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The authors aim to broaden the understanding of incivility through the lens of bystanders who witness incivility toward women. Integrating attributional ambiguity and emotional contagion theories with the literature on workplace mistreatment, the authors propose that witnessing incivility toward women may negatively impact bystanders.

The authors collected multi-wave data from 324 employees to assess the consequences of witnessing incivility toward women at work for bystanders.

Utilizing a serial mediation model, the authors found evidence that witnessing incivility toward women indirectly increased turnover intentions six weeks later, first through elevated negative affect and then through increased cognitive burnout.

Taken together, this study's findings suggest that the negative effects of incivility toward women can spread to bystanders and highlight the importance of considering individuals who are not directly involved, but simply bear witness to incivility at work.

This paper examines the rise of electronic‐commerce and its implications for quality and service delivery with particular reference to its impact on legal services. E‐commerce is growing at a phenomenal rate with more organisations offering their goods and services on‐line every day. Importantly, this growth is being matched by the number of people gaining access to the Internet in a variety of ways. E‐commerce offers both opportunities and threats to law firms. The main threat is identified as coming from on‐line competitors offering reduced prices and higher customer services. This competition is forcing law firms to change their attitude to new technology generally and the Internet in particular. A Web presence allows legal practices to be more transparent and to offer greater access to information to customers by way of improving their services. This improved communication may lead to a reduction in complaints against solicitors. The paper concludes that the Internet will have a profound effect on the way private law firms conduct business.

Influence tactics are prevalent in the workplace and are linked to crucial outcomes such as career success and helping behaviours. The authors argue that sex role identity affects women’s choice of influence tactics in the workplace, but they only receive positive performance ratings when their behaviours are congruent with gender role expectation. Furthermore, the authors hypothesize that these relationships may be moderated by occupational continuance commitment. Results suggest that femininity is negatively related to the use of influence tactics overall, and this relationship is moderated by occupational continuance commitment.

In all, 657 women working in the construction industry were surveyed for their continuance occupational commitment and sex role identity and 465 supervisors whose responses are linked with the subordinates are surveyed for the women’s influence tactics and performance ratings.

Results suggested that femininity was negatively related to the use of influence tactics overall, and this relationship was moderated by occupational continuance commitment. Results also showed that women’s use of influence tactics was only positively received in terms of performance ratings when the influence tactic was congruent with gender role expectations.

The results of this current study suggest that not all women are equally likely to use influence tactics and not all tactics result in positive perceptions of performance. Feminine women in general refrain from using influence tactics unless they are driven to stay in a given occupation, but they only receive positive results when their behaviours are congruent with society’s gender role expectations.

Past research has mostly focused on broad differences between males and females, and this study has shown that there are more nuanced differences that can more accurately describe the effects of gender disposition (i.e. sex role identity) on influence tactics. It also emphasizes the importance of occupational commitment as a boundary condition, which influences women to step out of their gender roles even though they may be penalized with lower performance ratings.

OUR various accounts of the Portsmouth Conference, and the official record of it which is now in the hands of readers shows that it may be regarded as a successful one. It was specially notable for the absence of those bickerings and differences which must inevitably come to the surface at times. There may be something in the suggestion of one of our writers that the weather was a main factor. However that may be, there was uniform good temper, and we came away with the belief that a good week's work for librarianship had been done.

The UK Public Library Service has been in the news lately, but for all the wrong reasons. The service offered to customers/users has been steadily declining in recent years as local politicians view libraries as a "soft" option as regards budget cuts. This decline in funding is seen as being responsible for poor service levels and declining book stocks. Central Government aims to halt this decline by introducing another set of performance indicators against which libraries will be judged. However, their success will depend on what is happening at local level. This paper examines the decline in library services and its impact on users. It looks at the role of libraries in the community and offers ways for libraries to improve their product‐service bundle. It further highlights the need for library services to be fairly and properly funded if their role in the community is to be maintained and service levels improved.

