Towards an understanding of the female expatriate experience in Europe

The increased participation of women in the workforce has been one of the major changes in the structuring of the labour force in recent years, and it is anticipated that this trend will continue. Despite growing numbers of women in senior domestic management roles, the participation rates of women in international management remains low across the globe. In Europe, international management has generally been a masculine preserve. Much of our knowledge of female expatriation comes from North America and is based on the experiences of female managers working for North American MNCs. This article builds on that base of understanding but highlights a growing stream of research into female expatriation in Europe, which remains largely “invisible” to specialists outside Europe. Given the paucity of empirical research in this area in general and the need for a more international understanding of the phenomena which can arise from examining different contexts, the article suggests that researchers outside Europe may find useful insights in this paper which pulls together and summarises what we know from the existing research on female expatriates in Europe and offers some avenues for future research.     

The decline of child labour: labour markets and family economies in Europe and North America since 1830

This survey of the ‘adulting’ of national and family economies argues that understanding of the segmentation of labour markets and of the male breadwinner has been impoverished by a failure to consider age alongside gender, and that we are at best in a situation where contextualized studies may provide some insight into reasons for the decline of child labour. With respect to family economies, there has been very little study of the timing or cause of the diminution of children's contributions, or of how, if at all, that decline is related to the rise in married women's participation in the labour force.     

Ethical statements as smokescreens for sectional interests: The case of the UK accountancy profession

The UK accountancy industry has traded upon its professional status as a means of expanding and legitimating its activities. Extensive appeals are made to ethical codes and disciplinary arrangements as part of its claim to professional status. This study examines some recent events relating to audit failures and alleged unprofessional conduct by accountancy firms and their partners in the UK with a view to assessing the validity of the claims to professional status. It concludes that the rhetoric of the claims is belied by the failure/inability of the professional accountancy bodies to take effective action against the offending firms or their partners.Austin Mitchell After an early career as a university lecturer he became a television journalist and since 1983 has been a Member of Parliament. He was the Labour Party's Trade and Industry spokesman from 1987–1989. He published a number of books and many articles in the press.Anthony Puxty has since 1987 been professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Strathclyde. He has published some seven books and more than seventy papers and articles.Prem Sikka is a professionally qualified accountant. He is currently a Principal Lecturer at the University of East London. He has published two research monographs and more than seventy five articles.Hugh Willmott is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Manchester School of Management, having worked previously at the University of Aston and the Copenhagen Business School. He has published seven books and contributed numerous articles to leading management, accounting, finance, and social science journals.     

Secondary cancer and relapse rates following radical prostatectomy for prostate-confined cancer

In the SEER database, it is relatively easy to identify secondary cancers that follow an initial diagnosis of cancer. However, the SEER public-use data does not explicitly capture relapse of the initial cancer. One can assume that organ-confined prostate cancer treated by radical prostatectomy will show no evidence of disease after treatment. Death due to prostate cancer in such cases can be assumed to follow a relapse of previously occult metastatic disease. We devised an estimate of the timing of these relapses and tabulated rates for both new primaries and relapses following radical prostatectomy for organ-confined prostate cancer.     

Pivot tables for mortality analysis, or who needs life tables anyway?

Actuarial life-table analysis has long been used by life insurance medical directors for mortality abstraction from clinical studies. Ironically, today's life actuary instead uses pivot tables to analyze mortality. Pivot tables (a feature/function in MS Excel) collapse various dimensions of data that were previously arranged in an "experience study" format. Summary statistics such as actual deaths, actual and expected mortality (usually measured in dollars), and calculated results such as actual to expected ratios, are then displayed in a 2-dimensional grid. The same analytic process, excluding the dollar focus, can be used for clinical mortality studies. For raw survival data, especially large datasets, this combination of experience study data and pivot tables has clear advantages over life-table analysis in both accuracy and flexibility. Using the SEER breast cancer data, we compare the results of life-table analysis and pivot-table analysis.     

Socioeconomic Impacts of Public Forest Policies on Heterogeneous Agricultural Households

Nepal has a long history of returning public forests to local people as part of its community forestry programme. In principle the community forestry programme is designed to address both environmental quality and poverty alleviation. However, concern has been expressed that forest policies emphasise environmental conservation, and that this has a detrimental impact on the use of community forests in rural Nepal where households require access to public forest products to sustain livelihoods. To study the effect of government policies on forest use, an economic model of a typical small community of economically heterogeneous households in Nepal was developed. The model incorporates a link between private agriculture and public forest resources, and uses this link to assess the socioeconomic impacts of forest policies on the use of public forests. Socioeconomic impacts were measured in terms of household income, employment and income inequality. The results show that some forest policies have a negative economic impact, and the impacts are more serious than those reported by other studies. This study shows that existing forest policies reduce household income and employment, and widen income inequalities within communities, compared to alternative policies. Certain forest policies even constrain the poorest households?? ability to meet survival needs. The findings indicate that the socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies may be underestimated in developing countries unless household economic heterogeneity and forestry??s contribution to production are accounted for. The study also demonstrates that alternative policies for managing common property resources would reduce income inequalities in rural Nepalese communities and lift incomes and employment to a level where even the poorest households could meet their basic needs.     

Measuring intracultural bimodality and cross-cultural diversity in American-Japanese business negotiations

One of the greatest challenges facing managers and administrators in an international environment is effectively communicating and negotiating with their foreign counterparts. Yet a large portion of their time is spent in these most critical activities. Much has been written about the differences in the perception, motivation and behaviour of people from different cultures, in particular about the American and Japanese interface. However, very little scientific confirmation and measurements exist. In this empirical study the nature and intensity of cross-cultural similarities and dissimilarities were tested and measured with selected statements on a Likert-type scale for a sample of 41 American and 29 Japanese practising managers, pointing to weak intracultural bimodality, but strong cross-cultural contrasts.