When “Best Practices” Win,Employees Lose: Symbolic Compliance and Judicial Inference in Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Cases

This article provides a new account of employers' advantages over employees in federal employment discrimination cases. We analyze the effects of judicial deference, in which judges use institutionalized employment structures to infer nondiscrimination without scrutinizing those structures in any meaningful way. Using logistic regression to analyze a representative sample of judicial opinions in federal EEO cases during the first thirty‐five years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we find that when judges uncritically use the presence of organizational structures to reason about whether discrimination occurred, employers are much more likely to prevail. This pattern is especially pronounced in opinions written by liberal judges. In light of these findings, we offer recommendations for judges, lawyers, and policy makers—including legal academics—who seek to improve the accuracy and efficacy of employment discrimination adjudications.     

Changes in staff confidence and attributions for challenging behaviour after training in positive behavioural support within a forensic medium secure service

Positive behavioural support (PBS) is a non-aversive approach to preventing and managing challenging behaviours. Seventy-nine qualified and unqualified nursing, psychology and occupational therapy staff were trained in using PBS. To measure the effectiveness of the training, confidence in managing challenging behaviour and attributions for causality, control and stability were measured before and after the training. To measure confidence, an adapted version of the Confidence in Coping with Patient Aggression Instrument was used. Attributions were measured using the Challenging Behaviour Attributions Scale and the Causal Dimension Scale II. There was a significant increase in confidence after training. In addition, there were significant changes in attributions relating to causality and stability of challenging behaviour, particularly for qualified staff. The results suggest that confidence and attributions are affected positively by training in PBS within a medium secure forensic mental health setting.     

The Home Maintenance and Improvement Behaviors of Older Adults in Boston

Prior studies have found that older homeowners spend less money maintaining and improving their homes, which may reduce their quality of life and eventually pose larger, more costly housing problems. Delayed repairs and improvements may also have adverse spillover effects on neighborhoods. We explore the home maintenance expenditures, housing conditions, and credit access of older homeowners in Boston, Massachusetts, where many aging adults have limited incomes and live in older structures but also have substantial home equity that could be used as a financial resource. We find evidence that older homeowners spend less on home maintenance, and many live in low-income areas with high numbers of constituent complaints about housing conditions and less access to cheaper forms of credit. A particular policy intervention, the Boston Senior Home Repair Program, helps by providing home repair assistance to low- and moderate-income older homeowners.     

Responding to COVID-19 through Surveys of Public Servants

Responding to COVID-19 presents unprecedented challenges for public sector practitioners. Addressing those challenges requires knowledge about the problems that public sector workers face. This Viewpoint essay argues that timely, up-to-date surveys of public sector workers are essential tools for identifying problems, resolving bottlenecks, and enabling public sector workers to operate effectively during and in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic. This essay presents the COVID-19 Survey of Public Servants, which is currently being rolled out in several countries by the Global Survey of Public Servants Consortium to assist governments in strategically compiling evidence to operate effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Drugs in oral fluid: Part II. Investigation of drugs in drivers

As part of the European project, Impaired Motorists, Methods of Roadside Testing and Assessment for Licensing, otherwise known as IMMORTAL (Deliverable R4.2), the University of Glasgow was required to analyse 1396 oral fluid samples, collected from drivers, for a wide range of drugs. A previously described method to include 49 drugs and metabolites was used. To include cannabis in the study a separate extraction method was required because of interferences caused by the collection device. The study group included drivers who were stopped at random and participation was entirely voluntary. The results showed that out of the 1396 samples tested, 16.8% were positive for at least one drug. In the majority of positive cases (85%), monodrug use was found and the most commonly detected drug was 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. This study showed that a significant number of the driving population are positive for at least one drug.     

Towards a multimodal ethnohistorical approach: a case study of bookplates

ABSTRACT

This study uses four examples of bookplates printed in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914) to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach to social semiotics can vastly strengthen multimodal analysis. It argues that situating choices of image, colour, typography and materiality in archival research and the broader sociohistorical context of the Edwardian period can help to uncover the external motivations for a bookplate’s structure. The case study reveals that bookplate designs were primarily influenced by the social status and wealth of owners, as well as the specific, well-established norms of the bookplate genre. It also highlights the significance of connecting semiotic choices to the traditions of Edwardian society and the ways in which meanings can shift over time. The findings demonstrate the importance of grounding hypotheses concerning the function and form of artefacts in concrete historical documents, in addition to the vast potential of this methodology for exploring other texts within a particular historical period.     

Social process in grizzly bear management: lessons for collaborative governance and natural resource policy

In this study, we analyze a case of governance in natural resource management. Building on the limited body of literature on termination and using methods of problem orientation and social process mapping, we examine a stakeholder engagement process designed to address conflicts in grizzly bear management in Banff National Park, Alberta. Terminated in 2009 after several years of collaboration, this stakeholder engagement process explicitly used the policy sciences framework to cultivate dialogue, improve participants?? decision-making skills, and make consensus-based recommendations for grizzly bear management. Our analysis demonstrates the utility of undertaking social process mapping and problem orientation in order to understand a natural resource policy problem. We include recommendations to foster a social process that allows for clarification and advancement of the common interest in stakeholder groups, insights into how social process can contribute to policy termination, and reflections on the practical, collaborative use of the policy sciences to solve problems of governance. This analysis complements other articles on this case that examine stakeholder perspectives, initial outcomes, and decision process, collectively providing a thorough policy analysis.     

Determining sex of the posterior ilium from the robert j. Terry and william m. Bass collections

Morphological traits of the posterior ilium are commonly used for sex determination in bioarcheological and forensic skeletal analysis. This study was designed to compare the classification correctness of standard scoring systems and measurements of the posterior ilium, including using logistic regression, to develop new formulae to predict sex. Metric measurements and morphological scores for the preauricular sulcus (PS), the elevation of the auricular surface, and the greater sciatic notch width were recorded for 97 males and 101 females of both European and African ancestry from the William M. Bass and Terry Collections. Correct classification of sex was high using individual traits such as the greater sciatic notch score (88.4%), the presence or absence of a PS (78.8%), and the scoring of a present PS as 1, 2, or 3 (100%). Furthermore, an equation combining multiple traits of the posterior ilium had a high classification of 94.9%.