Employment civil rights laws require employers to make reasonable accommodations for certain workers so that they can perform their jobs. The “reasonableness” of an accommodation request should be based largely on the cost of the accommodation relative to the company's resources, but how do people really evaluate such requests? This study examines determinations of the reasonableness of workplace accommodation requests made by trial judges and ordinary people. Using a 2 × 3 × 3 between‐subjects factorial design, we test the effect of worker identity (nursing‐mother worker, transgender worker, and Muslim worker) and cost on determinations of reasonableness. We find that (1) the identity category of the requesting worker impacts determinations of reasonableness by both judges and laypeople, (2) the cost of the accommodation impacts determinations of reasonableness, (3) judges are more likely to think that accommodation requests are reasonable than are laypeople, (4) there is a complicated relationship between accommodation cost and employee identity, and (5) the cost of the requested accommodation mitigates the effect of identity significantly for judges but less so for ordinary citizens. While judges are less influenced by the identity category of the employee‐requestor than are their lay‐counterparts, social status plays a role in determining what constitutes “reasonable accommodation.”
Crime research often fails to recognize the context of small-town crime as meaningfully different from urban and rural crime contexts. Furthermore, non-urban spaces serve as the symbolic counterpoint to problematized urban areas. Even now, research fails to provide the detail and nuance needed to explain how complex local perceptions of small-town crime disprove the monolithic assumption of idyllic small towns. This study interrogates the disconnections between the realities of assault in a small town and the rhetorical constructions of perceived offenders. We analyze available police report data from the town of Sandusky, Ohio, comparing it with local social media commentary to identify and explain gaps between the reported incidence of assault and related perception and rhetoric among area residents. We find that area residents construct their town as violent, crime-ridden, and beyond hope. Discourses surrounding reports of violence reinforce cynicism, assign blame, and rely on race, youth, and poverty tropes. This study constitutes a divergence from previous crime literature that considers small towns as generally less prone to violent crime than big cities and treats public perception of small towns as positive overall. We contribute important axes for comparison between institutional and locally constructed rhetorical spaces and address localized anomic perspectives on small-town crime.
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