Failure to Update: An Institutional Perspective on Noncompliance With the Family and Medical Leave Act

At least one‐quarter of covered workplaces violated the parental leave requirements of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) when surveyed in 1997. What explains this noncompliance? Using a survey of 389 U.S. workplaces and qualitative interviews with managers in 40 organizations, I demonstrate that noncompliance comes in distinct forms. Some forms of noncompliance result from a failure to update institutionalized—and gendered—policies, practices, and norms. This form of noncompliance (indicated by illegally short leaves) is better explained by the institutional perspective, while outright noncompliance (as evidenced by a lack of leaves) is best explained by rational choice and deviant culture theories.     

浅议大学新生在人际交往中的矛盾心理

大学新生在人际交往中存在多种矛盾心理,主要有强烈的交往需要与强烈的孤独感之间的矛盾,过分自尊与自卑的矛盾,传统与现代观念的矛盾,现实交往与虚拟交往心理的矛盾.     

Beijing Back Breakers

When I first arrived here a few months ago, I couldn't help but notice several work projects going on all around me. A new dorm was being built on campus where I would be teach-ing, as well as a courtyard being repaved and bricked in front of the female students' dormitory, and a building next to my gym was being renovated. I wondered how long it would take to finish these large tasks, espe-cially the courtyard, as school would begin in about a week, and it would be a mess for students to have to walk through mud, over piles of sand, and around stacks of bricks to get where they wanted to go.     

A NATIONWIDE SURVEY OF MANDATORY PARENT EDUCATION*

In an effort to take positive steps toward coping with problems for families and children created by high levels of separation and divorce, ever increasing civil caseloads and the exposure of children to interparental conflict, court‐affiliated educational programs have emerged in the United States for parents separating from their spouse or partner or going through a divorce. This article will provide an overview of the creation of such programs and their development, which includes a discussion regarding the numerous states currently mandating parents to attend. It will summarize some of the research which has been conducted as to the efficacy of the programs and will provide the results of our nationwide research for each state's parent education status. There is a discussion of domestic violence issues and sensitivities in the context of parent education programs and possible future directions for mandatory parent education.     

Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March

Although the study of local cultures has become established in American sociology, it often ignores the contested nature of how culture emerges and is negotiated within the context of small groups. To this end, we address the concept of infighting, a subtype of conflict, as it operates within a small group framework. Building on an ethnographic study of the Chicago Dyke March, we demonstrate that infighting highlights competing ideologies that may remain implicit in the absence of such conflict. Infighting treats divergent meaning systems as part of local contention between rival cliques and power centers. These ideological battles both reflect pre-existing differences between subgroups and serve to make explicit and public such differences, both in their background characteristics and in their interests. In the process infighting directs attention away from shared concerns and group building to questions of strategy, transforming the small group into an arena of ideological production and factional rivalry. Infighting recasts a group from a space of consensus to a contested political arena. We elaborate four analytic processes through which infighting connects to ideology and small group culture: infighting emphasizes the multivocality of meaning, cultural heterogeneity, an equilibrium of inclusion and group boundaries, and planning in light of ideologies of power.     

俄中美三角中的俄罗斯东部地区

21世纪初西伯利亚和远东的地理政治与地理经济作用正逐渐增长,太平洋地区国家对该地区的兴趣和关注也在飞速增长.莫斯科、北京和华盛顿在广袤的西伯利亚和远东的利益将如何部署,这种部署会建立在合作的基础之上还是会成为引发各种冲突表现的主要原因?它将怎样影响在太平洋地区和全世界的国际关系?一种关于"俄中美三角关系"在西伯利亚和远东广大地区相互作用之前景的观点得出了关于潜在冲突的结论,这种潜在的冲突埋伏在三方态度和利益的差异上.在太平洋地区潜在的国家利益和全球及地区力量分配的改变可能会给三方利益和立场的确定带来调整.     

Reactions to flag desecration in American society: Exploring the contours of formal and informal social control

Although flag burnings today rarely draw the amount of attention they received in the late 1980s, efforts to protect the flag have persisted for nearly a decade. Accordingly, the flag protection campaign has captured the interest of intellectuals from various academic backgrounds, including political scientists, egal scholars, and journalists. Conspicuously absent from the literature on flag desecration, however, are sociologists and criminologists. Combining historical evidence with recent cases, this article unveils key sociological aspects of social control, including formal and informal responses to flag desecration.     

Bundled Discounts, Leverage Theory, and Downstream Competition

Under plausible circumstances, a monopolist in one market canuse its control of prices in that market to force competingdownstream buyers to sign tying contracts that will lever itsmonopoly into another market. Specifically, the monopolist ofthe tying good can place each downstream buyer in a prisoner'sdilemma by offering them more favorable pricing on the tyinggood if they sign a requirements-tying contract covering thetied good. Since a buyer benefits on receiving more favorablepricing on the tying good and the competitors do not, and suffersif the competitors receive more favorable pricing on the tyinggood and the buyer does not, buyers will sign the tying contracteven when they would earn higher profits if they all refusedto sign. This enables a monopolist in one market to inefficientlyexclude an entrant in another market.     

Allele frequency distribution for 21 autosomal STR loci in Bhutan

We studied the allele frequency distribution of 21 autosomal STR loci contained in the AmpFlSTR^® Identifiler™ (Applied Biosystems), the Powerplex^®16 (Promega) and the FFFL (Promega) multiplex PCR kits among 936 individuals from the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan. As such these are the first published autosomal DNA results from this country.