Facing the Giant: A Framework to Undo Sex-Based Discrimination in Academia

In 2019, American workers reported 26,221 claims of workplace harassment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nearly half of those claims represented sex-based harassment. The #MeToo movement has shined a spotlight on the pervasiveness of harassment across sectors and institutions. A 2018 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine indicates that 58 percent of women in academic institutions, for instance, have experienced some form of sexual harassment. In this article, the authors propose a three-part framework to establish a culture of zero tolerance of sexual harassment. The framework helps academic and other institutions prevent sexual harassment, protect victims from risks of reporting harassment, and set accountability measures to demand justice. The utility of the framework is twofold. First, administrators can apply it as a tool to audit institutional attitudes toward sexual harassment. Second, leaders can apply it as a corrective tool to prevent permissive organizational climates that allow sexual harassment to be perpetuated.     

On the relation between savings,distribution and inflation

A model of inflation, distribution and savings analysed by Thirlwall is evaluated. We replace the Kaldor saving function, instead following Pasinetti, where capitalists’ and workers’ savings are assumed proportional to their respective incomes. With this formulation, estimates of the inflation required to change the overall savings rate are generally larger than Thirlwall's. The magnitude of the difference is related, inter alia, to the share of capitalists’ profits in total income. Alternative estimates are presented, and it is shown that in general very large inflation changes are required to raise savings through redistribution. We also discuss the empirical evidence on the value of the wage adjustment parameter in the models.     

Leadership and organizational transformation

Following a discussion of recent literature concerned with leadership, the authors note that there is a tendency for many writers to marginalize contextual issues when examining the impact of leaders on organizations. Taking a study of three community transport organizations in the UK, the authors seek to apply some of the currently popular themes in the leadership literature to the coordinators of these organizations. It is shown that one can usefully be described as a transactional leader, another as a transformational leader, while the third is characterized as a ‘frustrated transformational leader’. The application of the adjective ‘frustrated’ serves as a focus for the consideration of contextual factors that inhibited this leader, who can legitimately be described as transformational, and which thwarted his capacity to see through his vision. A number of different contextual features are noted and it is shown how these severely constrained and in the end frustrated the aspirations of this coordinator. Some implications of these findings for the literature on leadership and on organizational transformation are spelled out.