Whose Safety Net? Home Insurance and Inequality

Drawing on prior theoretical and empirical work that has begun to constitute the insurance field as a distinct sociolegal research project, this study uses quantitative and qualitative data collected following Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to explore distributional questions within that field. Survey results show that higher income, age, and education were associated with having home insurance and that Hispanics and blacks were less likely than non-Hispanic whites to have insurance. The study provides the first quantitative evidence of bias in the insurance claims process by documenting a statistically significant and substantial ethnic difference in the timing of insurance payments. The qualitative research helps to explain the difference in the timing of insurance payments as the product of unconscious bias by insurance adjusters. The study concludes by proposing market-structuring regulation to reduce the inequality encountered.     

Procedural Justice in Negotiation: Procedural Fairness, Outcome Acceptance, and Integrative Potential

Two correlational studies test the hypothesis that procedural justice, or fairness of process, plays a role in acceptance of agreements reached through bilateral negotiation. Both studies test the relationship between the fairness of the process used to resolve a dispute, objective monetary outcomes, subjective assessments of outcome favorability, and subjective assessments of outcome fairness. Additionally, the second study tests the hypothesis that negotiations characterized by greater procedural justice result in more potential for integrative bargaining. The results suggest that procedural justice encourages the acceptance of negotiated agreements, as well as leading to the opportunity for increased integrative bargaining.     

Is ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ a lesbian plot?

Despite Virginia Woolf's lesbian vision of love and friendship between Chloe and Olivia in A Room of One's Own, the literary and critical text often serves to shut lesbians into a closet of prose. Among the debilitating myths used by writers are the ‘Phaon myth’ (that authentic lesbian experience must be terminated by an inauthentic heterosexual rescue), the vampire myth, and the myth of masculinity. The latter in particular has served to divide heterosexual women from their lesbian sisters, so that much feminist literary criticism displays a pervasive heterosexual bias by ignoring or distorting lesbian texts and subtexts. This paper suggests ways in which the word and concept ‘lesbian’ is being reclaimed by lesbian writers and critics. It calls for all women to destroy patriarchal myths about lesbians; reread literary texts for their lesbian subtexts; recover the works of lesbians, particularly lesbians of color; and, finally, proclaim the word ‘lesbian’ forcefully despite the threats posed by a misogynistic academy and society.     

Why procedural justice in organizations?

This article reviews the existing research and theory on procedural justice and considers how it may be applied to the study of organizational behavior. It begins by distinguishing between the concepts of distributive justice and procedural justice and noting the historical contexts within which they emerged. Existing conceptual contributions and the research inspired by them are reviewed. The few existing studies applying procedural justice notions to organizational contexts are summarized, and the contributions of the articles to the present issue of this journal are reviewed relative to these efforts. The article closes by discussing the dual benefits of studying procedural justice in organizations: the enhanced understanding of the concept of justice and the behavior of people in organizations.     

A comparison of different delinquency measures derived from self-report data

The purpose of this research was to explore different ways of using self-report data to derive measures of juvenile delinquent behavior. The subjects were 161 public school children in the Omaha area, and 1,030 public school children and 665 adjudicated delinquents in the metropolitan areas of Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Phoenix. The Omaha youths responded to twenty-eight self-report items two times with an intervening period of three weeks and then rated the items for seriousness. Four measures of delinquency were derived from the data: frequency of activity, diversity of activity, seriousness of activity, and progression into delinquent behavior. The four measures were shown to be highly reliable and strongly intercorrelated; none was shown to be consistently better than the other three. Rated seriousness and reported frequency of behavior were highly negatively correlated, giving support to the use of frequency measures in building delinquency scales. All four scales showed differences within the Omaha sample as a function of sex, age, and birth order; but the differences were not always in the same directions when the four measures were used.