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I present and evaluate various explanations for why new workers who were sponsored by oldtimers tend to have better job outcomes (better performance, more satisfaction, and less turnover) than do new workers who were not sponsored.

My evaluations involve searching for evidence that fits (or does not fit) each of the explanations.

The two most popular explanations argue that the job benefits of sponsorship arise because (a) sponsored newcomers have more realistic job expectations than do unsponsored newcomers, or (b) the quality of sponsored newcomers is greater than that of unsponsored newcomers. Unfortunately, these explanations have weak empirical support. A third explanation, largely untested as yet, attributes the performance benefits of sponsorship to social pressures that can arise when someone is sponsored for a job. These pressures include efforts by newcomers to repay the people who sponsored them, efforts by sponsors to assist the newcomers they sponsored after those persons have been hired, and stereotypes among coworkers about the kinds of people who get jobs through sponsors. Although limited as yet, the evidence regarding this new explanation seems promising.

More research on this third explanation for sponsorship effects should be done. Suggestions for how to do such research are reviewed and a relevant experiment is presented.

The ideas and evidence presented here could help employers who want to improve the job outcomes of their new workers. Poor outcomes among such persons are a major problem in many settings.

Although some of my ideas have been mentioned by others, they were not been described in much detail, nor were they tested. My hope is that this chapter will promote new theory and research on the performance benefits of sponsorship, a topic that has been largely ignored in recent years.

Roland Joffé, the film-maker behind the significant critical hits The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), employed a hypnotic aesthetic, which unflinchingly depicted violence and brutality within different cultural contexts. In 2007, he used a no less impressive aesthetic in a similar way, although this film, Captivity, was met with public outcry, including from self-proclaimed feminist film-maker Joss Whedon. This was based upon the depiction, in advertisements, of gendered violence in the popularly termed ‘torture porn’ subgenre, which itself has negative gendered connotations.

We aim to revisit the critical reception of Captivity in light of this public controversy, looking at the gendered tensions within considerations of genre, narration and aesthetics. Critics assumed Captivity was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the torture horror subgenre, and there is evidence that the film-makers inserted scenes of gore throughout the narrative to encourage this affiliation. However, this chapter will consider how the film works as both an example of post-peak torture horror and an interesting precursor to more overtly feminist horror, such as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Raw (2017). This is seen through the aesthetic and narrative centralizing of a knowing conflict between genders, which, while not entirely successful, does uniquely aim to provide commentary on the gender roles which genre criticism of horror has long considered implicit to the genre’s structures and pleasures.

As Jennifer, Lucy, Jerri-Lynn, Lulu, Brenda Mary, and Khea storied and restoried their lives in the ways earlier noted, we were in the midst of, as earlier noted, gradually growing in our wakefulness of attending to new possible intergenerational narrative reverberations made visible in their storied lives, in their stories to live by. As they storied their lives Jennifer, Lucy, Jerri-Lynn, Lulu, Brenda Mary, and Khea not only taught us of ways in which the intergenerational narrative reverberation of colonizing Aboriginal people continues to reverberate in their lives, in their stories to live by, but they also showed us the new possible intergenerational narrative reverberations they are composing. These new possible intergenerational narrative reverberations are poised to counter and to restory the colonization and oppression of Aboriginal people. In this way, by tracing the counter stories to live by they are composing so as to shape new possible intergenerational narrative reverberations we see that their counterstories to live by carry much potential for shaping a future in which the spirits of Aboriginal teachers, children, youth, families, and communities in Canada are strong.

This case study describes how one library leveraged shared resources by defaulting to a consortial catalog search.

The authors use a case study approach to describe steps involved in changing the catalog interface, then assess the project with a usability study and an analysis of borrowing statistics.

The authors determined the benefit to library patrons was significant and resulted in increased borrowing. The usability study revealed elements of the catalog interface needing improvement.

Taking advantage of an existing resource increased the visibility of consortial materials to better serve library patrons. The library provided these resources without significant additional investment.

While the authors were able to identify other libraries using their consortial catalog as the default search, no substantive published research on its benefits exists in the literature. This chapter will be valuable to libraries with limited budgets that would like to increase patron access to materials.

Long-term care (LTC) homes are highly regulated settings that provide care to people living with complex health conditions who are often at the end of their lives. Mental health and quality of life are important concepts in LTC given the inherent poor health and diminished autonomy of residents living in this setting. The COVID-19 pandemic had the potential to further compound these issues through lockdowns limiting movement within and outside of LTC homes, increased fear of severe COVID-19 infections, staff shortages, and impaired communication through personal protective equipment. However, the evidence describing the effect of the pandemic on mental health and quality of life is mixed, with some studies describing increased rates of mental health concerns and others presenting modest increases or decreases. Creative strategies to mitigate negative mental health consequences of lockdown included technology supported and window or outdoor visits, increased access to volunteers, and supports for families. However, the evidence in this area continues to evolve as subsequent waves of the pandemic progress. Future research may present new evidence about other strategies that became important in different stages of the pandemic.

