted especially by the push for a scientific and technical human capital theory to explain the role of capacity in research evaluation. We summarize the theoretical rationale for CV analysis, and present three major foci: career trajectories, mobility, and the mapping of collective capacity. We assess progress in solving methodological and practical problems and the future research possibilities and remaining needs in developing methods. We reflect on some new research topics that could benefit from CV analysis. We draw on the papers in this special issue of Research Evaluation to illustrate research developments and to show the place of specific contributions in the developing CV literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of the Quality Protects initiative in England and the focus on performance management has challenged social services departments to examine the systems, processes and outcomes for children who have their name on a child protection register. Research indicates that approximately one-quarter of the situations in which children are registered could be described as chronic—that is, they remain on the child protection register for significant periods of time, experience more than one period of registration or suffer a further incident of significant harm whilst subject to a child protection plan. In this article, the findings from a research study conducted into this group of vulnerable children are reported, focusing on the characteristics of the children and their families, and their careers in the child protection system. The paper concludes with observations about the weak conceptualization of performance management and the need to recognize the complexity of the factors that influence children's careers in the child protection system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most skills acquired through on-the-job training may be specific to an occupation and therefore transferable to some but not all firms. This paper explores the relationship between the size of the local market for an occupation-specific skill and job-training outcomes. The Stevens (1994) model of training predicts that as market size increases, job turnover increases and training becomes more general. I test these predictions using data on blue-collar workers and variation in market size across US metropolitan areas. The empirical results support the theoretical predictions and the impacts are most relevant at low levels of market size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a particular aspect of teacher commentary on EFL students' writing and examines the influence on their revisions. Three types of handwritten commentary were used between drafts: statements, imperatives, and questions. The resulting 115 changes were analyzed based on the degree to which the students utilized each teacher's commentary in the revision. The results show that the comments in the imperative form were more influential on revisions than questions or statements and appeared to help students to make substantial, effective revisions. This outcome may imply that teachers should be careful in selecting comment types when writing between-draft comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupation and industry classifications are used in epidemiological studies to classify study subjects according to their job and subsequently to study risk by job, to infer social class indicators, or to infer exposure to specific agents through job-exposure matrices. However, documentation on methodological aspects concerning the use of occupation and industry classifications is sparse within epidemiology. This paper reviews the diverse applications of occupation and industry classifications in population-based epidemiological studies. The different classifications in use are discussed, and criteria are given for choosing a classification in an epidemiological study. Finally, the reliability of coding for occupation and industry is reviewed. A further standardization of the use of occupation and industry classifications in epidemiology is recommended, in order to facilitate future comparisons between studies and fully exploit their possibilities, especially when occupational exposures are to be inferred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problems of work in extreme environments have been studied for many years. This paper discusses various aspects of work in hot and cold environments and at high pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper pitfalls in risk assessment for high molecular weight allergens, which can cause typical Type I/IgE-mediated respiratory allergy, are discussed. The major pitfalls seem to be that no agreement exists on the preferential end point that should be used in risk assessment. As a result, it is unclear which exposure–response relationship should be considered. In addition, there is a lack of data on health risks for non-occupationally exposed reference populations, so the baseline risk is often not known and little is known about the shape of exposure–response relationships and the existence of exposure thresholds. The good news is that more and more groups have published exposure–response relationships for several allergens. The possibilities for risk assessment approaches that should lead to occupational exposure standards are explored. Specific consideration is given to situations in which data on exposure–response relationships for humans are available. Considerable progress has been made in this area by use of advanced statistical techniques for exposure–response modelling. The major practical constraint at this moment seems to be the absence of well-standardized measurement techniques (immunoassays) for the evaluation of allergen exposure in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers three aspects of the job insecurity facing British men in the last two decades. The probability of becoming unemployed, the costs of unemployment in terms of real wage losses and the probability that the continuously employed will experience substantial real wage losses. The first of these has not risen in the last two decades, the second has risen by around 40% and the third has risen, particularly for the top skill groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the statistical aspects of causality in the sociological context. Within the statistical view of causality there are a number of different formulations, three of these are reviewed in the article. In the final part of the paper the challenges of reaching potentially causal representations are outlined for a study of some German political and social attitudes. There are two possible bases for the distinction between explanatory and response variables and thus for using a directed edge. One is that features referring to an earlier time-point are explanatory to features referring to a later time-point. Thus aspects of previous education may be possible explanatory variables for subsequent career performance. In such situations the relevant time is not the time when the observation is made but the time to which the features refer although, of course, observations recorded retrospectively are especially subject to recall biases. The analysis sketched in the article aims to find pathways of dependence from the baseline variables through the intermediate variables to the final response variable. The analysis gives more insight than, for example, only direct regression analysis of the final response on all available potentially explanatory variables.

