Identity,Ethnicity and Gender: Using Narratives to Understand their Meaning in Retail Shopping Encounters

This paper examines the ways in which two women (Sweetie and Desiree) experience a dissatisfying retail encounter. Citing data derived from memory-work methodology, we illustrate how stories can be used to gain a detailed insight into the complexity of consumption experiences and give voice to women consumers. By allowing women to write about, and critically reflect on their experiences, we show how consumers attach meaning to retail encounters and how we, as researchers can offer alternative interpretations of consumer behavior to those commonly reported in the literature. In this paper we use memories of "nasty" retail encounters to illustrate how social constructs related to identity, such as ethnicity and gender, have meaning in shopping experiences. Because of the new understandings possible via this method, we argue for using reflexivity in our research and analyses informed by feminism.     

Racialization and the US Latina Experience: Economic Implications

This brief paper explores the economic implications of the racialization of Latinas, focusing primarily on women of Mexican background, with special attention to the historical and contemporary experiences of this group in the Midwest. The author discusses three interrelated processes that help explain the social positioning of Mexican-American and Mexican immigrant women in the region: the production of a "commodity identity" image, spatial barrioization (creation of segregated, generally poor barrio neighborhoods), and "outsider racialization." She also analyzes the income status of Latina women in terms of their reproductive responsibilities and productive work.     

Understanding Recent Empirical Evidence on Race and Labor Market Outcomes in the USA

The concepts of path dependence and lock-in have received growing acceptance but have generally been thought of as driven by positive feedback on the supply side of the economy. A case through example is made here of how endogenous preferences positive feedback in utility from consumption, social considerations, and institutional considerations can all lead to path dependence and the persistence of suboptimal consumption choices. The case here specifically relates to meat consumption and utilizes behavioral, institutional, as well as neoclassical approaches to justify the conclusion. It is argued that increased meat consumption, which at one time may have had positive value, has developed increasingly negative consequences both at the individual and social level. Negative impacts include health consequences, low production efficiency, and environmental damage, among others. Nevertheless, preferences for meat are maintained by multiple factors including historical dependence of tastes, socially established meanings of consumption choices, and institutional inertia.     

The gender wage gap in Myanmar: Adding insult to injury?

Using two surveys from 2017, we analyze the gender wage gap for urban workers in Myanmar. We start from a standard wage equation and condition on education, experience, health and a small set of household demographic attributes. Subsequently we control for differences in occupational choice and sector of employment. We estimate the models with sample selection correction and this leads to estimated average wage offers that are lower than the observed average wages for women. Selection into wage work results in a workforce where female wage-workers have higher levels of education compared to their male counterparts. However, average wages for female workers continue to be 29% lower than male average wages. Differences in observable attributes do not account for this gap. Instead, it is associated with a lower base wage and lower remuneration of women’s experience. Going beyond the traditional decomposition methods, we utilize our matched employer–employee survey to generate exact comparisons of female and male production workers with equal levels of education and experience, employed in the same enterprises. Even in this setting, we find a gender wage gap of 13%. Our analysis thus indicates discrimination against women in Myanmar’s labor markets.     

Recent trends in pregnancy discrimination law

In 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) to protect the civil rights of motherhood in the workplace. Since then, the act's interpretation has been altered by various court decisions. These changes, along with more working women, make PDA compliance more complex. This challenge is reflected by a 39% increase in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints over the past decade, and a 66% increase in plaintiff victories during the same time period. These developments are discussed in this article, which attempts to help managerial decision making by exploring legal trends and their workplace implications.     

Ethics, trust and expectations regarding the treatment of disabled staff within a tourism/hospitality industry context