People with chronic conditions faced a type of double jeopardy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their pre-existing health conditions made them more likely to become severely ill – and more likely to be admitted to intensive care, intubated, and die – if infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. At the same time, access to needed screening, testing, and treatment was often limited due to the cancelation of primary care services by healthcare providers and systems overwhelmed by the need to treat patients with COVID-19. Patients with chronic conditions feared being exposed to COVID-19 while receiving care. The resulting stress, fear, and anxiety made the management of chronic diseases even more difficult. Several subsets of patients with certain medical conditions, including immunodeficiencies and disabilities, were particularly impacted. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the response to it, also impacted support and services available to caregivers and heightened stress, particularly among parents and caregivers.

Deborah L. Balk is a social demographer at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). Her prior work has focused on fertility, marriage, health and gender in Asia and north Africa. Her current work integrates demography with geography, applying both geospatial and demographic data and techniques to one another. Her current research includes a study of climate, health and migration interactions in sub-Saharan Africa, and analysis of the global spatial distribution of population with particular attention to estimates of urban extents.Alejandro Cervantes-Carson is assistant professor of sociology at Mary Washington College. Born in Mexico City, he studied both in Mexico and the United States, obtaining a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas, at Austin. His primary areas of interest and research are political sociology, social inequality, and Latin America. He has written articles on gender, human rights, population policies and reproductive rights in Mexico. He is currently part of a research team studying a transnational community that connects northern Virginia, U.S., and southern Puebla, Mexico, and developing a project on deliberative democracy in the Zapatista movement.Denise A. Copelton is visiting assistant professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where she teaches courses on women’s health, medical sociology, and sociology of families. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2003. Her dissertation examined the social experience of pregnancy in the U.S., focusing both on the social construction of prenatal norms in popular pregnancy advice books and on the ways in which pregnant women accommodate and resist these norms in their daily lives.Vasilikie Demos is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She has studied ethnicity and gender in the United States and is currently completing a monograph on her study of Kytherian Greek women based on interviews in Greece and among immigrants in the United States and Australia. With Marcia Texler Segal, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and of the North Central Sociological Association, and has been an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales.Lara Foley is assistant professor of sociology and governing board member of the women’s studies program at the University of Tulsa. Among the courses she teaches are Sociology of Medicine and Sociology of Reproduction and Birth. Her work in this volume is based on her dissertation research examining the work narratives of midwives. Another article from this project, co-authored with Christopher Faircloth, entitled “Medicine as a Discursive Resource: Legitimation in the Work Narratives of Midwives” appears in Sociology of Health and Illness, 2003, 25, 165–184. She is currently working on a book project examining the experiences and roles of male partners in pregnancy and childbirth.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She conducts research in the areas of health policy, health across the life course, health behavior including preventive health behavior, and research into AIDS in geographically mobile populations. She has recently authored Health Care Policy: Issues and Trends (Praeger, 2002). She has conducted research in a variety of topics related to child health, including recruitment into CHIP (child health insurance program) and has published a book on the impact of school-based health clinics, Schools and the Health of Children (Sage, 2000). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and past chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.Marcia Texler Segal is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean for Research and professor of sociology at Indiana University Southeast. Her research and consulting focus on education and on women in Sub-Saharan Africa and on ethnic women in the United States. With Vasilikie Demos, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of the North Central Sociological Association and past chair of the American Sociological Association Sections on Sex and Gender and Race, Gender and Class.Chikako Takeshita is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech University. Her research interests include socio-cultural and political aspects of biodiversity prospecting and indigenous rights. She is the author of the article “Bioprospecting and its Discontents: Indigenous Resistances as Legitimate Politics” (Alternatives, 2001, 26, 259–282). More recently, she has been researching the social and scientific development of intrauterine devices, politics of medical representations of female bodies, and reproductive rights and population policies from a gender perspective. She has a M.S. degree from the Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech, an M.B.A. from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and a B.A. from Keio University in Tokyo.Carol A. B. Warren is Professor Emerita and former chair of sociology at the University of Kansas. Her former appointment was as associate to full professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. Among her recent publications are Gender Issues in Ethnography with Jennifer K. Hackney (Sage, 2000), “Qualitative Interviewing” in the Handbook of Interview Research (J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (Eds), Sage, 2002), Pushbutton Psychiatry: A History of Electroshock in America with Timothy Kneeland (Praeger, 2002) and “Sex and Gender in the 1970s,” in Qualitative Sociology (Winter 2003). She is working on a book, Discovering Qualitative Methods: Field Research, Interviews, and Images, with Tracy X. Karneer, to be published by Roxbury, and on articles (with Timothy Kneeland) on “Mineral Magnetism in Psychiatric Treatment” and “Natural Electricity in Psychiatric Treatment: Amber, Fish and Eels.”Terri A. Winnick earned a B.S. in psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University, Mansfield. Her area of interest is medical sociology, with a focus on professions; she is currently doing research on the reaction of the established medical profession to alternative medicine.Kathryn M. Yount is a social demographer specializing in the measurement of morbidity and mortality in less developed settings and in the integration of qualitative and quantitative data in sociodemographic analysis. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of International Health and Sociology and Affiliated Faculty of the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses primarily on multi-method case studies and comparative analyses of the determinants of disparities by gender in survival, health, and access to care over the life course. Yount has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the University Research Committee at Emory, and the National Institute on Aging to study these issues in the Middle East.