Summaries
Undesired behaviour and the social climate in the Dutch police force
Liesbeth Eikenaar and Harrie Jansen
In 1991 a sample of 492 executive policewomen in the Netherlands completed a questionnaire on their personal experiences with behaviour com monly perceived as improper or even sexist. More than one third of the women regularly experienced sexual jokes, sexual remarks and remarks on women during their work. Although less frequently, more than one third of the wo men claimed to sometimes be confronted with pinups, indecent gestures, ogling, physical obtru sions and pornographic video’s.
Correlation analysis shows that two main catego ries of undesirable behaviour can be distin guished: person directed sexism and group direc
ted sexism. Both types of behaviour are detrimen
tal to the social climate experienced by the poli cewomen. Contrary to hypotheses derived from token theory and power theory, both the sex-ratio in the professional group and the hierarchical status of the women show only little, of any, effect on the frequency of undesired behaviour.
The implementation of the Income Support Act: research, debate, perspectives
Roeland van Geuns en Ger Homburg
Over 3.000 dossiers were studied and more than 150 persons were interviewed to gather informa tion on the way decisions on the allowance of income support were taken. It was concluded that there is a considerable distance between the law and its implementation, partly due to the specifi cations of the law and partly due to local govern ments, that are responsible for the execution of the Income Support Act. The final conclusions of the commission were severe on local government. Confronted with them, local governments argued that the commission did not, or not enough, take
into account the specific circumstances of income support allowance, the impossiblility of checking information on clients and the costs and benefits of checking information.
Reintegration of Surinamese clients of Dutch social services:obstacles within the organisation
Justus Veenman en Ruud Verburg
The local social services in the Netherlands in creasingly strive towards reintegration of their clients into the labour market. A means towards this end is policy differentiation, which gives staff members the opportunity to adapt their assistance to the specific needs of their clients. Lipsky (1980) has pointed out that this ‘made-to- measure’ policy is not necesssarily to the advan tage of every client, since staff members fre quently use general client characterizations to decide who needs what kind of assistance. In this way, ‘institutionalized disadvantages’ become the other side of ‘institutionalized advantages’. In Dutch research (Veenman 1985), it was found that such phenomena do occur at the Labour Ex change, with ethnic minority unemployed being the victims. This raised the question whether the same will be true for ethnic minority clients of the local social services. To answer this question, research was done among Surinamese clients of three social services in and around the city of Rotterdam. In general, it was found that these clients actually run the risk of ‘institutionalized disadvantages’, precisely because staff members seem to have rather strong general client charac terizations, which have a negative effect on the communication between staff members and their Surinamese clients. Certain provisions are neces sary to diminish the possible negative effects of policy differentiation. Among them is the impro vement of knowledge of the social and cultural background of ethnic minority clients.
Summaries
Seven-sectors model L.W. van Ittersum
This article describes a model to stimulate the labour participation of the increasing group of the long-term unemployed. Before labour-exchanges and municipal departments of social services can use their instruments, they have to determine which instrument for which of the clients will give the best perspectives to (re)enter the labour- market: they need a model to diagnose.
In spite of the fact that both economic and socio logic scientists published a lot of survey-results about long-term unemployment and labour parti cipation, these results are not yet translated into a useful integrated instrument to diagnose the position of a jobless individual on the labour- market. In this article it is tried to integrate the economic and sociological sights into a new model (seven-sectors model) and to build a brid ge to a new policy of the municipal departments of social services to activate benefit-owners in the direction of the labour-market.
Education between profession and m arket: The developm ent o f professional training E. de Bruijn en A.F.M. Nieuwenhuis
This article compares two case studies on the responsiveness of vocational education and trai ning on developments in industrial and service oriented branches. The two case studies are con cerned with both a traditional branch of industry (installation engineering) and a developing sector (tourism and recreation). The article shows that in different developmental stages of professional sectors vocational education and training play different roles. There are also similarities to be seen: the existence of an own sectoral training system is a weapon in the struggle for sectoral recognition and shielding of economic markets, but also contains the risk of rigidity and stagna tion of the development of qualifications and pro fessions reacting on technological and social-eco nomic innovations. The balance between conser vative hedging of positions and flexible inno vations and developments is the future challenge. G ender-neutral pay for female and male jobs: the role of jo b evaluation systems and com pa rable w orth
Joop Schippers
Wage rate differentials between men and women seem to be of a very persistent nature. Job eva
luation systems are often seen as a means to rea-' lize pay equity between male and female orien ted jobs. The introduction of the comparable worth-strategy in countries like Canada and the United States relies on the same idea. In this ar ticle we try to answer the question whether and , - if so - to what degree and in which way job evaluation systems and the comparable w orth-, strategy can indeed contribute to narrowing the wage gap between women and men and female and male jobs respectively. Legal procedures to establish a lack of gender-neutrality and to repair remuneration take much time, and require high investments with respect to time and energy. So, negotiations between unions and employers may be more succesful in realizing a job evaluation and pay system that guarantees equal treatment between men and women. Besides, such a system can also take into account a certain degree of flexibility that is both necessary from the point of view of a flexible organization and desired from the point of view of compensating workers for their efforts.
The division of tasks a t home, 1975-1990 Tanja van der Lippe en Marry Niphuis-Nell Four comparable time budget surveys were used , to analyse the hypothesis of a reallocation of ’household and family tasks’ among married and cohabiting couples in the period 1975-1990. The data showed that the hypothesis was confirmed for ’household labor’: the time spent by men on this activity increased while the time spent by women decreased. For the tasks of ’child care’ and ’do-it-yourself acitivities’ the results were less clear. Women, especially, with a youngest child up untill the age of 6 deviated from what was expected: they spent considerable more time on child care in 1990 compared to 1975. Men with a child in the same age group also - and in accordance with the expectation - increased their time use for childcare. The results of a regression analysis showed that the time used for ’household and family tasks’ is strongly influenced by the amount of time used for paid labour (for both sexes) and by the presence of a young child (for women only).
