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Copyright of Marmara Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi Hukuk Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Marmara University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Japan, the “Act on the Arrangement of Related Acts to Promote Work Style Reform” was enforced in 2019 to reduce long working hours. However, work style reforms largely depend on workers’ and companies’ awareness and abilities. This study aimed to develop the Work Style Reform scale to assess the competencies required for work style reform and to examine its validity and reliability. This study was conducted with a diverse sample of 1,641 Japanese workers, and 17 questions across three subscales—Work Style, Personal Style, and Work Environment—were developed. After a response bias analysis, some items were discarded based on an exploratory factor analysis; the reliability coefficients were calculated; and a confirmatory factor analysis was performed. The convergent and discriminant validity were evaluated through a multi-trait multimethod analysis. Finally, nine questions remained. Construct validity, reliability and convergent validity were sufficient for all Subscales, and discriminant validity was sufficient only for Work Style. In conclusion, while Work Style was sufficient, issues remained in other subscales. To improve the accuracy of them in the future, it is necessary to examine the validation of discriminant validity using different indicates and the addition of new items to the smallest subscale; Personal Style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we have shown that nutrient input in aquatic ecosystems has different impacts on the various facets of phytoplankton and zooplankton diversity. We designed an experiment with eleven levels of nutrient addition replicated four times. Alpha, beta, and gamma taxonomic and functional diversity indices were calculated based on organisms' occurrences and abundances in each microcosm, among microcosms of the same treatment and for the set microcosms of a same treatment. There was an increase in species richness and a decrease in equitability along the gradient for both groups. Taxonomic beta diversity based on occurrences was positively related to nutrient gradient, but a hump-shaped relationship between nutrient enrichment and beta diversity was observed when abundance data were considered, showing greater variation in species composition at intermediate levels of nutrient. Alpha functional richness increased for both groups, whereas alpha and gamma RaoQ, and gamma functional divergence decreased, indicating that nutrient enrichment promotes functional trait richness, but also the dominance of species. At small spatial scale and at a short period of time, we showed that taxonomic and functional diversities respond in similar ways to nutrient enrichment. We conclude that nutrient input may modify community composition and affect ecological processes overtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and observers attribute many democratic benefits to local news media. This paper examines exposure to local and national news media websites, side-by-side in one model, testing their over-time effects on political participation, knowledge, and affective and attitude polarization. We test whether traditionally disengaged or disadvantaged groups (i.e., racial minorities, those with low education levels, politically disinterested, and those who do not consume national news), may particularly benefit from local news consumption. To this end, we combine three-wave panel surveys (final N = 740) with 9 months worth of web browsing data submitted by the same participants (36 million visits). We identify exposure to local and national news sites using an extensive list of news domains. The results offer a robust pattern of null findings. Actual online exposure to local news has no over-time effects on the tested outcomes. Also, exposure to local news sites does not exert especially strong effects among the tested sub-groups. We attribute these results to the fact that news visits account for a small fraction of citizens' online activities, less than 2% in our trace data. Our project suggests the need to evaluate the effects of local news consumption on the individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thousands of aging education buildings in the US are in urgent need of maintenance to ensure their operational performance. The planning and scheduling of these maintenance activities need to be optimized to minimize their total maintenance costs and reduce the challenging deferred maintenance problems confronting education institutions in the US. This paper presents the development of a novel model for optimizing the planning of maintenance activities in education buildings. The computations of the developed model are implemented utilizing an optimization module that identifies an optimal maintenance schedule for minimizing total maintenance costs; a scheduling module that calculates the start day, start hour, finish day, and finish hour of all maintenance activities; and a cost estimating module that estimates the total maintenance cost for each generated schedule. An application example of three education buildings that include plumbing, HVAC, and electrical maintenance activities was analyzed to illustrate the use of the model and evaluate its performance by comparing its results to those generated by widely used existing methods for planning maintenance activities of education buildings. The outcome of this analysis confirms the model was capable of outperforming existing methods in reducing the total maintenance cost by more than 12%. The main contributions of the developed novel model to the body of knowledge include its innovative methodology for identifying optimal ranking of maintenance activities, selecting optimal overtime use and crew size for all maintenance activities, generating an optimal maintenance schedule that complies with all practical constraints such as the availability of classrooms during