Ever since Mead, sociology has maintained a deep divide between human and non human animals. In effect, Mead constructed humans as having capacities that he saw lacking in animals. Recent research on animals has challenged the traditional ideas of Mead and others by providing evidence of animal intelligence, adaptability, selfawareness, emotionality, communication and culture. This paper examines the human‐animal relationship as presented in Introductory Sociology Textbooks to see if this new research on animals has allowed us to move beyond Mead. We find outdated information and confused thinking on such topics as the relationship between language and culture, the development of the self in animals, and the role of instinct, socialization and culture in animal behavior. We conclude that, with few exceptions, the main function of the treatment of animals in these texts is to affirm the hard line that sociology has always drawn between humans and other species.

This paper examines the quality issues facing private legal practices as they try to offer services on the Internet. The threats and opportunities from offering high quality e‐services are examined as well as potential problems. E‐service operations are divided into “hard”, that is those operations concerned with ensuring the customer receives what was ordered at the right time, place, cost and condition, and “soft”, that is those concerned with Web site design, data information readiness and transactions. Quality measures for both types are proposed and the implications for the legal profession examined. The second half of the paper reports the findings of a survey of Merseyside legal practices in order to see the extent to which they are facing the challenges of the Internet and the issues of e‐service provision. The results show that the legal profession is being slow to introduce Internet technology and only a few firms are offering limited e‐services to their clients. The old attitudes of an aged and learned profession are proving difficult barriers to overcome as the profession battles to bring itself into the twenty‐first century.

People develop general stereotypes and beliefs about how people look and behave, and discrepancies in perceptions of warmth and competence can lead to incongruence in expected behaviors during service interactions. These perceptions can contribute to negative outcomes for employees; therefore, this study aims to examine how perceptions of warmth affect both customer reactions to employees who are Asian and the work stress, strain and attitudes of employees who are Asian toward their jobs.

To investigate the phenomenon, the authors conducted three studies. The first study examined whether occupational-racial stereotypes influence customers’ evaluation of employees’ service recovery performance. The second study temporally examined whether employees who are Asian engage in more emotional labor strategies to counter these occupational-racial stereotypes and as a result experience more negative outcomes. And a third study investigated the cumulative effects of negative perceptions on employee outcomes.

The results suggest employees in the hospitality industry who are Asian are perceived as less warm during service failure interactions and, thus, must work harder to regulate their emotions. As a result, employees who are Asian reported experiencing more negative outcomes, supporting the notion that occupational-racial stereotypes contribute to racial disparity and act as challenges and barriers for employees in the service industry.

These findings emphasize the need to understand and address occupational-racial stereotypes for employees who are Asian to mitigate racial disparities in the service industry. Organizations can promote diverse work climates, provide emotional support and foster high-quality relationships to support employee well-being and satisfaction.

The results provide insight into how stereotypical warmth perceptions of employees who are Asian may affect the demands they face when engaging in service recovery, and how these increased demands may reduce the quality of their work experiences.

As our correspondent on another page suggests, the economic crisis may have reactions upon libraries. The most obvious one he mentions is the increased difficulty we shall experience in obtaining American books. Not all libraries, public or private, make any special collection of books published in the United States, although there has been an increasing tendency to buy more as the relations of the two countries have grown closer through their common struggle; in fact, we know libraries which have spent many hundreds of pounds in the course of the past year or two on the select lists of books which have been made for us by American librarians. It is most unfortunate that the manipulation of dollar currency should have brought about a situation in which even the exchange of ideas between the countries becomes more difficult. One suggestion might be made and that is that our American colleagues should continue to sift the literature of this time of famine for us, so that further select lists may be available in better days.

LOUGHBOROUGH was the first of the post‐war schools to be established in 1946. This resulted from negotiations of representatives of the Library Association Council with technical and other colleges which followed their failure to secure facilities within the universities on the terms of the L.A. remaining the sole certificating body. The late Dr. Herbert Schofield accepted their terms and added a library school to already varied fields of training within his college.