Occupations, Organizations, and Boundaryless Careers

[Excerpt] The central premise of this chapter is that, as organizations become less important in defining career pathways and boundaries, occupations will become increasingly more important. While occupational demarcations have always had a significant, albeit often unacknowledged, impact on individual career patterns, the significance of such demarcations for careers is likely to be heightened by current trends in employment relationships. In this chapter, then, I review the sociological literature on occupational labor markets and on the structure of professional occupations, in an effort to shed light on a number of issues associated with occupationally based careers. Of specific concern are three questions: What kinds of job and occupational characteristics foster such careers? When occupations become the major locus of careers, what are the consequences for organizations? And finally, what are some of the key career-management issues for individuals pursuing occupation-ally based careers

Comments on War and Peace

[Excerpt] In War and Peace, Baron, Dobbin, and Jennings provide an integrative analysis of the role of internal organizational requirements and external environmental forces in structuring the personnel function in modern organizations. To appreciate fully the scope of this contribution to organizational theory and research, it is useful to consider briefly the general development of studies of formal organizations over the last four decades

Organizational Institutionalism and Sociology: A Reflection

[Excerpt] In 1991, DiMaggio and Powell observed: Institutional theory presents a paradox. Institutional analysis is as old as Emile Durkheim\u27s exhortation to study \u27social facts as things\u27, yet sufficiently novel to be preceded by new in much of the contemporary literature. (1991: 1) We argue that this paradox is, at least in part, the result of a long-standing tension in sociology between more materialist, interest-driven explanations of behavior and ideational, normative explanations, a tension that has often driven oscillating waves of sociological theorizing. It underlies many classical debates (e.g., between Spencer and Durkheim, Weber and Marx, and even Parsons and Mills), and the waves of theory associated with it have produced a variety of \u27neo-isms\u27, including neo-Marxist as well as neo-institutionalist theories. This distinction in explanatory approaches is linked to a more general theoretical problematic for sociologists: how to provide a single, coherent account of both stable, persisting patterns of social behavior, and the breakdown and elimination of what were once deeply-entrenched patterns. In this chapter, we examine the history of these distinctive explanatory approaches in sociology, and locate the origins of contemporary institutional work on organizations within this context. We also consider how more recent organizational analyses in the tradition of institutional theory have been driven by and reflect this basic tension

CONSUMER TRENDS IN FATS AND SWEETS: POLICY OPTIONS FOR DIETARY CHANGE

The following topics are examined in this paper to illustrate how dietary quality improvements may be overestimated: trends in fats, added sugars, and the percent of energy contributed from fat. Although a variety of policy and regulatory options are available to improve diet, the difficulty of making basic structural changes in people or society makes sustained change challenging. The issue attention cycle is used to illustrate a possible background to the rise and decline in interest given to healthy diet by the U.S. population.Consumer/Household Economics,

Organizational Demography and Individual Careers: Structure, Norms, and Outcomes

[Excerpt] As the terms career choices and opportunity structure suggest, demographic influences on careers operate at multiple levels of analysis: at the individual level, on individuals\u27 perceptions of work environments and career decisions, and at the organization level, on group dynamics and organizational selection processes. However, there are few theories that explicate the processes that bridge these levels. What are the dynamics by which demographic patterns influence an individual\u27s career choices? Similarly, how do individual actions shape the processes of demographic change within organizations? This chapter presents one approach to exploring such questions

BOOK REVIEW: Brian Wansink. Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity.

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Evidence for an additive inhibitory component of contrast adaptation

The latency of visual responses generally decreases as contrast increases. Recording in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), we find that response latency increases with increasing contrast in ON cells for some visual stimuli. We propose that this surprising latency trend can be explained if ON cells rest further from threshold at higher contrasts. Indeed, while contrast changes caused a combination of multiplicative gain change and additive shift in LGN cells, the additive shift predominated in ON cells. Modeling results supported this theory: the ON cell latency trend was found when the distance-to-threshold shifted with contrast, but not when distance-to-threshold was fixed across contrasts. In the model, latency also increases as surround-to-center ratios increase, which has been shown to occur at higher contrasts. We propose that higher-contrast full-field stimuli can evoke more surround inhibition, shifting the potential further from spiking threshold and thereby increasing response latency

The Impact of Working at Home on Career Outcomes of Professional Employees

This research examines the claim that working at home adversely affects employees\u27 career progress, by comparing the career achievements of professional employees who work at home and those who do not. The findings contradict assertions of negative consequences of working at home. Implications for research and practice are discussed