Guidelines 5 Reagents and test systems2.3.1. Reagents used for ABO and D grouping must be CE marked, and be stored and used in accordance with the manufacturers' instructions.

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Summary In a prospective, randomised, controlled trial, we compared the effects of two anaesthetic techniques on surgical conditions during day‐case, gynaecological laparoscopic procedures in 40 female patients. Patients were allocated randomly to two groups, either to breathe spontaneously through a laryngeal mask airway or to receive a neuromuscular‐blocking agent (NMB) and have the lungs ventilated via a tracheal tube. We then measured the number of attempts of Verres' needle insertion, initial intra‐abdominal pressure, time to reach a steady 15 mmHg (1.97 kPa) of intra‐abdominal pressure, adequacy of the pneumoperitoneum, operative view and duration of operation. We found that the initial intra‐abdominal pressure was higher and the operation time shorter in the laryngeal mask group. The adequacy of the pneumoperitoneum for trocar placement was better in the NMB group. We conclude that the anaesthetic technique of spontaneously breathing through a laryngeal mask airway reduces total operation time. However surgeons should be aware of the different abdominal pressure patterns produced by each anaesthetic technique, and anaesthetists must consider the implications of the anaesthetic technique on surgical safety.

Occupations provide a central unit of analysis for economic inequality in stratification research for two main reasons. First, occupations are supposed to structure inequality. Second, occupations are supposed to proxy as a source of inequality. Although there was a 'massive rise' in British wage inequality, relatively little is known about the relationship between the occupations and growing British wage inequality, and the sparse empirical research is inconclusive. Since sociologists traditionally have tended to place a great deal of emphasis on occupations, we might expect the changing structure of occupations and changing occupational wages to play a key role in accounting for trends in overall British wage inequality. More recent strands of stratification theory, however, have challenged the idea that occupations structure economic inequalities, and argue that the link between occupations and wages might have been weakening over time, instead predicting that growing wage inequality mostly occurs within occupations. We decompose trends in British wage inequality into between-occupation and within-occupation components and show that, although most wage inequality is within occupations, it is inequality between occupations that accounts for the lion's share of changes in wage inequality trends. Furthermore, trends in between-occupation inequality cannot be 'explained away' by fundamental labour market changes such as rising educational attainment and the decline in collective bargaining. We also demonstrate what the rise in between-occupation inequality implies for the British 'big class' structure using the NS-SEC social class schema. We show that growing between-occupation inequality can be more or less described as growing between-class inequality. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We present the first attempt to locate zero‐hour contract (ZHC) jobs—jobs that lack a guaranteed minimum number of hours—within theoretical frameworks of the employment relationship and occupational class and empirically explore their characteristics using successive UK Labour Force Survey. In line with these theories, we find this contentious form of employment to be strongly differentiated by the nature of occupational tasks and to overlap with nonstandard employment features (e.g. part‐time and temporary). They are also highly concentrated in a small number of occupations and sectors, with over half of ZHC jobs found in just 10 occupations. We further show that ZHCs are associated with indicators of inferior job quality such as low pay and underemployment. Although we find no evidence that ZHCs are a particularly pervasive feature of the UK labour market, further growth cannot be ruled out in certain occupations.

This article explores the relationship between the job characteristics underlying the Goldthorpe model of social class (work monitoring difficulty and human asset specificity) and those underlying theories of technological change (routine and analytical tasks) highlighted as key drivers for growing inequality. Analysis of the 2012 British Skills and Employment Survey demonstrate monitoring difficulty and asset specificity predict National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) membership and employment relations in ways expected by the Goldthorpe model, but the role of asset specificity is partially confounded by analytical tasks. It concludes that while the Goldthorpe model continues to provide a useful descriptive tool of inequality-producing processes and employment relations in the labour market, examining underlying job characteristics directly is a promising avenue for future research in explaining dynamics in the evolution of occupational inequalities over time.

Previous research shows that job satisfaction often increases sharply upon initial entry into the new job and gradually falls back to the baseline level over time. In this study, we propose that this 'honeymoon-hangover' pattern is affected by both the direction of occupational mobility and the individual's personality in terms of extraversion and neuroticism. Drawing on the British Household Panel Survey that followed 10,000 individuals annually for 18 years, this study shows that only those who move up the occupational class ladder experience significant 'honeymoon' effects, while those who move downwards experience dissatisfaction that lasts for several years after the transition. While the positive effect of upward mobility is not amplified by extraversion, the negative effect of downward mobility is exacerbated by neuroticism. This study highlights the importance of taking into account both situational and dispositional factors for understanding the long-term impact of career change on subjective well-being.

We present the first nationally representative evidence on the relationship between religion and subjective well-being for the case of China. Research on Western societies tends to find a positive association between being religious and level of well-being. China provides an interesting critical case as the religious population is growing rapidly and the religious and socioeconomic environments are profoundly different from Western societies, implying different mechanisms might be at work. We hypothesize to find a positive association between religion and well-being in China too, but argue social capital, for which strong evidence is often found in Western societies, is unlikely to be an important mechanism because religion in China is generally non-congregational. Instead, we argue that the private and subjective dimension of religion matters for well-being in China by helping adherents have an improved sense of social status relative to the non-religious in the context of rapid social change and growing inequality. Our results generally support these predictions.