A price worth paying?: Women and work – choice, constraint or satisficing

Purpose – Are women held back or holding back? Do women choose their jobs/careers or are they structurally or normatively constrained? The purpose of this paper is to shed fresh light on these questions and contribute to an on-going debate that has essentially focused on the extent to which part-time work is women’s choice, the role of structural and organisational constraints and the role of men in excluding women. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses data from interviews with 80 working women – both full-time and part-time – performing diverse work roles in a range of organisations in the south east of England. Findings – It was found that many women do not make strategic job choices, rather they often ‘‘fall into’’ jobs that happen to be available to them. Some would not have aspired to their present jobs without male encouragement; many report incidents of male exclusion; and virtually all either know or suspect that they are paid less than comparable men. Those working reduced hours enjoy that facility, yet they are aware that reduced hours and senior roles are seen as incompatible. In short, they recognise both the positive and negative aspects of their jobs, whether they work full or part-time, whether they work in male-dominated or female-dominated occupations, and whatever their position in the organisational hierarchy. Accordingly, the paper argues that the concept of ‘‘satisficing’’, i.e. a decision which is good enough but not optimal, is a more appropriate way to view women’s working lives than are either choice or constraint theories. Originality/value – There is an ongoing, and often polarised, debate between those who maintain that women choose whether to give preference to work or home/family and others who maintain that women, far from being self-determining actors, are constrained structurally and normatively. Rather than supporting these choice or constraint theories, this paper argues that ‘‘satisficing’’ is a more appropriate and nuanced concept to explain women’s working lives.

We could make a meal out of nothing: contested explanations of inequalities in health

This paper reports on the qualitative findings from a comparative study of public health and lifestyles in South East England and Northern France, regions with similar geographic and economic characteristics. Data from health surveys showed that both countries had an increasing BMI with age, particularly in Northern France. This was despite the finding that the percentage eating fresh fruit and vegetable at least five days a week in Northern France increased with age (from well over 50% to over 90%) compared to around 50% to around 75% in South East England. Qualitative data on health inequalities and how they could be addressed were gathered by focus groups sampling from five tiers using the Townsend Index for comparability (14 in England with 106 participants overall; 13 in France with 143 participants). Both had about two thirds women participants, with a preponderance of middle aged and older people. There was a striking difference in the salience of diet between the two countries; in the French data it was raised only 14 times, whereas in England there were 165 occurrences, and these were often distinguished by their use of narrative. Older respondents contrasted the pressures on families today and the expense of fresh fruit and vegetables with their own childhood or childrearing, when cheap meals could be created using skills which have now been lost. These data therefore provide further evidence that providing food is a moral activity.

Organisational whistleblowing policies: making employees responsible or liable?

This paper explores the possible impact of the recent legal developments on organizational whistleblowing on the autonomy and responsibility of whistleblowers. In the past thirty years numerous pieces of legislation have been passed to offer protection to whistleblowers from retaliation for disclosing organisational wrongdoing. An area that remains uncertain in relation to whistleblowing and its related policies in organisations, is whether these policies actually increase the individualisation of work, allowing employees to behave in accordance with their conscience and in line with societal expectations or whether they are another management tool to control employees and protect organisations from them. The assumptions of whistleblower protection with regard to moral autonomy are examined in order to clarify the purpose of whistleblower protection at work. The two extreme positions in the discourse of whistleblowing are that whistleblowing legislation and policies either aim to enable individual responsibility and moral autonomy at work, or they aim to protect organisations by allowing them to control employees and make them liable for ethics at work.

Time domain decomposition for European options in financial modelling

Finance is one of the fastest growing areas in modern applied mathematics with real world applications. The interest of this branch of applied mathematics is best described by an example involving shares. Shareholders of a company receive dividends which come from the profit made by the company. The proceeds of the company, once it is taken over or wound up, will also be distributed to shareholders. Therefore shares have a value that reflects the views of investors about the likely dividend payments and capital growth of the company. Obviously such value will be quantified by the share price on stock exchanges. Therefore financial modelling serves to understand the correlations between asset and movements of buy/sell in order to reduce risk. Such activities depend on financial analysis tools being available to the trader with which he can make rapid and systematic evaluation of buy/sell contracts. There are other financial activities and it is not an intention of this paper to discuss all of these activities. The main concern of this paper is to propose a parallel algorithm for the numerical solution of an European option. This paper is organised as follows. First, a brief introduction is given of a simple mathematical model for European options and possible numerical schemes of solving such mathematical model. Second, Laplace transform is applied to the mathematical model which leads to a set of parametric equations where solutions of different parametric equations may be found concurrently. Numerical inverse Laplace transform is done by means of an inversion algorithm developed by Stehfast. The scalability of the algorithm in a distributed environment is demonstrated. Third, a performance analysis of the present algorithm is compared with a spatial domain decomposition developed particularly for time-dependent heat equation. Finally, a number of issues are discussed and future work suggested.