Parental Leave Policies: Implications For Higher Education Policy

A persistent disadvantage of individuals and couples navigating and negotiating parental leave policies is often embedded in biased assumptions. Oftentimes, as a result, individuals and couples inherently encounter vastly different parental leave experiences. However, recommendations from the literature and federal policy support the need for gender equity, family-focused initiatives, and workplace interventions related to individuals and couples navigating and negotiating parental leave processes. Yet because of a lack of policy standardization, policy protocols related to these recommendations have proved unsuccessful in addressing the complexities individuals and couples experience when navigating and negotiating parental leave processes. Thus, this study applies a discourse analysis framework to examine the implications of the lack of standardization of parental leave policies. Data collection consisted of interviews conducted during the summer and fall semester of 2016 involving staff, faculty, and administrators. The emergent interview data revealed that participants across the institutional community navigated and negotiated leave amid anxiety, pressure, and uncertainty of institutional processes, protocols, and communications. My findings suggest that discourses surrounding navigated and negotiated parental leave policies remain stigmatized because of a lack of policy standardization and the understanding of policy processes, as well as workplace productivity pressures. Recommendations to improve these discourses include creating standardized communication initiatives related to parental leave protocols and implementing parameters to address the needs of academic mothers and fathers

Identifying risk factors for healthcare-associated infections from electronic medical record home address data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Residential address is a common element in patient electronic medical records. Guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specify that residence in a nursing home, skilled nursing facility, or hospice within a year prior to a positive culture date is among the criteria for differentiating healthcare-acquired from community-acquired methicillin-resistant <it>Staphylococcus aureus </it>(MRSA) infections. Residential addresses may be useful for identifying patients residing in healthcare-associated settings, but methods for categorizing residence type based on electronic medical records have not been widely documented. The aim of this study was to develop a process to assist in differentiating healthcare-associated from community-associated MRSA infections by analyzing patient addresses to determine if residence reported at the time of positive culture was associated with a healthcare facility or other institutional location.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We identified 1,232 of the patients (8.24% of the sample) with positive cultures as probable cases of healthcare-associated MRSA based on residential addresses contained in electronic medical records. Combining manual review with linking to institutional address databases improved geocoding rates from 11,870 records (79.37%) to 12,549 records (83.91%). Standardization of patient home address through geocoding increased the number of matches to institutional facilities from 545 (3.64%) to 1,379 (9.22%).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Linking patient home address data from electronic medical records to institutional residential databases provides useful information for epidemiologic researchers, infection control practitioners, and clinicians. This information, coupled with other clinical and laboratory data, can be used to inform differentiation of healthcare-acquired from community-acquired infections. The process presented should be extensible with little or no added data costs.</p

The social foundations of the bureaucratic order

This article views the bureaucratic form of organization as both an agent and an expression of key modern social innovations that are most clearly manifested in the non-inclusive terms by which individuals are involved in organizations. Modern human involvement in organizations epitomizes and institutionally embeds the crucial yet often overlooked cultural orientation of modernity whereby humans undertake ac-tion along well-specified and delimited paths thanks to their capacity to isolate and suspend other personal or social considerations. The organizational involvement of humans qua role agents rather than qua persons helps unleash formal organizing from being tied to the indolence of the human body and the languish process of per-sonal or psychological reorientation. Thanks to the loosening of these ties, the bu-reaucratic organization is rendered capable to address the shifting contingencies un-derlying modern life by reshuffling and re-assembling the roles and role patterns by which it is made. The historically unique adaptive capacity of bureaucracy remains though hidden behind the ubiquitous presence of routines and standard operating procedures –requirements for the standardization of roles– that are mistakenly ex-changed for the essence of the bureaucratic form

The Internet society and its struggle for recognition and influence

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Circling the square: Indigenizing the Dissertation

Abstract:Through tradition and standardization, the structure of the dissertation template has ‘boxed in’ a colonial standard whilst ‘cornering’ ways of knowing that cannot be expressed within these limits. But within these corners ideas huddle desperately together, preserving valuable embers of knowledge, conserving strength to ignite a fire to round these corners to closer resemble a circle, forcing dialogue between disparate world-views (Ermine, 2007).The Doctoral Forum at the Queensland University of Technology [QUT] in Australia brought together an Aboriginal PhD candidate from Australia and an Indigenous PhD candidate from Canada. Discussion about the limitations of the standard dissertation format arose.  While researching in diverse disciplines, we found we shared experiences of constraint and a kind of tug-of-war to address the requirements of the institution while privileging our positionality and standpoint as Indigenous peoples; speaking back to the dominant voices of the coloniser.  We reflected on how the template acted to privilege Western institutional constructs and how dominant colonial structures suppress land-based methodologies, creativity, and holism. Through our critical dialogues, we recognise that to morph the ‘square’ of standardization, we must nourish an openness towards multiple ways of knowing and doing through a delicate balance of decolonizing and Indigenizing (Pratt, Louis, Hanson &amp; Ottmann, 2018). This paper will address how these two grad students are blurring the boundaries of the standardized dissertation structure. Through critical dialogue, the colonial structures that ‘box’ us in, providing a means for the previously cornered and marginalized voices to be heard

The EU as Provider of Frames and Scripts: Evidence on Law and Courts from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas

Regional trade agreements (RTAs) differ a great deal in both their legal and judicial dimensions. Accounting for RTAs means, in good part, to explain those differences. A rationalist approach focused on interests, calculations, and utility-maximizing outcomes can offer limited insight into those differences. RTA officials do not operate in a vacuum. First, at the intra-regional level, they work in environments with established, and often similar, national legal and judicial traditions. Those traditions, rather than the EU, provide the frames through which officials interpret and solve the regulatory challenges associated with integration: officials develop legal frameworks and judicial mechanisms that mirror, in their overall character, what is already in place in the member states. But, second, officials are aware of RTAs elsewhere in the world – above all, the EU. The EU provides ready-made detailed instructions, or scripts, for the formulation of specific laws and judicial processes in other RTAs. If consistent with the national traditions in a given RTA, officials often adopt or mimic those scripts. Thus, overall, choices about legal and judicial design have little to do with what is ‘best’ for trade liberalization and the fulfillment of national interests. They have a lot more to do with continuity, legitimacy, and expediency

Global Standards in Action: Insights from Anti-Money Laundering Regulation

As organizations have come under the increasing influence of global rules of all sorts, organization scholars have started studying the dynamics of global regulation. The purpose of this article is to identify and evaluate the contribution to this interdisciplinary field by the ‘Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research’. The latter’s key proposition is that while global regulation often consists of voluntary best practice rules it can nevertheless become highly influential under certain conditions. We assess how innovative this approach is using as a benchmark the state of the art in another field of relevance to the study of global regulation, i.e. ‘International Relations’. Our discussion is primarily theoretical but we draw on the case of global anti-money laundering regulation to illustrate our arguments and for inspirations of how to further elaborate the approach