Employee Satisfaction With Work‐life Balance Policies And Organizational Commitment: A Philippine Study

This study investigates the relationship between public employees' satisfaction with work‐life balance policies (WLBPs) and organizational commitment in the relatively unexplored Philippine context. Our findings show that (i) employees' overall satisfaction with WLBPs is positively related to organizational commitment, (ii) when specific WLBPs are examined, only satisfaction with health and wellness programs are positively associated with organizational commitment, and (iii) when accounting for employees' preferences for WLBPs, compensatory time‐off, childcare policy, health insurance benefits, and paid sick leave are positively related to organizational commitment. The findings indicate that understanding which WLBPs employees prefer is important before implementing WLBPs. The article discusses the theoretical and practical implications of this study in the developing country context. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Local elected administrators’ career characteristics and revenue diversification as a managerial strategy

Local governments have endeavoured to be fiscally better prepared against adverse economic downturns, and revenue diversification (RD) is considered one of such efforts. This study examines how Korean local governments have utilised diversification as a managerial strategy between 2007 and 2010. Focusing on local elected administrators’ (LEAs’) previous career, it reports that local governments with administrators with business experiences diversify revenues more than those with politics-turned administrators. It further finds that the effects of socio-economic and institutional factors are moderated by administrators’ career characteristics. Based on such evidence, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Blaming the Victim: Perceptions About Incarcerated Sexual Assault Victim Culpability Among a Sample of Jail Correctional Officers

Research examining correctional officer perceptions about the sexual victimization of inmates is rare. This research offers a first glimpse of what personal, job-related, and attitudinal factors influence blaming incarcerated sexual assault victims among a sample of 376 jail correctional officers in one state. Surveys are utilized to elicit understanding about officer perceptions of incarcerated victims. Findings indicate that jail correctional officer blaming of incarcerated sexual assault victims is highly correlated with perceptions about rape myths and homosexuality. Specifically, officers who adhere to rape myths and disapprove of homosexuality are more likely to blame incarcerated victims of sexual assault. This study is a first to examine factors correlated with jail correctional officer blaming of incarcerated sexual assault victims. The results are useful in understanding the perspectives of jail correctional officers and experiences of victims incarcerated in jails. Implications for correctional institutions and authorities include attending to the issue of sexual assault in correctional facilities, understanding staff perceptions that are related to this issue, training of staff, and classification of inmates.     

Changes in Teachers’ Involvement Versus Rejection and Links with Academic Motivation During the First Year of Secondary Education: A Multilevel Growth Curve Analysis

Research consistently shows that the learning environment plays an important role for early adolescents’ learning and outcomes and suggests that good teacher–student relationships can serve as a protective factor for maintaining young adolescents’ interest and active engagement in learning. However, less is known about the dynamic nature of teacher–student relationships and how they link with academic motivation development. Furthermore, little is known about the nature and the effects of teacher–student relationships in a cross-national context. The present study investigated changes in two components of teacher–student relationships (teachers’ involvement vs. rejection) and examined links with students’ academic motivation during the first grade of secondary school. Ten Dutch and ten Indonesian teachers (65 % female) from 24 classes were videoed 12 times across the school year, and four videos for each class were selected randomly and coded on teachers’ involvement versus rejection. A total of 713 students (52 % girls) completed four-wave measures of their academic motivation after each video observation. Multilevel growth curve modeling revealed that the teacher’s involvement changed in a curvilinear way and decreased across the first year of secondary education, while changes in the teacher’s rejection did not follow a linear time function. Academic motivation changed in an undesirable way: controlled motivation increased, while autonomous motivation decreased over time. Teachers’ involvement had a unique contribution in preventing high levels of controlled motivation in both countries. Findings suggest that teacher–student relationships (teachers’ involvement) play an essential role in early adolescents’ motivation regardless of the nations and should be a priority for schools.     

“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.     

A Computational Framework for Age‐at‐Death Estimation from the Skeleton: Surface and Outline Analysis of 3D Laser Scans of the Adult Pubic Symphysis

In forensic anthropology, age‐at‐death estimation typically requires the macroscopic assessment of the skeletal indicator and its association with a phase or score. High subjectivity and error are the recognized disadvantages of this approach, creating a need for alternative tools that enable the objective and mathematically robust assessment of true chronological age. We describe, here, three fully computational, quantitative shape analysis methods and a combinatory approach that make use of three‐dimensional laser scans of the pubic symphysis. We report a novel age‐related shape measure, focusing on the changes observed in the ventral margin curvature, and refine two former methods, whose measures capture the flatness of the symphyseal surface. We show how we can decrease age‐estimation error and improve prior results by combining these outline and surface measures in two multivariate regression models. The presented models produce objective age‐estimates that are comparable to current practices with root‐mean‐square‐errors between 13.7 and 16.5 years.     

Are Public-Led Arts Incubating Programs a Double-Edged Sword? A Case Study of the Arts Council Korea’s Performing Arts Grant Program

A nation’s cultural policy is derived from its political and governance history, and its past practices. Taking the genealogical traits of South Korean cultural policies into account, the authors examine the contributions and risks of a public-led arts incubator program. One of the Arts Council Korea’s grant programs in the arts-incubating structure was involved with a public funding scandal of political intervention during the grant review process. Consequently, questions were raised about the current bureaucratic system for cultural policy. This article discusses the legitimacy of state intervention in the arts, and analyzes the case with relevant collected documents and interviews.     

Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea

This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (ch?ng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the ch?ng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the binary of individualism and collectivism and of liberalism and nationalism, represents the essence of Korean national citizenship. In other words, this essay attempts to make a Korean case of “liberal nationalism” in its post-Confucian context.     

The future of coastal development in the Yellow Sea Rimlands

With its strategic location in East Asia, the Yellow Sea Rim is becoming an important economic region, where the socialist economies of China and North Korea and the market economies of Japan and South Korea interact and exchange for their mutual benefit. In light of the recent rapprochement among Northeast Asian countries, the article describes the emerging pattern of development in the Yellow Sea Rim. It assesses the potential gains of opening up the region by assuming a complete or partial removal of political barriers. Anticipating the future of cooperative regional development in the Yellow Sea Rimlands, the article discusses regional strategies and key issues involved in cooperation, in particular between China and South Korea.