Existing theories of social stratification fail to address the issue of the assortment of young adults into specific occupations. As an inductive strategy to fill this gap, empirical research can examine the determinants of the entry into detailed career lines. This paper focuses on a particular yet relevant case: the self-selection of young people into the pool of those eligible for a political career. In many democratic and non-democratic countries, access to political office tends to follow structured paths which usually begin within party organizations. Italy in the early 1990s is a case in point. Previous research shows that in those years the bulk of the Italian parliamentary elite had begun their career as militants of a party youth organization. Hence, to be a young party militant appears to be the most common first step in a political career. A `case-control' research design is adopted. Background and psychological traits of a sample of young party activists are contrasted with those of a random control group of people of the same age. Empirical results lend little support to hypotheses based on the psychological factors underscored by the literature on the political personality. On the other hand, in itself class is insufficient as a predictor of such a career choice. A more complex mechanism of social reproduction is highlighted, involving: (a) gender, (b) the availability of an educational and/or occupational `safety net' against possible career failures, (c) the embeddedness in the political world of some family member providing an identity model for political work and (d) a prior attachment to a senior party sponsor who facilitates (e) the political use of a larger than average volume of social capital. A rational identification model is consequently proposed, surmising that it may also explain other processes of self-selection into upper-class career lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper criticizes the deskilling hypothesis for temporal change in occupations. Case studies of occupations alleged to support the deskilling hypothesis have typically been insensitive to the internal heterogeneity found within occupations, and to the fact that the boundary between adjacent occupations located on the same functional hierarchy can shift over time. When these factors are explicitly taken into account, it is found that apparently compelling evidence for the thesis of clerical downgrading better supports an alternative explanation, which might be called the process of status redefinition, an aspect of the process of professionalization. The case of clerical workers in the federal government is examined in some detail, Available evidence supports the argument that status redefinition occurred. Status redefinition and des killing are not mutually exclusive explanations for change, though they do conflict in important respects. This paper suggests that case studies of occupations should focus on functional hierarchies, rather than specific occupations, in order to avoid the comparability problems which arise when occupational boundaries change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under a regime of quasi-markets, UK public sector occupations are having to promote themselves as enterprising and argue their case for a share of public spending. Much of this takes place through the news media. In order to do this effectively, some kind of professional grouping is essential. The paper reviews the failure of non-probation social work to achieve a professional formation thus far. Rejecting explanations rooted in attitudes, values and gender, it argues that the core problem since the early 1970s has been the shifting nature of social services work because of central government policy changes. Now that the profile of social services tasks is more settled, it is time for social workers to abandon their reluctance to claim distinctive expertise and set about developing a more confident set of intellectual skills and thus an effective voice. In a postmodern age of sceptical consumers they need not fear élitism as they will, rather, be judged by their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses whether a class structure can be discerned using job characteristics as indicators of class positions derived from employment relations. A structure underlying the distribution of these characteristics is identified using latent class analysis. The relation between this structure and the Goldthorpe class schema is then modelled, allowing an assessment of the latter's criterion-related validity. Both the latent class representation of class structure and Goldthorpe schema are then used to predict a range of outcome measures -- vote, earnings, work orientation, class identity, and probability of unemployment -- which are expected to vary by class position and which therefore provide a basis for assessing the schema's construct validity. The analysis reveals a class structure defined in terms of groups of individuals that share similar class characteristics and provides evidence that the Goldthorpe schema displays, to a reasonable degree, both criterion-related and construct validity as a measure of this structure. The discussion elaborates on several issues raised by this analysis in particular and by the adoption of validation procedures more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although job segregation concentrates women in the lowest status and lowest paid jobs in the workforce, women are disproportionately satisfied with their jobs. This paper assesses the strength of women's work commitment in Western industrial societies, and finds it to be markedly lower than men's work commitment. Work commitment is also found to be a powerful predictor of women's work decisions and job choices. The majority of women aim for a homemaker career in which paid work is of secondary or peripheral importance, with strong support from their husbands for this strategy. A minority of women are committed to work as a central life goal, achieving jobs at higher levels of status and earnings. The existence of these two discrete groups within the female workforce explains the paradox of women's high satisfaction with poor jobs, and helps explain the persistence of job segregation. We conclude that more refined and sociological indicators of workforce participation must be developed to replace the standard measures used by labour economists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sense of involvement with broad problems of mental health is not automatically achieved by social casework students. Quite naturally, casework students tend to become absorbed in the fascinations of learning about, and working with, the individual and his family. Such knowledge is basic to the development of professional skills, but the skills will rarely enter the service of preventive efforts without early engagement of student interest in the challenge of mental health. The purpose of this report is to describe some of the educational methods that have proved valuable in the teaching of mental health concepts. Although developed in a children's hospital, they are thought to have relevance for many other field settings. Opportunities for the teaching of mental health principles exist in all field instruction settings. The methods described in this paper are believed to be adaptable to a wide variety of other settings. In the opinion of the writer, it is impossible to overemphasize the importance of early student interest in mental health principles.

