‘Approve to Decline’: A feminist critique of ‘Fairness’ and ‘Discrimination’ in a case study of EEO in the New Zealand Public Sector

The present paper aims to look at the contexts of meanings that surround Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) in practice, particularly for issues of gender justice. At the heart of the paper is a critical appraisal of one EEO event; an example drawn from the New Zealand public sector where claims to ‘gender disadvantage’ is made by an employee and responded to by the agency to which the claim is made. The event is representative of an instance where all parties are equally claiming the need to further EEO and fairness. By deconstructing the language and context of EEO in practice, the paper argues the point that EEO policy is not implemented in discursively uncontested contexts. At a substantive level, the paper builds on feminist theoretical perspectives of social justice, and questions if the contemporary frameworks of meaning in the public sector can support transformations of relationships of disadvantage. More pertinently, it asks if the “removal of unfair disadvantage”, on which EEO strategies are based, constitutes the promotion of social and gender justice

Managerial Discretion in the Use Of Self-Ratings in an Appraisal System: The Antecedents And Consequences

Self-evaluations of performance have elicited the interests of researchers over the last four decades. Supporters attest to the importance of employee involvement in the appraisal process while detractors raise issues concerning leniency, validity and purpose. This study examines the circumstances under which superiors have discretion to ask subordinates to self-evaluate their performance in an ongoing appraisal system. Three primary issues are investigated: the conditions under which superiors requested subordinates to self-evaluate, the relationship between opportunity to self-evaluate and the type of post-appraisal interview that was conducted, and the impact of self-ratings on performance appraisal outcomes. Three hundred twenty-six subordinates responded to questions about the performance appraisal process. Results showed leader-subordinate relationships were strong predictors of opportunity to self-rate. Self-ratings were strongly related to type of interview conducted and had an impact on perceived fairness of ratings. While criticism of self-ratings exists, our findings indicate that voluntary self-ratings, focusing on performance development, have a positive impact on the appraisal process

Representing, planning and evaluating audit evidence with belief function theory.

This paper presents a framework for the representation, planning and evaluation of uncertain audit evidence using a belief-function approach. We only consider the case of a financial statement audit. The framework allows for the modeling of audit risk and audit evidence at different levels of detail, thereby incorporating dependencies at all levels. It provides the information needed to plan an efficient audit and provides means for intermediate and final evaluation. The paper includes a basic introduction to belief-function theory. Then the framework is described in detail, first for aggregation purposes, then for disaggregation. Next, it is explained how different types of audit evidence should be represented. Finally, we use the audit of the sales and collection cycle and one other fictitious cycle to illustrate representation as well as planning and intermediate and final evaluation. We conclude with a discussion.Planning; Theory;

A Rational Approach to Cryptographic Protocols

This work initiates an analysis of several cryptographic protocols from a rational point of view using a game-theoretical approach, which allows us to represent not only the protocols but also possible misbehaviours of parties. Concretely, several concepts of two-person games and of two-party cryptographic protocols are here combined in order to model the latters as the formers. One of the main advantages of analysing a cryptographic protocol in the game-theory setting is the possibility of describing improved and stronger cryptographic solutions because possible adversarial behaviours may be taken into account directly. With those tools, protocols can be studied in a malicious model in order to find equilibrium conditions that make possible to protect honest parties against all possible strategies of adversaries

Fair and optimistic quantum contract signing

We present a fair and optimistic quantum contract signing protocol between two clients that requires no communication with the third trusted party during the exchange phase. We discuss its fairness and show that it is possible to design such a protocol for which the probability of a dishonest client to cheat becomes negligible, and scales as N^{-1/2}, where N is the number of messages exchanged between the clients. Our protocol is not based on the exchange of signed messages: its fairness is based on the laws of quantum mechanics. Thus, it is abuse-free, and the clients do not have to generate new keys for each message during the Exchange phase. We discuss a real-life scenario when the measurement errors and qubit state corruption due to noisy channels occur and argue that for real, good enough measurement apparatus and transmission channels, our protocol would still be fair. Our protocol could be implemented by today's technology, as it requires in essence the same type of apparatus as the one needed for BB84 cryptographic protocol. Finally, we briefly discuss two alternative versions of the protocol, one that uses only two states (based on B92 protocol) and the other that uses entangled pairs, and show that it is possible to generalize our protocol to an arbitrary number of clients.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure