Graves and families in Japan: Continuity and change

The population aging in Japan has been accelerated not only by the nation's longest life expectancy at birth but also by its falling fertility rate. As the existence of a Japanese family's grave presupposes the continuity of the family line, Japan's current low fertility rate has increased families without progeny who now face problems of their family graves becoming “disconnected.” In this study, historical trends of graves in Japan were analyzed — how the idea of traditional family grave was socially constructed and how it has transformed society, culture, and families. In addition, analyzing the Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS) 2001, it addresses the importance of gender on people's expectations about burial partners in current Japanese society. The analysis of JGSS-2001 data revealed that although the majority of people chose graves with succession across generations, younger generations were more likely to support diversified graves than were older generations, and this difference was greater for women than for men. Finally, understanding problems and limitations of current Japanese graves, future issues of Japanese graves will be addressed.     

Smoking in the work place: a management perspective.

In the past, smoking in the private work place has been a matter left largely to the discretion of individual employees and employers. A recent poll of the nation's largest service and industrial companies indicates a strong employer preference for this noninterventionist approach by which employees work out smoking-related problems among themselves. Nonetheless, approximately eight states and four dozen localities have passed legislation regulating smoking in the private work place, apparently in response to the courts' reluctance to order such restrictions where the employer has undertaken reasonable efforts to accommodate smokers and nonsmokers. While these laws vary widely in their language and specifics, they may pose significant practical and compliance problems for employers. In the following article, the authors examine judicial, legislative, and employer responses to work-place smoking issues and discuss the options of private employers for coping with this problem.     

Exploring the association between organizational structure variables and work on family strain among Indian police officers

Work-family conflict occurs when the domains of work and home spill over into one another leading to conflict, which is a real possibility for the unique occupation of policing. Work on family conflict, a subdomain of work-family conflict, occurs when issues at work spill over impacting home life. One form of work on family conflict is strain-based conflict, which is when work problems results in conflict at home, such being irritable at home or arguments with family members and friends. This study examined the relationship between organizational structure variables and work on family conflict strain among Indian police officers. India is the most populous democracy in the world, but little has been published in Western journals of how workplace variables maybe related to work on family strain among Indian officers. Among the organizational structure variables, instrumental communication, organizational support, formalization, distributive justice, and procedural justice each had negative relationships with work on family strain. Input into decision-making had a nonsignificant association.     

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III: a perspective from family court

The third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III) is evaluated from the standpoint of forensic science experience in a family court setting. The importance of diagnosis in developing pertinent recommendations within an adversarial system is discussed, with particular emphasis on difficulties in coordinating the Manual with the mental disorders frequently found in such a population. The limitations of the current criteria of the developmental disabilities are noted, and problems of reconciling incest and child abuse with the nomenclature are investigated. Some inconsistencies in the conceptualization of the conduct disorders and antisocial personality disorder are explored in terms of the needs of the juvenile justice system. An additional coding procedure is proposed for DSM-III, in order to identify more easily prodromal or emerging disorders of clinical significance.     

Structural change, technology, and economic growth: Brazil and the CIBS in a comparative perspective

Schumpeterian growth theory stresses the role of structural change in long run growth. Countries which increase the share of technology-intensive sectors in their economic structures benefit more from technological learning and innovation. In addition, they are more able to respond to changes in the international markets and to compete in sectors whose demand grows at higher rates. The paper compares Brazil (and to a lesser extent the CIBS group of countries) from the point of view of the direction and intensity of structural change. It is suggested that structural change has been relatively weak in Brazil and that this has been associated with a less dynamic growth performance since the 1980s.     

A contractual perspective on succession in family firms: a stakeholder view

This paper analyses succession in family firms from a contractual perspective. A firm is regarded as a nexus of contractual relations with owners, employees, suppliers of goods and services and customers. These contractual parties are in differing degrees tied to the firm through asset specificities. Succession can affect the value of such assets. In this sense they become stakeholders with vested interests in the succession process. The theoretical discussion of affected stakeholders is backed up by a survey study of 143 Swedish family-owned businesses that have been subject to succession. The results show that the opinions of close shareholders such as family members and incumbent mangers as well as those of other stakeholders such as suppliers and customers are important.     

Employee concerns regarding self-managing work teams: A multidimensional justice perspective

The increase in the use of self-managing work teams in organizations has been accompanied by growing employee resistance and concern about what such dramatic changes mean to workers. Using an organizational justice perspective, this chapter identifies and examines employee concerns about the move to self-managing work teams in two Fortune 500 organizations. Employee fairness concerns regarding three types of justice—distributive, procedural, and interactional—are highlighted. Findings suggest that to address employee fairness concerns regarding the move to self-managing work teams, managers should act distributively, procedurally, and interactionally justly.[Self-managing work teams are] the right way and the only way to be productive.—Self-managing work team member in a Fortune 500 company     

Job satisfaction: The gender perspective among police officers

Although women constitute more than 50% of the United States’ population, their percentage among police officers is approximately 9%. Despite being relatively new to policing as fully accepted officers, their growth in numbers should be higher. Nevertheless, such growth may be stagnant. The reasons for this phenomenon are still under examination, and any research that can shed light on this quandary is useful. This article examines job satisfaction among police officers and whether there is a difference by gender. The belief is that if job satisfaction among women police officers is low, this could reflect why more women are not entering law enforcement. However, the data analyzed from a purposive sample of 2,309 male and 309 female officers suggest that there is little difference in job satisfaction solely by gender.     

