262 research outputs found

    Labor Market Inequality and Atypical Employment.

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    This dissertation presents four papers on inequality in the labor market. The first paper uses regression analysis to show which national contexts encourage high levels of atypical employment (part-time, self employment, and fixed term). The paper includes a review of current public policy designed to improve atypical employment including employment protection legislation, relevant judicial rulings, and union activity, and concludes with some policy directions. The second paper uses regression analysis and propensity score matching to examine the relative wages of fixed term workers in ten European countries. Findings suggest that fixed term workers have lower wages than their permanent counterparts in all countries, although they suffer a worse disadvantage in those countries with strict employment protection legislation. The third paper uses an agent based model of worker-job matching and shows that firms may use intermediaries (i.e. temp agencies) for reasons beyond just saving on compensation. As such, while income inequality may result from atypical employment, it need not be the driving factor behind it. In addition, the simulation finds that standard intermediary fee structures encourage the sorting of less skilled workers into indirect hire positions. The final paper uses network analysis to show that in academic sociology, organizational prestige can reinforce itself through professors' labor market transitions. In sum, the four papers use a variety of methodological approaches to illustrate several sources of inequality in the labor market for both individuals and organizations. The first two papers illustrate how these inequality-generating mechanisms might vary across countries.Ph.D.Public Policy & SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61794/1/dhevenst_1.pd

    The role of empathy in the lawyer-client relationship, an exploration of how empathy can serve to address the issues of neutral partisanship and paternalism

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    Empathy's lack of definitional certainty has posed significant challenges in assessing its utility and value in the lawyer-client relationship. The author argues that the two main models of lawyering that seek to challenge the traditional model - the client centred and collaborative models - fail to adequately address the issues of paternalism and neutral partisanship that arise within the relationship due to their adoption of an incomplete definition of empathy. The author concludes that it is imperative for lawyers to employ a conception of empathy that includes both affective and cognitive components, and in terms of cognition, the lawyer must reciprocally employ both self and other-oriented perspective-taking in order to effectively empathically engage with their client. Ultimately, this thesis will conclude that when it adopts such a conception of empathy, and where it embraces a postmodern ethic of alterity, which encourages lawyers to attentively listen to, and appreciate, the narratives of the Other - particularly the subordinated Other, the ethic of care provides a superior basis from which toaddress the issues of paternalism and neutral partisanship.Empathy's lack of definitional certainty has posed significant challenges in assessing its utility and value in the lawyer-client relationship. The author argues that the two main models of lawyering that seek to challenge the traditional model - the client centred and collaborative models - fail to adequately address the issues of paternalism and neutral partisanship that arise within the relationship due to their adoption of an incomplete definition of empathy. The author concludes that it is imperative for lawyers to employ a conception of empathy that includes both affective and cognitive components, and in terms of cognition, the lawyer must reciprocally employ both self and other-oriented perspective-taking in order to effectively empathically engage with their client. Ultimately, this thesis will conclude that when it adopts such a conception of empathy, and where it embraces a postmodern ethic of alterity, which encourages lawyers to attentively listen to, and appreciate, the narratives of the Other - particularly the subordinated Other, the ethic of care provides a superior basis from which toaddress the issues of paternalism and neutral partisanship

    Distances in the field : mapping similarity and familiarity in the production, curation and consumption of Australian art music

