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Expectations play a crucial role in finance, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and fiscal policy. In the last decade a rapidly increasing number of laboratory experiments have been performed to study individual expectation formation, the interactions of individual forecasting rules, and the aggregate macro behavior they co-create. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive literature survey on laboratory experiments on expectations in macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we discuss the extent to which expectations are rational or may be described by simple forecasting heuristics, at the individual as well as the aggregate level.

This chapter critically examines the dynamics that exists between employee well-being, line management leadership and governance as experienced and perceived by employees in the public sector context. This chapter is based on research into employee well-being and line management leadership with a British Local Authority in northern England, focusing on employees’ verbal accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of well-being, line manager leadership and corporate social responsibility. Twenty-six interviews were conducted from a diverse range of employees with each interview lasting (45–60 minutes), tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. The research investigated the subjective perceptions of senior managers, managers, senior officers and clerical/secretarial staff regarding their views concerning line management leadership on employee well-being at work. Using the technique of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) provided insight into the life-world of participants, providing the opportunity for employees to share their personal experience of leadership and governance on the front line and its implication for employee well-being at work. The data revealed line management leadership and governance emerged as central to influencing and enabling well-being at work and were linked to individual, social and organisational factors (blame culture, rewards, trust in management, support and communication). Employees’ accounts of line management leadership, well-being and corporate social responsibility identified salient issues, thus providing a basis for broader research in this area. Thus organisations wishing to enhance employee well-being could focus efforts on creating organisational conditions and line management leadership to encourage well-being through the six identified factors. This research has relevance for the employment relationship, corporate social responsibility, service delivery, performance and for practitioners and academics alike.

The public transport sector is known for high levels of violence, but women are particularly at risk of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, from both passengers and fellow workers. Furthermore, women transport users face high rates of sexual harassment. This chapter provides evidence of the extent of gender-based violence and harassment in public transport, arguing that attention, though minimal, has been paid to the experiences of female passengers, but overlooks women workers’ experiences of gender-based violence. The chapter discusses the role of key actors in dealing with and preventing gender-based violence for both passengers and women workers. It draws on evidence from Kenya, collected as part of research for the International Transport Workers Federation on the future of work for women in public transport, and other published sources. It argues that the state (national and local), employers, trade unions and civil society actors all have a key role to play in preventing sexual harassment and gender-based violence at work, but need to do more, particularly through adopting and publicising a zero-tolerance approach to gender-based violence. It also highlights the importance of collaboration among key stakeholders for effective intervention and enforcement.

The International Labour Organisation Convention 190 on Violence and Harassment in the World of Work, with an accompanying Recommendation, came into force in June 2021. This represents a potentially powerful new framework for action on tackling and preventing violence and harassment at work that recognises the interrelated effects of gender-based violence and harassment, gender stereotypes and unequal gender power relations, which underpin occupational gender segregation. The transport sector was particularly mentioned in the Convention as an area where change is needed. The chapter briefly considers the Convention’s potential to tackle gender-based violence in the transport sector and how global trade unions are using this opportunity.

Homelessness has many causes and also is stigmatized in the United States, leading to much misunderstanding of its causes and what policy solutions may ameliorate the problem. The problem is of course getting worse and impacting many communities far removed from the West Coast cities the authors examine in this study. This analysis examines the socioeconomic variables influencing homelessness on the West Coast in recent years. The authors utilize a panel fixed effects model that explicitly includes measures of healthcare access and availability to account for the additional health risks faced by individuals who lack shelter. The authors estimate a spatial error model (SEM) in order to better understand the impacts that systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have on a variety of factors that directly influence productivity and other measures of welfare such as income inequality, housing supply, healthcare investment, and homelessness.

Giambattista Piranesi's disturbing images of fantasy prisons set out in his Carceri d'Invenzione have had a profound impact on cultural sensibilities. The chapter explores Piranesi's distinctive visual language and situates it in an eighteenth-century penchant for ruins and what they might signify. The macabre fantasy structures bear little relation to actually existing prison buildings, but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. The chapter examines the relationships between narrative and visual methods by considering that scholarship in art history which has sought to address the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’.

Much of it belongs to what was once the ‘new art history’ in the 1970s, and which had become critical of how conventional approaches in the discipline had tended to see art as the visualisation of narrative. For example, Norman Bryson's (1981) study of French painting in the Ancien Régime explored the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’ by examining the kind of stories pictures tell, drawing a distinction between the ‘discursive’ aspects of an image (posing questions on visual art's language-like qualities and relationships to written text) and those ‘figural’ features that place the image as primarily a visual experience – it's ‘being-as-image’ – that is entirely independent of language.

The focus on language is symptomatic of the ‘linguistic turn’ that has had such a profound influence on intellectual thought since the 1960s, and this chapter will concentrate on one strand in it. In particular, it will introduce the approach Jacques Derrida developed and defined as ‘deconstruction’, which in some important respects revealed the limitations of language, and seeks to create the effects of ‘decentring’ by highlighting how signification is a complex, often duplicitous, process. The chapter then situates Piranesi's images in an account of landscape, not least since he was a leading exponent of the veduta (a faithful representation of an actual urban or rural view) that had achieved the status of a distinctive and popular genre by the eighteenth century.