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Clifford Broman is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. His general research area is psychosocial factors in physical and emotional health. Recent research has focused on the role of race/ethnicity in substance use; psychosocial stress; and family formation behaviors and attitudes among African-Americans. His recent publications have appeared in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Race and Social Problems, and Psychological Services.

Purpose – This study seeks to explore the impact of economic hardship on levels of couple conflict.

Methodology – We make use of data from the Michigan Spring 2010 State of the State survey to explore the degree to which Michiganians experience financial hardship and unemployment, which demographic and social characteristics are associated with such hardship, and the impact of hardship on the degree of conflict experienced by couples.

Findings – We find that a considerable percentage of Michiganians report financial challenges such as having difficulty paying bills or experiencing food insecurity. Moreover, financial difficulties do have an impact on the well-being of families. Specifically, we find that those who report higher levels of financial hardship or who have difficulty paying their bills also report higher levels of conflict within their marital or cohabiting relationship.

Social implications – This study suggests that, during times of widespread financial difficulties, the experience of unemployment and associated financial hardship can have a noteworthy impact on familial well-being. This suggests social programs like food assistance and unemployment benefits are important, in that they may alleviate some of the hardship experienced by so many families. Also, low-cost counseling may help couples to navigate the stresses in their relationship.

Originality/value of the chapter – This chapter makes use of quality data from the state of Michigan, which has experienced a poor economic climate for more than a decade. The state serves, in many ways, as an ideal case in which to explore such issues.

We use Canadian data to examine the help‐seeking strategies of women dealing with the consequences of violent victimization. Consideration of the help‐seeking strategies of victimsmay provide insight into other decision‐making processes. The analytic framework integrates research on police reporting and intimate partner violence with the wider help‐seeking literature. This integration allows for an examination of the effect of the victim’s relationship to her offender on decisions to seek help from family, friends, doctors, social service agencies and the police. The research has two objectives. First, we aim to determine whether help‐seeking exists as isolated choices or whether there is a discernable set of help‐seeking strategies used by crime victims. Although many victims do not call the police, they often rely on family, friends, social service and mental health interventions.We find that those victims who report their victimizations to the police also seek support from family and friends. Second, we examine the correlates of these help‐seeking decisions. In doing so, we explore the effects of the offender relationship on decisions to seek help. We explore differences in help‐seeking across attacks by strangers, spousal offenders, dating offenders, and other known offenders. Our findings suggest that women victimized by a spousal offender are more likely than others to use a substantial help‐seeking strategy that includes disclosure to the police, doctors and social service agencies.

Beginning in 2007, many countries around the globe began to experience substantial downturns in their respective economies. Stock markets began to falter, unemployment rates began to climb, and it became readily apparent that a worldwide economic recession was underway.

The purpose of this paper is to advance research on job loss-related stress through a critical realism framework which considers the interplay between organisational context and personal agency and its implications for worker stress in the pre-lay-off stage.

The paper adopts a qualitative case study approach and considers two groups of workers confronted with the prospects of job loss in Australia’s power generation industry – permanent employees working for power stations and workers employed by associated contractors. Field research and semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 35 power industry workers including power station employees and contract workers.

The research shows permanent employees expressing higher levels of stress than contract workers. The different emotional responses expressed by the two groups are accounted for by differences in organisational circumstances and the conditioning of personal agency within these organisational contexts.

One of the implications is that “vulnerable” workers are better prepared for plant closure and less prone to stress. Additional research involving different types of industries, organisational forms, and workforces and involving different stages of the job loss experience, however, is needed to more full advance the understanding of the complexities between organisational structure, worker agency, and the stress implications.

This study assists the authors in better understanding worker emotional experience in the pre-lay-off stage. These findings have important implications for workers, unions and social support agencies and how they can appropriately approach, prepare and assist different categories of workers confronted with job redundancy situations.

This study assists the authors in better understanding worker emotional experience in the pre-lay-off stage. The study has implications for the design and implementation of assistance packages for displaced workers.

Unlike other studies which focus on the lay-off, unemployment or re-employment stage of job loss, this study focuses on the pre-lay-off stage. Conceptually, the study departs from the positivist paradigm which dominates much of the stress literature and adopts a nuanced approach inspired by critical realist understandings of the structure-agency relationship.

In general, there are many disincentives standing in the way of promoting change in public procurement practices by government agencies. Because engaging in sustainable purchasing requires some level of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking, a sorting framework is adopted to gauge whether some organizations are systematically more likely to pursue sustainable public purchasing (SPP) efforts than others. One-way analysis of variance and other methods are applied to a survey of public procurement practitioners across over 300 governments in the U.S. Results strongly suggest that agencies of various scope and reach tend to abstain from aggressively pursuing SPP efforts. However, when they do employ SPP, these efforts tend to be quite variable across and within levels of government and organizational size. In an effort to bridge theory with empirical data, a strong case can be made that the current state of SPP in the United States is the result of random and very cautious experimentation with little systematic pattern to SPP adoption.

This paper examines the role of government procurement as a social policy mechanism within a multilateral open trading system. Government regulations globally are being transformed to foster more responsible business conduct in multinational enterprises (MNEs). Yet, concern that sustainability may present a discriminatory barrier to trade has stalled the progress of sustainable public procurement (SPP) at the international level, raising questions regarding the role and scope of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) to align taxpayer-funded contracts with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.

With a focus on social sustainability, this paper reviews the grey and academic literature to assess the changing landscape of public procurement policy and supply chain legislation in high-income countries.

Frontrunner nations are adopting a mandatory approach to sustainable public procurement and due diligence legislation is elevating supply chain risk from reputational damage to legal liability. While technological innovation and the clean, green production of manufactured goods dominates the sustainable public procurement literature, the social aspects of sustainability poverty, inequality and human rights remain underrepresented.

The scope of this paper is limited to the examination of government procurement covered by the WTO-GPA (2012). Smaller value contracts, under the WTO-GPA thresholds and the category of defence are beyond the scope of the paper.

The paper focusses on the underserved topic of social sustainability in business-to-government (B2G) – business to government – supply chains arguing that for responsible business conduct to become a competitive advantage, it must be more meaningfully rewarded on the demand-side of all taxpayer-funded contracts in organisation for economic co-operation and development countries. The paper introduces the idea of priceless procurement as a mechanism to build system capacity in the evaluation of non-financial sustainability objectives.

To build the capacity to stimulate competition based on social and environmental policy objectives, the paper introduces the concept of priceless procurement in B2G contracts.