Development and Consideration of Global Policies for Managing the Future Risks of Poliovirus Outbreaks: Insights and Lessons Learned Through Modeling

The success of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative promises to bring large benefits, including sustained improvements in quality of life (i.e., cases of paralytic disease and deaths avoided) and costs saved from cessation of vaccination. Obtaining and maintaining these benefits requires that policymakers manage the transition from the current massive use of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) to a world without OPV and free of the risks of potential future reintroductions of live polioviruses. This article describes the analytical journey that began in 2001 with a retrospective case study on polio risk management and led to development of dynamic integrated risk, economic, and decision analysis tools to inform global policies for managing the risks of polio. This analytical journey has provided several key insights and lessons learned that will be useful to future analysts involved in similar complex decision-making processes.     

The Role of the Communal Voice in Constructing Meaning at the Funeral of an Infant Child in a Quaker Community in Costa Rica

This article attempts to capture the ongoing process of the construction of a “communal voice” out of the idiosyncratic “individual voices” of diverse people in a remote Quaker Community in the rainforest mountains of Costa Rica. The communal story is investigated through the rituals surrounding the death of an infant child. The constant dialogue is examined as the Cliffedgians struggle with issues of community/individualism, tolerance/conviction, and simplicity/benefit. Attention is also given to the communal construction of taboo areas of discourse.     

The Development of Vocational Realism in Black American College Students

A total of 172 Black students completed a survey of biographical, educational, and vocational information about themselves and their immediate relatives. The results indicated that educational realism tended to increase across the college years. There was no difference in satisfaction with school or intent to leave school as a function of educational realism or salary realism. Vocationally realistic male and female students did not differ in age.     

“FOI POR ACASO”*:

Everyone knows that most of the things that happen to them happen “by accident,” and this is particularly true of the things that are most important to us, like our choice of a career or a mate. Yet social science theory looks for determinate causal relationships, which do not give an adequate account of this thing that “everyone knows.” If we take the idea of “it happened by chance” seriously, we need a quite different kind of research and theory than we are accustomed to.     

Colourism and African–american wealth: evidence from the nineteenth-century south

Black is not always black. Subtle distinctions in skin tone translate into significant differences in outcomes. Data on more than 15,000 households interviewed during the 1860 US federal census exhibit sharp differences in wealth holdings between white, mulatto, and black households in the urban South. We document these differences, investigate relationships between wealth and recorded household characteristics, and decompose the wealth gaps to examine the returns to racial characteristics. The analysis reveals a distinct racial hierarchy. Black wealth was only 20% of white wealth, but mulattoes held nearly 50% of whites’ wealth. This advantage is consistent with colourism, the favouritism shown to those of lighter complexion.

Generic Strategies and Business Performance: an Empirical Study of the Screw Machine Products Industry

Select businesses in industry may attempt to compete through distinct strategies. But some may be successful in adopting distinct strategic profiles while others may not prove successful. In this study it was expected that six different groups of businesses might be present in the empirical exploration – those competing successfully with the low cost strategy and those competing unsuccessfully with this strategy; those competing successfully with the differentiation strategy and those competing unsuccessfully with this strategy; and those competing successfully with low cost and differentiation strategies and those competing unsuccessfully with these strategies. The results of the investigation portray the presence of three strategic profiles. They are unsuccessful low cost businesses with the lowest performance, unsuccessful differentiated businesses with the second lowest performance, and successful businesses with combination strategies with the highest performance.     

Managing the introduction of new technology

Most of the existing literature on the implications of new technology focuses on either its ‘impact’ or the social choices that lie behind strategies for its introduction into work organisations. The problems of managing the implementation of new technology have yet to be extensively examined despite this being one of the most critical aspects in the process of technological change. The findings from two case studies are presented which show how managers in the organisations concerned developed contrasting approaches to the problem of implementation in the context of opportunities and constraints presented by product markets and technological advance. Similarities between the two approaches are identified, in particular the role played by top management support in facilitating the acceptance of the new technology. The argument that management is able to develop a single unitary strategy towards the introduction of new technology is rejected in favour of a view of managerial actions as a series of flexible and changing sub-strategies associated with different stages in the process of change.     

Stigma Management Among Gay/Bisexual Men with HIV/AIDS

People with HIV infection are subjected to prejudice, discrimination and hostility related to the stigmatization of AIDS. To manage the stigma of their disease, they mount complex coping strategies. This paper reports results from a qualitative study that examined gay/bisexual men's experiences of living with HIV infection. Unstructured interviews from a diverse sample of 139 men were analyzed to examine how men coped with AIDS-related stigma. We discerned a variety of stigma management strategies that could be arranged along a continuum from reactive to proactive based on the extent to which they implicitly accepted or challenged the social norms and values that underlie the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS. Reactive strategies to cope with stigma involve defensive attempts to avoid or mitigate the impact of stigma, but imply acceptance of the underlying social norms and values that construct the stigma. Examples of reactive strategies include hiding one's HIV status, presenting one's illness as a less stigmatizing one (e.g., cancer), or distancing one's self from more damaging aspects of AIDS-stigma (e.g., attributing infection to blood transfusion). Proactive strategies challenge the validity of the stigma and imply disavowal and resistance of the social norms and values that underlie the stigma. Examples of proactive strategies include engaging in public educational efforts that address misperceptions about HIV transmission and social activism to change the social and political conditions that affect PWA/HIV.     

TREATMENT OF CHILDREN'S FEARS: A STRATEGIC UTILIZATION APPROACH

The Sufi teaching story of the Watermelon Hunter perhaps teaches us much of what we need to know about Milton Erickson's strategic utilization approach to therapy:
Once upon a time there was a man who strayed from his own country into the Land of Fools. He saw a number of people running in fear from a field where they had been trying to harvest wheat. They reported to this man that there was a monster in the field. Upon closer observation, the traveler saw that it was only a watermelon. The traveler offered to kill this monster for them, and he cut the watermelon from the stalk and ate it. The people then became more afraid of him than of the monster and drove him away from their village.
It happened later that another man wandered into the Land of Fools, and the same thing began to take place. This man agreed, however, that it was a monster and led them tiptoeing away from it. He spent a long time with them and lived with them in their houses until he could slowly teach them the facts that would help them to loose their terror of melons. Eventually, they even grew melons for their own pleasure. (Shah, 1970)