Continuity in crime: Sex and age differences

This study deals primarily with the question of continuity in serious criminality. The study follows a cohort consisting of 15,117 individuals from the age of 15 years through the age of 30 years. The age-based transition probabilities are studied, both for males and for females, showing that the transitions for females conform to a first-order Markov chain, so that the original matrices can be seen as estimates from a single parent matrix. This was not the case for males. The predictive power of prior criminality for later transition probabilities is also studied. Finally, the difference between stating that a given percentage will relapse in crime and the ability to make real prediction is emphasized.     

How batterer intervention programs work: participant and facilitator accounts of processes of change

Understanding what facilitates change in men who perpetrate domestic violence can aid the development of more effective batterer intervention programs (BIPs). To identify and describe key change processes, in-depth interviews were conducted with nine successful BIP completers and with 10 intervention group facilitators. The accounts described a range of individual-level processes of change consistent with prior research but also included several processes spanning the community, organizational, and group levels of analysis. Program completers and facilitators gave mostly similar accounts, though differed in their emphasis of criminal justice system sanctions, group resocialization of masculinity, and the participants' own decision to change. All accounts especially emphasized group-level processes and the importance of balancing support and confrontation from facilitators and group members. The findings demonstrate the importance of obtaining multiple perspectives on change processes, and support ecological and systems models of batterer intervention.     

Psychosocial work environment, interpersonal violence at work and mental health among correctional officers

The main purpose of this study was to present changes occurring between 2002 and 2004 in the prevalence of psychosocial constraints and interpersonal violence at work among officers working in correctional facilities in Quebec. Results suggest that in the absence of specific organizational intervention aimed at improving a deleterious work situation, exposure to low decision latitude remained similar between 2002 and 2004, while exposure to high psychological demands improved somewhat, for both men and women. In 2000, rates of exposure of correctional officers in Quebec to high psychological demands, low decision latitude and the combination of high psychological demands and low decision latitude (job strain) were significantly higher than those obtained for the entire population of workers in Quebec in contact with the public. Exposure of correctional officers in Quebec to intimidation at work increased substantially between 2002 and 2004, among both men and women. Globally speaking, rates of exposure to intimidation by colleagues and superiors practically doubled between 2000 and 2004. Rates of exposure to intimidation among correctional officers in Quebec were particularly high in 2004 (71% among men 66% among women) compared to rates in another study conducted among federal correctional officers (48%) by Samak. The present study also showed that in 2004, correctional officers in Quebec were more likely to present signs of psychological distress linked with work when they were exposed to high psychological demands, low decision latitude, job strain and poor social support from superiors and colleagues. Psychological distress was also shown to be greater when reward at work was scarce and when there was an imbalance between effort and reward at work. Finally, in 2004, psychological distress among correctional officers was also associated with intimidation and psychological harassment at work.     

Continuity and Change in Legal Positivism

Institutional theory of law (ITL) reflects both continuity and change of Kelsen's legal positivism. The main alteration results from the way ITL extends Hart's linguistic turn towards ordinary language philosophy (OLP). Hart holds – like Kelsen – that law cannot be reduced to brute fact nor morality, but because of its attempt to reconstruct social practices his theory is more inclusive. By introducing the notion of law as an extra-linguistic institution ITL takes a next step in legal positivism and accounts for the relationship between action and validity within the legal system. There are, however, some problems yet unresolved by ITL. One of them is its theory of meaning. An other is the way it accounts for change and development. Answers may be based on the pragmatic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, who emphasises the intrinsic relation between the meaning of speech acts and the process of habit formation.     

Household,family, and economy among wine-growing peasants

This article discusses commercial viticulture as a peculiar form of agro-economic activity with certain analogies to proto-industry. Using cadastral surveys, parish registers, and census lists from two Lower Austrian villages, the main economic features, the household formation patterns, and the family forms of peasant wine-growers are analyzed within the broader framework of the demographic and social landscape of the Austrian Alpine provinces of the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century. The prevalence of nuclear family forms, low proportions of permanent celibates and illegitimate births, highly fragmented landownership, small numbers of farm servants, and numerous lodgers are shown to be the main characteristics of this smallholder society. Due to the decline of Austrian viticulture in the first half of the nineteenth century, it underwent a process of “re-agrarianisation.”     

Sexual violence among dates and acquaintances: Trends and their implications for marriage and family

While it would be difficult to make a conclusive case that there has been a significant increase in forcible rape during the past generation, there is evidence showing that the rate of date rape has increased dramatically during this period. This study describes certain sociocultural changes that society has undergone during this time that appear to be largely responsible for this trend. These include the equalization of sexual freedom for females vis-a-vis males, the pervasive and questionable ways in which the mass media and popular culture feature human sexuality, and the widespread, excessive use of alcoholic beverages among male and female adolescents and college students.     

Context and Continuity: Philistines,Pharisees and Art in English Culture

Cultural identity is an important facet of globalization, and cultural policy involves an international network of policymakers at the subnational, national, and supranational levels. It is often unclear what cultural identity means and who effects policy change, especially in a fast-changing world. The author examines one of the most important cultural policy conflicts of the last two decades to suggest that the intersections among multiple policymakers led to considerable learning through interaction and clear articulation of policy preferences. The author examines the culture war between the European Union (EU) and the United States over trade in cultural products.¹ The conflict played out in international organizations and allowed the EU to come together to articulate a somewhat coherent cultural identity policy, while the United States realized the difficulty of sustaining cultural exports in the context of provocative cultural identity frames.