Quality strategies in supply chain alliances of disposable items

This paper studies a single-product distribution channel where a supplier manufactures items of a given type, some of which are defective, that are sold by a retailer who only detects a subset of the defective items, passing the rest along to customers. We conjecture the structure of the demand and cost functions, assuming customers to have a decreasing marginal aversion to bad quality while both the supplier and the retailer make marginally increasing efforts to avoid bad quality. This allows us to deduce several implicit parameters of a cost model based on observable data, such as the share of the channel margin. Once the parameters of the model are available, we analyze the result of vertical integration. Although we confirm the well-known fact that vertical integration improves the quality perceived by the customer, we characterize the supplier's decision of whether or not to provide a better quality in terms of the individual channel margins. As an alternative, we derive the conditions under which the supplier and the retailer may devise a mutually beneficial transfer contract that simultaneously increases their profit and improves quality.     

Male Adolescents: Sexual Victimization and Subsequent Sexual Abuse

Veneziano, Veneziano and LeGrand (2000) found support for the victim to victimizer hypothesis of sexual aggression with 74 sexually abusive youth. This project, a further step in examining this theory (Burton, 2000, Burton, Miller, & Shill, 2002) builds on their ideas with data from 179 adolescent sexual abusers, and supports their findings. In an examination of relationships, gender, modus operandi, and acts, the sexually abused youth were likely to repeat what was done to them. This project also offers a further analysis of how victimization accounts for a significant portion of the variance in perpetration by these youth. Implications for research and practice are offered.     

An alternative to farmer age as an indicator of life-cycle stage: The case for a farm family age index

In studies of farming, the age of the principal decision-maker (PDM) has been associated with numerous farm structural and managerial features and has been widely accepted as a good indicator of the influence of life-cycle factors on decision-making. As such, it has become an important aspect of many quantitative studies of agricultural change. However, contemporary studies of family farming demonstrate that the concept of a single PDM in family farms is becoming an anachronism as alternative enterprises, pluriactivity and the scale of family farms force more diffuse management/operating systems. This raises questions concerning whether the age of the PDM can still be taken as representative of farm structure, strategy or life-cycle stage? Using a study conducted in the Grampian Mountains region of Scotland in 2003 this note investigates the impact of using an alternative index—compiled by averaging the age of family members working on the farm. It suggests that PDM age is a relatively poor indicator of farm structural and managerial features compared to a family age index and calls for researchers to think about alternative approaches to measuring ‘age’ as an indicator.     

Common sense leadership

Common sense has to do with problem solving. In the complexities of everyday human life, we are faced time and again with the need to solve problems. In fact, every situation we face, at least at the first exposure, requires some form of problem solving. When we want food, we have to solve a series of problems from acquisition to preparation to serving and eating. When we deal with organizational needs, problem solving is the daily fare.     

Diversity in Midwifery Care: Working toward Social Justice

La pratique de la sage‐femme opérant dans la communauté a apporté avec elle, lorsque devenu une profession régie et financée par l’état vers la fin du vingtième siècle, les objectifs et aspirations de son mouvement social. Parmi ces objectifs, elles désiraient à faire attention à l’équité et la diversité sociale lors de la provision de soins pendant la naissance. Dans cet article, nous utilisons des interviews avec des sage‐femmes qui pratiquent en ce moment en Ontario, afin de nous concentrer sur les conceptualisations de la diversité des sage‐femmes. Nous explorons leurs efforts, dans le travail quotidien, visant à supporter et fortifier la diversité sociale des clientes et des sage‐femmes elles‐mêmes. Nous proposons que la transition de la pratique de la sage‐femme vers le système de soins santé gouvernemental ne signale pas l'abandon des projets et engagements de changement social. Les réponses à la diversité sociale en soins de santé varie des efforts à améliorer l'accès aux soins de santé jusqu'à l’étude du rôle de la justice sociale en reconnaissant les besoins des populations diverses. L'aspiration de ‘créer un monde meilleur’ continue à animer le travail des sage‐femmes nonobstant la réglementation de leur pratique. Cet article explore le patrimoine de pratique des sage‐femmes en tant que mouvement social et décrit les rapports entre la diversité, la justice sociale et la pratique actuelle des sage‐femmes. As midwifery moved from lay practice to a regulated health‐care profession in Ontario toward the end of the twentieth century, it brought with it many of its social movement goals and aspirations. Among these was the desire to attend to diversity and equity in the provision of birthing care. Drawing on interviews with currently practicing Ontario midwives, this paper focuses on midwives’ conceptualizations of diversity and explores their everyday work to support and strengthen diversity among those using and those providing midwifery care. We argue that midwifery's recent relocation within state structured health care means neither that the social change projects of midwifery are complete nor that midwifery has abandoned its movement‐based commitment to social change. Responses to social diversity in health care range from efforts to simply improve access to care to analyses of the role of social justice in recognizing the needs of diverse populations. The social justice aspiration to “create a better world” continues to animate the work of midwives postregulation. This paper explores the legacy of midwifery as a social movement, addressing the connections between diversity, social justice and midwifery care.     

Building ‘cowshed cultures’: A cultural perspective on the promotion of stockmanship and animal welfare on dairy farms

Improving animal welfare is an important part of the development of the agricultural industry, particularly at a time when intensification and the encroachment of factory-style production systems is making the maintenance of human-animal relations increasingly difficult. Animal science deals with the issue of improving stockmanship by focusing on the relationships between attitudes and behaviour, under the premise that improved attitudes will lead to improved behaviour. From an analysis of 42 interviews with owners, sharemilkers and workers on dairy farms in New Zealand we present a different view, seeing behaviour instead as part of a self-reinforcing culture in which animals, humans and the physical structure all contribute to the development of farm specific ways of doing and being. We further suggest that changing one stockperson's attitude alone is insufficient to ensure a change in the culture as other actors – including animals and non-human actors – reinforce any existing culture that has developed, making both attitudinal and behavioural change difficult. We conclude by discussing the key importance of designing farm systems and structures that promote positive interactions between animals and humans and suggest that this, rather than simply promoting knowledge and attitudinal change, is likely to be the most effective way of maintaining stockmanship in the face of an industrialising agriculture.