All in the Family? Parental Roles in the Epidemic of Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity is a serious global health challenge. Families and consumption are at the nexus of the problem, as childhood weight issues depend significantly on family-related influences (genetic predispositions, physical activities, and household food consumption practices). This article focuses on how a family socializes a child toward or away from obesity. It advances a family consumer socialization framework to characterize key elements and processes. Biological predispositions, parent/family inputs, elements of child development, parent-child interactions, and intergenerational transfer are all major contributors to weight status and life course potentials. Time is also a crucial component, here represented in two forms -- linear and cyclical. Drawing on extensive research from other disciplines and related consumer research, five “Foundational Properties” are distilled, representing fundamental tenets underpinning the family’s role in this problem. Each property is then used to chart promising opportunities for consumer researchers and others interested in advancing knowledge on this pressing concern.

Governing through community? A comparative study of changing management practices in mixed tenure housing development

An important feature of UK housing policy has been the promotion of consortia between local authorities, private developers and housing associations in order to develop mixed tenure estates to meet a wide range of housing needs. Central to this approach has been a focus on the management of neighbourhoods, based on the assumption that high densities and the inter-mixing of tenure exacerbates the potential for incivility and anti-social behaviour and exerts a disproportionate impact on residents' quality of life. Landlord strategies are therefore based on a need to address such issues at an early stage in the development. In some cases community-based, third sector organisations are established in order to manage community assets and to provide a community development service to residents. In others, a common response is to appoint caretakers and wardens to tackle social and environmental problems before they escalate and undermine residents’ quality of life. A number of innovative developments have promoted such neighbourhood governance approaches to housing practice by applying community development methods to address potential management problems. In the process, there is an increasing trend towards strategies that shape behaviour, govern ethical conduct, promote aesthetic standards and determine resident and landlord expectations. These processes can be related to the wider concept of governmentality whereby residents are encouraged to become actively engaged in managing their own environments, based on the assumption that this produces more cohesive, integrated communities and projects positive images. Evidence is emerging from a number of countries that increasingly integrated and mutually supportive roles and relationships between public, private and third sector agencies are transforming neighbourhood governance in similar ways. This paper will review the evidence for this trend towards community governance in mixed housing developments by drawing on a series of UK case studies prepared for two national agencies in 2007. It will review in particular the contractual arrangements with different tenures, identify codes and guidelines promoting 'good neighbour' behaviour and discuss the role of community development trusts and other neighbourhood organisations in providing facilities and services, designed to generate a well integrated community. The second part of the paper will review evidence from the USA and Australia to see how far there is a convergence in this respect in advanced economies. The paper will conclude by discussing the extent to which housing management practice is changing, particularly in areas of mixed development, whether there is a convergence in practice between different countries and how far these trends are supported by theories of governmentality.

Do human resource practices enhance organizational commitment in SMEs with low employee satisfaction?

This paper considers a large matched employee–employer data set to estimate a model of organizational commitment. In particular, it focuses on the role of firm size and management formality to explain organizational commitment in British small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with high and low levels of employee satisfaction. It is shown that size ‘in itself’ can explain differences in organizational commitment, and that organizational commitment tends to be higher in organizations with high employee satisfaction compared with organizations of similar size with low employee satisfaction. Crucially, the results suggest that formal human resource (HR) practices can be used as important tools to increase commitment and thus, potentially, effort and performance within underperforming SMEs with low employee satisfaction. However, formal HR practices commonly used by large firms may be unnecessary in SMEs which benefit from high employee satisfaction and positive employment relations within a context of informality.

Separating the effects of ethnicity and socio-economic status on sleep practices of 6- to 7-month-old infants

Infant sleep undergoes significant re-organization throughout the first 12 months of life, with sleep quality having significant consequences for infant learning and cognitive development. While there has been great interest in the neural basis and developmental trajectories of infant sleep in general, relatively little is known about individual differences in infant sleep and the socio-economic and cultural sources of that variability. We investigated this using questionnaire sleep data in a large, unique multi-ethnic sample of 6-7 month-olds (n=174), with families from South Asian ethnic groups in the UK (Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) being especially well represented. Consistent with previous data from less variable samples, no effects of SES on sleep latency or nocturnal sleep duration emerged. However, perinatal risk factors and ethnic differences did predict daytime sleep, sleep fragmentation and sleep-onset time. While these results should be interpreted with caution due to several limitations, they likely demonstrate that even when socio-economic status and ethnicity are much less confounded than in previous studies, they have a surprisingly limited impact on individual differences in sleep patterns in young infants.