Genetic variation of 15 STR autosomal loci in the Maracaibo population from Venezuela

Allele frequencies for 15 short tandem repeats (STRs) autosomal loci (D8S1179, D21S11, D7S820, CSF1PO, D3S1358, TH01, D13S317, D16S539, D2S1338, D19S433, vWA, TPOX, D18S51, D5S818 and FGA, included in the AmpFLSTR Identifiler, Applied Biosystems) were studied in the city of Maracaibo, Venezuela and were compared with other published Latin-American populations for the same loci. Population and forensic parameters were estimated.     

Managing from the Middle: Frontline Supervisors and Perceptions of Their Organizational Power

Frontline supervisors serve in a critical role, maintaining relationships between upper management and frontline workers; however, we still know relatively little about how subordinates view their power in relation to their supervisors and how frontline supervisors understand and exercise their own power. Focusing on street‐level workers and frontline supervisors across a statewide community corrections agency, we explore perceptions, experiences, and assertions of power in the workplace. Using focus groups with thirty‐two street‐level probation and parole officers and focus groups and field observations of seventy‐five frontline supervisors, we find that officers and frontline supervisors have widely differing views on the power of the frontline supervisory position, some of which are influenced by gender. While street‐level workers align frontline supervisors with policy creators, frontline supervisors view themselves as disempowered go‐betweens. Frontline supervisors compensate for their perceived lack of power in policymaking and implementation by using micropower strategies to assert their power. This study extends street‐level bureaucrat theory to the role of frontline supervisors, who in practice are distant from the upper management roles with which they are typically categorized.     

The Transportability of Contingency Management in Problem-solving Courts

Problem-solving (PS) courts continue to proliferate throughout the country, providing an ideal setting for understanding the factors affecting the use of rewards, a key part of one evidence-based practice (EBP), contingency management (CM). This study uses the concept of transportability to explore how justice practitioners implement CM. Based on roughly 400?h of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted over 34?months in six PS courts, we examine the implementation and adaptation of CM. While decisions to adopt and implement practices are concentrated at the managerial level of organizations, the implementation processes used by frontline workers provide key insight into how EBP may become an everyday workplace practice. This study finds frontline workers adapting CM principles to their environments. While it might appear as though CM implementation strays from the original evidence-based construct, local adaptations provide a foundation for understanding the factors that affect the transportability of CM into routine practice.     

More dissimilar than alike? Public values preferences across US minority and white managers

Interest in public values has grown considerably over the past two decades. Much of this attention reflects a growing awareness that public values hold considerable significance for citizens and public employees. Yet, despite the rapid expansion of research on public values, we still know little about the role of race in shaping and determining public employees’ values preferences. To begin remedying this gap, this article examines whether minority and white public managers in large US local governments exhibit the same value preferences when making departmental decisions. Results from a multiple group confirmatory factor analysis indicate that minority and white managers express similar preferences for traditional public administration values; however, minority managers report a stronger preference for both traditional public administration (e.g., efficiency and effectiveness) and social equity‐oriented (e.g., equity, representation) values.     

DESIRING YOUNG LES(BI)AN VISIONARIES IN THE ARCHIVE

This paper presents a critically reflexive account of the experiences of a group of researchers at the Canadian Women's Movement Archives. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Claire Colebrook, and Victoria Hesford, it argues that the researchers shared intensely embodied and emotional encounters with the archival record of lesbians’ struggles to create and define community. These encounters encouraged the researchers to explore the potential of their own sexual subjectivities. Their deepened understanding of the complex lesbian and feminist past provided them with the desire to reconsider the collective promise of ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’ for their own future community.     

How Race,Sex, and Age Frame the Use of Authority by Local Government Officials

Thanks to the civil rights movement, women and racial and ethnic minorities increasingly hold positions of public authority—but they experience and exercise this authority differently from white men. Based on 162 narratives collected from 49 US local government officials (city administrators and police), I find that women, minorities, and younger officials in positions of authority face a paradox of rules. Because they have lower social status with the public and within their organizations, they must rely on formal and explicit rules as a key basis for their authority, but such reliance causes their very authority to be questioned. Social status based on implicit assumptions about social identities, including race or ethnicity, sex, and age, originates outside of organizations and has effects society wide. This study shows that social status continues to permeate US local government organizations in both subtle and explicit ways, even in bureaucratic settings that are formally committed to merit and professional norms.     

Gender and Organizational Rule Abidance

A long-standing contention in the public and private management literatures is that women use rule abidance as a way to compensate for their relative lack of organizational power. Many of the studies making this assertion rely on anecdotal evidence rather than theory-guided empirical studies. In this paper, the authors use survey data collected from four cities in a midwestern state to empirically test gender dimensions of rule abidance. The findings support long-asserted gender differences in rule abidance. Contrary to recent scholarship, however, the findings suggest that rule abidance among women is inversely related to organizational status, with higher-level women abiding by rules more so than women lower in the hierarchy.