The article focuses on relative prestige of twenty professions as judged by three groups of professional students. The paper is descriptive of an experimental study made at the University of Wisconsin during the school year 1934-1935. Objectives of the study were to see whether the method of paired comparisons could be satisfactorily used in measuring the relative prestige of a number of representative professions and to use the method, if shown to be reliable, to study the attitudes of groups of Professional students toward their own future professions as compared with other recognized professions. Under the latter objective it was desired to investigate whether representative samples of students from recognized Professional schools differ significantly in their attitudes toward the relative prestige of their own future professions as compared with nineteen other professions; whether such attitudes in these homogeneous groups are as well defined as researcher L.L. Thurstone found student attitudes to be in heterogeneous groups with reference to nationality preferences and the relative seriousness of various crimes; and whether such a study could provide any objective data on the theories concerning social and occupational distance and on the concept of the social distance margin.

Information on the rural occupational shifts reveals that the shift toward farming has been for the past five years and may continue to be for a number of years to come the most important rural shift, and it is also apparent that this shift is intimately related to rural relief problems. It is pertinent to ask at the outset why there should be a rural relief problem peculiar to this depression and relatively unknown in other depressions. In the past bread lines and soup kitchens were characteristic of cities and rural relief was almost negligible. Although a relatively new phenomenon, rural relief reached distressing proportions at its peak. In March of this year-the high point, there were 2,000000 families on relief and rehabilitation in rural areas. It is the thesis of this paper that this situation, in part, grew out of a back-to-the-land movement and a cessation of the previous movement away from the land. To focus the problem still more clearly the rural relief load was not by any means a farm operator load. There were, in March, 1935, about a million rural non-farm cues, about 300,000 farm laborers and about 700,000 farm operators.

The problem of measuring change has been of continuing interest to sociologists. Changes in the occupational structure, for the most part, have been observed by means of percentage distributions, differences between percentage distributions, comparisons between expected and actual percentage distributions, and percentage change. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the primary advantages and disadvantages of these topics in the study of change and to introduce a new measure, the concept of affinity between occupations and other demographic categories, a measure, which not only overcomes some of the disadvantages of the conventional measures, but also is complementary to them. The measure of affinity can and does provide a simple and yet meaningful measure of changes in social structure over a period of several decades. It measures the extent and direction of changes, and above all, it reflects not only the proportion of workers in the occupational category but also the proportion of persons in the occupational class.

Objective Asbestos use has decreased over time but occupational exposure still exists today due to the presence of asbestos in older buildings. The objective of this study was to update CAREX Canada's prevalence of exposure estimate from 2006 to 2016, and to assess the level of occupational exposure by industry, occupation, province/territory, and sex. Methods Estimates by occupation, industry, province/territory, and sex were calculated using labor force data from the 2016 Census of Population and proportions of workers exposed by occupation and industry, which were previously developed for the 2006 estimates and updated here to reflect new knowledge and changes in exposures. Statistics Canada concordance tables were used to account for changes between the 2006 and 2016 job and industry coding systems. Expert assessment was used to qualitatively assign levels of exposure (low, moderate, or high) for each occupation and industry, with consideration of workers' proximity and access to asbestos-containing material, and the condition and content of asbestos. Results Approximately 235 000 workers are exposed to asbestos on the job in Canada. The majority of Canadian workers exposed to asbestos are male (89%). Only 5% of all exposed workers are in the high-exposure category, while most workers are in the low (49%) or moderate (46%) exposure categories. The construction sector and associated jobs (e.g. carpenters, trades helpers and laborers, electricians) accounted for the majority of exposed workers. Conclusions Occupational exposure to asbestos continues to occur in Canada. Updating the prevalence of exposure estimate and adding exposure levels highlights the shift from high to lower-lever exposures associated with asbestos-containing materials remaining in the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]