their nonoperational hours, and minimizing total maintenance cost of all scheduled activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have policy and ideological incentives to vote against their European Political Groups (EPGs) and national party delegations (NPDs), and how often they act on these by voting against the party line? Documenting over-time variations in incentives to dissent in floor votes using five waves of surveys of MEPs, covering the years 1994–2019, this article shows that while these have generally decreased over time, they remain substantial. Further, by combining individual floor voting records on legislation and individual MEP survey responses for the 2004–2009 EP, the article shows that while individual MEP preferences significantly influence the decision to dissent from the EPG line in floor votes, this is not the case for voting against their NPD, lending support to the argument that the primary principal for MEPs is their national party, not their EPG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of citizenship norms is considered a driving force behind changing political processes in contemporary democracies. Competing expectations have emerged on this topic: a 'citizen engagement' argument anticipates an increase in norms that emphasize engaged and expressive values, while a 'democratic erosion' argument expects an increase in traditional and even authoritarian values. With a theoretical focus on individual-level citizenship norms, we analyze uniquely high-quality cross-national data on adolescents in 14 diverse countries in 1999, 2009 and 2016. We integrate recently developed innovations in latent class analysis that have not yet been implemented in applied research by using a two-step estimator for multilevel latent class models with measurement equivalence testing. The findings confirm expectations of the existence of both 'engaged' and 'duty-based' citizenship norms, but the stability in the prevalence of these norms contrasts expectations in the literature. The findings also identify additional normative types that do change in prevalence over time—namely, decreased prevalence of a 'mainstream' norm that parallels mean societal scores, along with increased prevalence of both a 'maximalist' high-scoring group and a 'subject' low-scoring group. The results regarding over-time change provide partial support for both the citizen engagement and democratic erosion arguments, and highlight the importance of robust measurement of these concepts to contribute to the debate of evolving global trends in citizenship norms. We conclude by discussing how the multilevel latent class modeling approach used in this article can be applied to related topics to better understand changing relationships between citizens and democratic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outpatient care providers usually allow patients to access service via scheduling appointments or direct walk-in. Patients choose strategically between these two access channels (and otherwise balking) based on the trade-off of appointment delay and in-clinic waiting. How to manage outpatient care with such dual access channels, taking into account patient strategic choice behavior, is a challenge faced by providers. We study three operational levers to address this management challenge: service capacity allocation between these two channels, appointment delay information revelation via the choice and design of online scheduling systems, and a walk-in triage system that restricts the use of walk-in hours only for acute care. By studying a stylized queueing model, we find that neither a real-time online scheduling system (which offers instant access to appointment delay information at time of booking) nor an asynchronous online system (which does not directly provide delay information) can be universally more efficient. Although real-time systems appear more popular in practice, asynchronous systems sometimes can result in higher operational efficiency. Under the provider's optimal capacity allocation, which scheduling system is more efficient hinges on two key factors: the patient demand–provider capacity relationship and patient willingness to wait. For the walk-in triage system, we find that it may or may not be beneficial to adopt; the provider's own cost trade-off between lost demand and overtime work is the key determinant. Our research highlights that there is no one-size-fits-all model for outpatient care management, and the best use of operational levers critically depends on the practice environment. This paper was accepted by Jayashankar Swaminathan, operations management. Funding: S. Wang's work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72001220 and 71931008]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4676. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Crítica de Relaciones de Trabajo, Laborum is the property of Ediciones Laborum S.L. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article analyses over-time changes in family transfers in Hungary, Lithuania and Romania from 1990-2018 to seek evidence of similarity in the ethos of policy adaptation. Informed by recent scholarship signalling growing disparities in social entitlements along socio-economic lines in Hungary and Romania, the analysis assesses whether three decades of change in family transfers in three different policy contexts might exhibit the selective, pro-wealthy ethos of social policy transformation described. Using data from an original dataset drawing on exhaustive social legislation pertaining to family allowances, family tax breaks and paid parental leave-related transfers, the article shows that, for most of the last three decades, institutional dualisms in the protection of families with dependent children have grown. Policy drift undercuts the rights of the neediest and policy layering leads to programme expansion targeting dual-earner, high-income families especially. This trend has intensified over the last fifteen years and is most evident in paid leave schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]