The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal policy has revolutionized employment rights. Equal employment opportunity law, occupational safety and health legislation, and fringe benefits regulation were designed to create employee rights to equal protection, to health and safety, and to the benefits employers promise. In event-history analyses of data from 279 organizations, this research finds that these legal changes stimulated organizations to create personnel, antidiscrimination, safety, and benefits departments to manage compliance. Yet as institutionalization proceeded, middle managers came to disassociate these new offices from policy and to justify them in purely economic terms, as part of the new human resources management paradigm. This pattern is typical in the United States, where the Constitution symbolizes government rule of industry as illegitimate. It may help to explain the long absence of a theory of the state in organizational analysis and to explain a conundrum noted by state theorists: the federal state is administratively weak but normatively strong.Sociolog

Dynamic Response Characteristics of Local Capacitive Measurement Devices with Application to CFD Validation

The Two-Fluid Model (TFM) approach to modeling fluid-solid systems holds great promise as a means to simulate arbitrary systems, thus greatly reducing design and scale-up efforts. Unfortunately, comprehensive experimental validations of these models are still in short supply. This work addresses this issue by proposing a framework under which to relate computational fluid dynamics model results with experimental measurements on a one-to-one basis. Specifically this is performed for the case of local solids concentration transients in a bench-scale bubbling fluidized bed. The manner in which this comparison is performed has implications for the conclusions that may be drawn for a given validation effort

Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets

Internal labor markets have been explained with efficiency and control arguments; however, retrospective event-history data from 279 organizations suggest that federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law was the force behind the spread of formal promotion mechanisms after 1964. The findings highlight the way in which American public policy, with its broad outcome-oriented guidelines for organizations, stimulates managers to experiment with compliance mechanisms with an eye to judicial sanction. In response to EEO legislation and case law, personnel managers devised and diffused employment practices that treat all classes of workers as ambitious and achievement oriented in the process of formalizing and rationalizing promotion decisions.Sociolog

Imprisonment and Opportunity Structures: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis*

Comparative sociologists mostly ignore wide differences in criminality and incarceration rates among modern western societies; with notable exceptions, students of the prison take scant notice of research comparing political economies, welfare regimes, and patterns of inequality. This article outlines an opportunity structures model of imprisonment that bridges this gap by treating incarceration trends as byproducts of the institutional organization of opportunities over the life course. Using a sample of 15 rich democracies observed over four decades, empirical attention focuses on three levels of analysis: the capacities of alternative life course paths, the distribution of political power, and institutional differences in state structures and policy regimes. Hypothesized cross-level interactions call for the specification of a hierarchical model to be estimated within a Bayesian framework. Results conform to the expectations of the opportunity structures model and support many of its specific predictions. Introduction Law making and law enforcement are central functions of the modern nation state, and the wide variation in crime rates and levels of incarceration among industrialized democracies presents an attractive set of puzzles for comparative analysis. But these issues are largely ignored in the literatures on comparative politics, socio-economics, and social policy. The focus of this article is on incarceration, and while the number of cross-national analyses in this area is growing, further development requires scholars to overcome two significant challenges. The first is the theoretically promiscuous quality of the imprisonment literature. Recent accounts have drawn links between punishment practices and social welfare regimes A second challenge to comparative research, particularly involving quantitative data, is the difficulty of comparing punishment practices across nation states. Research on welfare, education, labour markets, and macroeconomics benefits from the rough isomorphism in institutional forms in these domains, and the fact that, thanks to the homogenizing influence of IGOs like UNESCO, the ILO, the OECD, and the World Bank, data are reported in consistent ways across the developed democracies. In contrast, comparability across modern systems of criminal law is problematic because of their disparate and remote historical origins, the tendency of national legal institutions towards self-referentiality and inertia, the lack of internationally valid conventions for recording data, and wide cross-national variation in the structure of institutional fields assigned jurisdiction over criminal behaviour. This is not just a measurement problem. The more fundamental issue is that causal processes determining forms and rates of incarceration may vary in different institutional contexts. Given this possibility, it is reasonable to ask whether any single model can reasonably be applied across a range of societies. This article attempts to meet both challenges. First, in a bid for theoretical synthesis, I outline and test an opportunity structures model that aims on the one hand to weave together strands from the new research on penalty, and on the other to integrate the analysis of imprisonment with recent macrosociological research on mobility regimes, life-course institutions, and social policy. A preliminary version of the opportunity structures model was described in an earlier study of five Common Law democracies Second, this emphasis on context suggests an analytical strategy that not only acknowledges cross-national causal heterogeneity, but also seeks to take advantage of it. I argue that social policies in different countries-including penal regimes-are influenced by historically rooted and relatively stable institutional structures that vary widely among the developed democracies. In making this argument, I borrow freely from the comparative welfare state literature, which has demonstrated that institutional differences in state structures To forecast my argument, democracies with tightly regulated labour markets and bureaucratically powerful national states are more assertive in regulating the distribution of life-course opportunities, with consequences for penal policy directly, and for the political opportunities available to non-state interest groups seeking to influence social policy. An adequate test of this argument requires both a broader range of data and a more sophisticated modelling strategy than was used in the earlier five-country study. This study uses data from 15 rich democracies observed over 40 years to capture wide variation in institutional regimes, and a multilevel modelling approach that can analyse complex interactions between relatively stable institutional structures and more fluid dimensions of the opportunity space within each country, and the consequences of both for incarceration rates. I motivate hypotheses and describe my modelling strategy in more detail in the sections that follow