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    This thesis provides a timely intervention in the investigation of cultural fields by employing traditional and new data analytics to expand our understanding of fields as multi-dimensional sites of production, curation and consumption. Through a case study of contemporary Australian art music, the research explores the multiple ways in which the concept of ā€˜distanceā€™ contributes to how we conceive of and engage with fields of artistic practice. While the concept of distance has often been an implicit or axiomatic concern for cultural sociology, this thesis foregrounds how it can be used to analyse fields from multiple perspectives, at multiple scales of enquiry and using diverse methodologies. In doing so, it distinguishes between notions of distance in the related concepts of similarity and familiarity. In the former, the relative proximities of cultural producers can be mapped to discern and contrast the organising principles which underlie different perspectives of a field. In the latter, the degree of an individualā€™s familiarity with an item or genre can be included in theorisations of cultural preferences and their social dimensions. This is disrupted in a field such as Australian art music, however, as its emphasis on experimentation and innovation presents barriers to developing familiarity. Distance can be considered a defining characteristic of this field, and motivates its selection as a critical case study from which to investigate how audiences form attachments to distant musical sounds. The investigation of distance from multiple perspectives, using different scales of analysis and across a series of focal points in the lifecycle of artist practice, provides an analysis of Australian art music in terms of the tensions which emerge from these intersecting representations of the field. The singular spatial representation of ā€˜objective relationsā€™ in a field, and a concern with power and domination ā€“ as found in the approach of Bourdieu ā€“ is replaced by a multiplicity of sets of relations and a concern with their organising principles and juxtapositions. The thesis argues that the actor constellations which distances produce are intimately linked to our capacity to engage with fields as discrete and knowable domains of cultural practice. Beyond our capacity to know a cultural field, it also argues for the importance of reconsidering how we form attachments to distant musical tastes. As an avant-garde genre which embraces foreign and confounding sounds, audiences require the capacity to draw on a range of consumption strategies and techniques to successfully engage with and value the unfamiliar

    Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

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    Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If studentsā€™ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in studentā€™s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

    Perspectives on Digital Humanism

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    This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series. Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships between people and machines in digital times. It acknowledges the potential of information technology. At the same time, it points to societal threats such as privacy violations and ethical concerns around artificial intelligence, automation and loss of jobs, ongoing monopolization on the Web, and sovereignty. Digital Humanism aims to address these topics with a sense of urgency but with a constructive mindset. The book argues for a Digital Humanism that analyses and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind toward a better society and life while fully respecting universal human rights. It is a call to shaping technologies in accordance with human values and needs

    The Subjective wellbeing of Malaysians

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    This thesis compared the subjective wellbeing Malaysians in Malaysia, Malaysians in Australia and Australians. Results highlight the importance of establishing the comparability of scales between countries to eliminate the possibility of response style contaminating comparison analyses. With response style contamination eliminated, the differences in Subjective Wellbeing across cultures are small

    Toward Sustainable Recommendation Systems

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    Recommendation systems are ubiquitous, acting as an essential component in online platforms to help users discover items of interest. For example, streaming services rely on recommendation systems to serve high-quality informational and entertaining content to their users, and e-commerce platforms recommend interesting items to assist customers in making shopping decisions. Further-more, the algorithms and frameworks driving recommendation systems provide the foundation for new personalized machine learning methods that have wide-ranging impacts. While successful, many current recommendation systems are fundamentally not sustainable: they focus on short-lived engagement objectives, requiring constant fine-tuning to adapt to the dynamics of evolving systems, or are subject to performance degradation as users and items churn in the system. In this dissertation research, we seek to lay the foundations for a new class of sustainable recommendation systems. By sustainable, we mean a recommendation system should be fundamentally long-lived, while enhancing both current and future potential to connect users with interesting content. By building such sustainable recommendation systems, we can continuously improve the user experience and provide a long-lived foundation for ongoing engagement. Building on a large body of work in recommendation systems, with the advance in graph neural networks, and with recent success in meta-learning for ML-based models, this dissertation focuses on sustainability in recommendation systems from the following three perspectives with corresponding contributions: ā€¢ Adaptivity: The first contribution lies in capturing the temporal effects from the instant shifting of usersā€™ preferences to the lifelong evolution of users and items in real-world scenarios, leading to models which are highly adaptive to the temporal dynamics present in online platforms and provide improved item recommendation at different timestamps. ā€¢ Resilience: Secondly, we seek to identify the elite users who act as the ā€œbackboneā€ recommendation systems shape the opinions of other users via their public activities. By investigating the correlation between userā€™s preference on item consumption and their connections to the ā€œbackboneā€, we enable recommendation models to be resilient to dramatic changes including churn in new items and users, and frequently updated connections between users in online communities. ā€¢ Robustness: Finally, we explore the design of a novel framework for ā€œlearning-to-adaptā€ to the imperfect test cases in recommendation systems ranging from cold-start users with few interactions to casual users with low activity levels. Such a model is robust to the imperfection in real-world environments, resulting in reliable recommendation to meet user needs and aspirations
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