Whilst it has long been recognized that disabled employees can be the recipients of discrimination in the workplace, occasioned by many factors including physical appearance, relatively little is known regarding the ethical conceptualizations, trust responses and also problem-solving architecture that potential employees bring to such contexts, particularly in service industries such as tourism/hospitality. This study has examined discrimination shown to a disabled hospitality industry employee within an ethical framework, investigating personal ethical beliefs, individual ethical influences upon behaviour and also perceived management problem-solving response influences in the face of disability discrimination. The study has been conducted among a sample of university management students in a major Australian tourism destination, many of whom on graduation would seek employment within the tourism/hospitality industry.Three personal ethical belief types were identified: equity or procedural justice, competence and integrity, with both competence and integrity ethics being regarded as of higher value than equity. Major individual ethical influences included one's own values and also those of the ambient society; the most highly rated perceived management response involved the protection of company image whereas the least expected involved a management perspective focusing on justice of all people involved in the ethical dilemma.The competence ethical belief was found to predict the individual who would be influenced by a legal perspective; the justice for all management perspective was employed as a measure of respondent trust in management, with analyses revealing that the competence ethical belief, the career and societal influences and also gender being found associated with lower levels of trust in management's willingness to respond to disability discrimination in a just manner. The protection of company image as a management response, employed as a measure of mistrust, was associated with integrity personal ethical values, and also with career, societal and own ethical influences upon responses to an incident of disability discrimination. Implications for future research in this domain together with implications for the tourism/hospitality industry are examined.     

城市经济转型时期人力资本回报率研究

基于Mincer基本模型和扩展模型的估算结果显示 ,中国城市地区的教育回报率比其他发展中国家的平均水平低 ,但这一回报率在不断上升 ;职工工资收入达到最高水平所需工作的年限在下降 ,工作年限的边际回报率在下降 ,尤其是女性工作年限的边际回报率下降速度更快。在 1986 /1987年 ,广东城市职工平均工资收入比湖南和四川高出 30 % ,而在 1993/1994年 ,广东城市职工平均工资收入比湖南和四川高出 70 % ,表明地区收入不平等的现象在扩大。令人费解的是 ,广东省的教育回报率并不高 ,尽管在这期间广东省男女两性的工作经验回报率大大下降。文章还发现 ,无论是工资性别歧视 ,还是职业性别歧视都似乎存在于中国城市的劳动力市场中     

HRM Role in EEO: Sheep in Shepherd’s Clothing?

Despite a plethora of laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, supporting and enforcing equal employment opportunity (EEO) principles has proven to be an enormous challenge for those charged with this responsibility. The question often asked is who should exercise this role in organizations. Not surprisingly, there has been a call for HRM to become the guardian of EEO in organizations but should human resource managers be male or female, and/or would line managers be better positioned to assume this responsibility? This paper overviews the literature and then summarizes an empirical study that attempted to address the possible impact of these options as they exist in organizations. One hundred and eighty respondents who met the criterion of having interviewed one or more job applicants in the previous 6 months were systematically selected from business telephone listings. Based on self-reported behaviors, no significant difference was found between the expected and actual distributions of HR and line managers in respect to whether decisions were made on unlawful grounds. The percentage of each respondent category that asked unlawful questions varied from 1% to 36% depending upon the attribute (unlawful ground of discrimination) under consideration. This begs the question as to what value HR managers contribute to EEO in the selection process. The second finding was that significantly less female managers admit to making decisions on the basis of unlawful questions than male managers. Thus, support was found for female line managers as guardians of EEO but no clear justification for HRM in this role.     

同步通信中的软件鉴频与锁相技术

本文介绍了一种利用软件产生同步通信中同步时钟信号的方法,论述了软件鉴频与锁相技术的基本思想,论证了软件鉴频与锁相技术的可靠性,并以实例说明了软件鉴频与锁扣技术的实际应用.软件鉴频与锁相技术较之硬件实现具有适应性强,经济性好,实现简便等优点.     

The Move to the Middle: Convergence of the Open‐Source and Proprietary Software Industries

In this paper we focus on open‐source software within the broader framework of the software industry. More specifically, we compare proprietary and open‐source software (OSS) companies in terms of three criteria: (a) approaches to the production of software; (b) business models; and (c) strategic interactions. We postulate three convergence hypotheses. First, there is evidence of convergence in production approaches: leading OSS firms tend to rely on R&D and acquisitions as intensely as leading proprietary companies do. Second, there is evidence of convergence in business models: through dual‐licensing models, top OSS firms derive substantial portions of their revenues from licenses, just as many proprietary companies do. Third, there is evidence of convergence in strategic interactions: the competitive strategies that a company follows do not really hinge on the ‘proprietary versus open‐source’ dichotomy, but on whether a firm feels threatened in the software layer where its core assets are located. This evidence of convergence raises a number of interesting questions for economic theory and for the analysis of the industry’s future evolution.