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Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

In recent decades, the use of capital punishment has declined, but in its place, a ‘new death penalty’ has arisen: life without parole (LWOP), which is being used far more frequently and for more crimes than capital punishment ever was. Yet, LWOP has received far less scholarly attention than the death penalty. Because of its greater scale, assessing the effects of LWOP on crime has important policy implications and is a better test of extreme penalties. Existing studies of LWOP focus on humanitarian issues and ignore its potentially reciprocal relationship with crime. Therefore, we use available LWOP data to fill these gaps in the literature, using models specifically designed to control for potential reciprocal effects. The results indicate there is no reciprocal causation between LWOP and violent crime and, at best, LWOP’s impact on crime is small, temporary, and, most importantly, no greater than the impact of life with parole.

State environmental agencies have been organized independently with a variety of structural schemes, and are responsible for the bulk of administration of federal environmental policy, such as the Clean Air Act. Using statistical models of air quality outcomes, this research compares three competing typologies for capturing agency differences: Ringquist (1993b), Lester (1990), and Wilson (1989). The findings indicate the most commonly used measure of organization, Ringquist (1993b), may be the weakest in comparison. Additionally, both Lester (1990) and Wilson (1989) show interesting advantages in comparison to each other. The findings provide some interesting insights into the difficult task of measuring organization.

There is limited discussion in the teacher education literature about the experiences of pre-service black male teachers generally and the ethnic diversity among black male pre-service teachers specifically. Thus, this paper aims to explore the experiences of Frank, a black male refugee health education major attending an historically black college and university (HBCU).

This research study is theoretically guided by selected tenets of Bush and Bush’s (2013) African American male theory and Goodman et al.’s (2006) transition framework and uses a qualitative approach to explore Frank’s transition experiences when coming to America, attending college and engaging in his student teaching experience.

Frank experienced some difficulty transitioning to America, as a result of not having a strong financial foundation. During his college transition, Frank believed that the HBCU environment was nurturing; however, he encountered numerous ethnocentrically charged hostile confrontations from US-born black students at his university because of his accent. While he had some disagreements with the US education system in terms of discipline, Frank believed that his accent served as an asset during student teaching.

This study adds to the burgeoning research that explores the intersectional identities among pre-service black male teachers. As we argue in this paper, researchers, policymakers and practitioners cannot treat black male teachers as a monolithic group and must contemplate the unique supports needed that can attend to the racial and ethnic needs of black male teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influences of teacher and student absenteeism across nine public schools (five primary and four secondary) in Guyana, South America.

To conduct this study, the author employed a mixed-methods study that included a descriptive analysis of a purposive sample of teacher (n=69) and student (n=175) surveys and semi-structured interviews with head teachers (n=8), teachers (n=25), students (n=36), and parents (n=9).

The findings suggested that teacher absenteeism can be attributed to school organizational challenges, such as poor working conditions and weak administrative leadership. Student absenteeism appeared to be influenced primarily by out-of-school factors such as the need to work and to take care of younger siblings.

The study’s purposive sample may have prevented a more nuanced understanding of the various influences of teacher and student absenteeism.

The author provides new insight into some of the root influences of teacher and student absenteeism in Guyana, South America. As such, policymakers and practitioners in the Ministry of Education are positioned to devise evidence-based solutions.

To develop customised machine vision methods for closed‐loop micro‐robotic control systems. The micro‐robots have applications in areas that require micro‐manipulation and micro‐assembly in the micron and sub‐micron range.

Several novel techniques have been developed to perform calibration, object recognition and object tracking in real‐time under a customised high‐magnification camera system. These new methods combine statistical, neural and morphological approaches.

An in‐depth view of the machine vision sub‐system that was designed for the European MiCRoN project (project no. IST‐2001‐33567) is provided. The issue of cooperation arises when several robots with a variety of on‐board tools are placed in the working environment. By combining multiple vision methods, the information obtained can be used effectively to guide the robots in achieving the pre‐planned tasks.

Some of these techniques were developed for micro‐vision but could be extended to macro‐vision. The techniques developed here are robust to noise and occlusion so they can be applied to a variety of macro‐vision areas suffering from similar limitations.

The work here will expand the use of micro‐robots as tools to manipulate and assemble objects and devices in the micron range. It is foreseen that, as the requirement for micro‐manufacturing increases, techniques like those developed in this paper will play an important role for industrial automation.

This paper extends the use of machine vision methods into the micron range.

This study examines whether police officers’ level of education is associated with their perceptions of performance of duties and delivery of services. Using self report survey methodology 110 officers with different levels of education (high school, some college education but not a degree, and college degree) evaluated themselves on 40 performance categories. The results indicate that officers with some college education and college degree report themselves performing better on several of the performance categories than officers with no college education. Even when years of experience with the law enforcement department are controlled for, officers with higher education reported performing significantly better than their counterparts with lower education.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

Collateral consequences (CCs) of criminal convictions such as disenfranchisement, occupational restrictions, exclusions from public housing, and loss of welfare benefits represent one of the salient yet hidden features of the contemporary American penal state. This chapter explores, from a comparative and historical perspective, the rise of the many indirect “regulatory” sanctions flowing from a conviction and discusses some of the unique challenges they pose for legal and policy reform. US jurisprudence and policies are contrasted with the more stringent approach adopted by European legal systems and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in safeguarding the often blurred line between criminal punishments and formally civil sanctions. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to contribute to a better understanding of the overreliance of the US criminal justice systems on CCs as a device of social exclusion and control, and (2) to put forward constructive and viable reform proposals aimed at reinventing the role and operation of collateral restrictions flowing from criminal convictions.