This introduction will provide a thematic overview of the major issues raised by Grosse and Voght (1991), "The Evolution of Languages for Specific Purposes in the United States," and the contributions in this Focus Issue that address those issues from a 2011 perspective. It will also explore contemporary (largely praxis-oriented) languages for…

This paper examines the propensity of highly educated women to exit the labor force at motherhood. We focus on systematic differences across women with various graduate degrees to analyze whether these speak to differences in the capacity to combine children with work over a variety of high-education career paths. Working with a sample of Harvard…

This study examined factors related to workplace gender diversity in a sample of 87 college-educated White women. Specifically, we investigated the moderating effects of one individual difference variable (sensitivity to sexism) and one contextual variable (perceptions of the workplace climate) in the relationship between the gender composition at…

Career literature has been discussing the decline of the traditional career. Despite this debate, systematic information on the prevalence of contemporary career types is lacking. Two studies with large samples of employees aimed to determine types of career orientation, to explore their prevalence, and to validate these types by testing…

Advocates of unions frequently argue that unionization results in benefits for libraries in general and for librarians. Previous data to support this position have been scattered, incomplete, and inconclusive. This study analyzes data on 1,904 academic libraries, 334 unionized, to explore whether there is a relationship between a librarian-union…

This paper presents empirical research analyzing the relationship between work-family climate (operationalized in terms of three work-family climate sub-scales), organizational leadership (i.e., senior manager) characteristics, organizational commitment and turnover intent among 526 employees from 37 different hotels across the US. Using…

Recent studies of the guidance system as it operates in public schools today indicate that counselors are often overworked and underprepared when it comes to helping students make the best decisions about their lives after high school. This survey of young adults aged 22 through 30 conducted by Public agenda for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…

The effectiveness of an intervention depends on its dose and on moderators of dose, which usually are not studied. The purpose of the study is to determine whether goal setting and theory-based moderators of goal setting had dose relations with increases in goal-related physical activity during a successful workplace intervention. A…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of dual vocational education and training (VET) attritions as indicating difficulties in the transition from school to work. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology consists of a content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 46 young people who interrupted their dual VET during…

The transfer of training to the workplace often fails to occur. The authors argue that feedback generated within the work environment about the application of newly learned skills in the workplace helps to close the gap between the current performance and the desired goal of full application of what is learned during training. This study takes a…

This grounded theory study of 18 American and Australian counselors explores the impact of working with adolescents with sexual behavior problems. Findings are reported reflecting the counselors' own histories of abuse, their feelings regarding sexual information, their sexual and emotional responses to clients, and the importance of self-care and…

The Australian coaching workplace (to be referred to as the State Institute of Sport; SIS) under consideration in this study employs significant numbers of full-time performance sport coaches and can be accurately characterized as a genuine workplace. Through a consideration of the interaction between what the workplace (SIS) affords the…

The purpose of this study was (a) to explore the latent factors in the "Reasonable Accommodation Factor Survey" (RAFS) instrument and (b) to compare scores on the latent factors of the RAFS by participant's role. Eight latent factors were identified through an exploratory factor analysis with orthogonal rotation. The reliability tests…

This article reports on the challenges facing public school leadership in southern Thailand, a region destabilized by renewal of a longstanding insurgency. Seeking to implement national educational reforms on shifting social, political and cultural terrain, educators in this region face extraordinary challenges as they reconsider and renegotiate…

The Internet has become part of our daily life and serves as a source of knowledge as well as a space for interaction. E-learning is thus a vital element in teaching, and digital media offer not only the possibility to support the individual learning processes of students, but also to foster multilingualism and to immerse into authentic learning…