Determining energy expenditure in a large seabird using accelerometry

Funding The research was financially supported by the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment. Open Access funding provided by La Trobe University. Deposited in PMC for immediate release. Acknowledgements We thank the Victorian Marine Science Consortium, Sea All Dolphin Swims, and Parks Victoria for logistical support. Catherine Hambly and Peter Thomson provided technical support for the DLW isotope analysis. Aspects of the results and discussion in this paper are reproduced from the PhD thesis of L.P.A. (Angel, 2015).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Modelling the hepatitis B vaccination programme in prisons

A vaccination programme offering hepatitis B (HBV) vaccine at reception into prison has been introduced into selected prisons in England and Wales. Over the coming years it is anticipated this vaccination programme will be extended. A model has been developed to assess the potential impact of the programme on the vaccination coverage of prisoners, ex-prisoners, and injecting drug users (IDUs). Under a range of coverage scenarios, the model predicts the change over time in the vaccination status of new entrants to prison, current prisoners and IDUs in the community. The model predicts that at baseline in 2012 57% of the IDU population will be vaccinated with up to 72% being vaccinated depending on the vaccination scenario implemented. These results are sensitive to the size of the IDU population in England and Wales and the average time served by an IDU during each prison visit. IDUs that do not receive HBV vaccine in the community are at increased risk from HBV infection. The HBV vaccination programme in prisons is an effective way of vaccinating this hard-to-reach population although vaccination coverage on prison reception must be increased to achieve this

Effect of QRS duration and morphology on cardiac resynchronization therapy outcomes in mild heart failure: results from the Resynchronization Reverses Remodeling in Systolic Left Ventricular Dysfunction (REVERSE) study.

International audienceBACKGROUND: Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) decreases mortality, improves functional status, and induces reverse left ventricular remodeling in selected populations with heart failure. We aimed to assess the impact of baseline QRS duration and morphology and the change in QRS duration with pacing on CRT outcomes in mild heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS: Resynchronization Reverses Remodeling in Systolic Left Ventricular Dysfunction (REVERSE) was a multicenter randomized trial of CRT among 610 patients with mild heart failure. Baseline and CRT-paced QRS durations and baseline QRS morphology were evaluated by blinded core laboratories. The mean baseline QRS duration was 151±23 milliseconds, and 60.5% of subjects had left bundle-branch block (LBBB). Patients with LBBB experienced a 25.3-mL/m(2) mean reduction in left ventricular end-systolic volume index (P<0.0001), whereas non-LBBB patients had smaller decreases (6.7 mL/m(2); P=0.18). Baseline QRS duration was also a strong predictor of change in left ventricular end-systolic volume index with monotonic increases as QRS duration prolonged. Similarly, the clinical composite score improved with CRT for LBBB subjects (odds ratio, 0.530; P=0.0034) but not for non-LBBB subjects (odds ratio, 0.724; P=0.21). The association between clinical composite score and QRS duration was highly significant (odds ratio, 0.831 for each 10-millisecond increase in QRS duration; P<0.0001), with improved response at longer QRS durations. The change in QRS duration with CRT pacing was not an independent predictor of any outcomes after correction for baseline variables. CONCLUSION: REVERSE demonstrated that LBBB and QRS prolongation are markers of reverse remodeling and clinical benefit with CRT in mild heart failure. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT00271154

Transmyocardial laser revascularization fails to prevent left ventricular functional deterioration and aneurysm formation after acute myocardial infarction in sheep

AbstractObjective: Transmyocardial laser revascularization is an investigational technique for revascularizing ischemic myocardium in patients with inoperable coronary arterial disease. This study tests the hypothesis that laser revascularization prevents left ventricular functional deterioration and aneurysm formation after acute anteroapical myocardial infarction. Methods: An ultrasonic ascending aortic flow probe and snares around the distal left anterior descending and second diagonal coronary arteries were placed in 26 Dorsett hybrid sheep. Ten to 14 days later, snared arteries were occluded to produce an anteroapical infarction of 23% of left ventricular mass. Before infarction 14 animals had 34 ± 4 transmyocardial perforations in the area of the anticipated infarction made with a carbon dioxide laser. Twelve animals served as controls. Hemodynamic measurements and transdiaphragmatic quantitative echocardiograms were obtained before, immediately after, and 2, 5, and 8 weeks after infarction. Eighteen sheep completed the protocol. Results: All animals had large anteroapical left ventricular aneurysms with massive ventricular enlargement. Immediately after infarction the anterior wall became thinner and dyskinetic in all sheep. At 8 weeks aneurysmal size and shape were indistinguishable between groups. Two days after infarction, laser holes were filled with fibrin. At 5 and 8 weeks the infarct consisted of dense collagen, fibroblasts, scattered calcifications, myocyte fragments, neutrophils, macrophages, and no laser holes. There were no significant differences at any time between groups for cardiac pressures or output, ventricular volumes, ejection fraction, stroke work, and the stroke work–left ventricular end-diastolic pressure index. Conclusion: Transmyocardial laser perforations do not revascularize acute myocardial infarction in sheep. (J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 1998;116:752-62