Perceived morbidity, utilisation of health services and factors affecting it in a rural area

A survey of perceived morbidity was carried out in rural population in eight villages and four wards of Saoner town, covering a total population of 8,876. The nature of illness was assessed by weekly visits to the families. History regarding treatment taken for disease and its source was taken. The overall incidence of perceived morbidity was 176.35 spells of sickness per 1000 population per month. Health care agency was contacted for 36.7 per cent spells of sickness. Utilisation of health services was found to be affected significantly by factors like age (chi 2 = 138.36), literacy (chi 2 = 14.123), type of occupation (chi 2 = 433.74), nature of illness (chi 2 = 83.578) and accessibility of health services. A health behaviour model of the population has also been discussed in this paper.     

Complexity and Adaptivity in Supply Networks: Building Supply Network Theory Using a Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective*

Supply networks are composed of large numbers of firms from multiple interrelated industries. Such networks are subject to shifting strategies and objectives within a dynamic environment. In recent years, when faced with a dynamic environment, several disciplines have adopted the Complex Adaptive System (CAS) perspective to gain insights into important issues within their domains of study. Research investigations in the field of supply networks have also begun examining the merits of complexity theory and the CAS perspective. In this article, we bring the applicability of complexity theory and CAS into sharper focus, highlighting its potential for integrating existing supply chain management (SCM) research into a structured body of knowledge while also providing a framework for generating, validating, and refining new theories relevant to real‐world supply networks. We suggest several potential research questions to emphasize how a CAS perspective can help in enriching the SCM discipline. We propose that the SCM research community adopt such a dynamic and systems‐level orientation that brings to the fore the adaptivity of firms and the complexity of their interrelations that are often inherent in supply networks.     

Sufficient m-out-of-n (m/n) bootstrap

Traditional resampling methods for estimating sampling distributions sometimes fail, and alternative approaches are then needed. For example, if the classical central limit theorem does not hold and the naïve bootstrap fails, the m/n bootstrap, based on smaller-sized resamples, may be used as an alternative. An alternative to the naïve bootstrap, the sufficient bootstrap, which uses only the distinct observations in a bootstrap sample, is another recently proposed bootstrap approach that has been suggested to reduce the computational burden associated with bootstrapping. It works as long as naïve bootstrap does. However, if the naïve bootstrap fails, so will the sufficient bootstrap. In this paper, we propose combining the sufficient bootstrap with the m/n bootstrap in order to both regain consistent estimation of sampling distributions and to reduce the computational burden of the bootstrap. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for asymptotic normality of the proposed method, and propose new values for the resample size m. We compare the proposed method with the naïve bootstrap, the sufficient bootstrap, and the m/n bootstrap by simulation.     

The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools

Parents gauge school quality in part by the level of student achievement and a school's racial and socioeconomic mix. The importance of school characteristics in the housing market can be seen in the jump in house prices at school district boundaries where peer characteristics change. The question of whether schools with more attractive peers are really better in a value‐added sense remains open, however. This paper uses a fuzzy regression‐discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effects of peer characteristics. Our design exploits admissions cutoffs at Boston and New York City's heavily over‐subscribed exam schools. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the least selective of these schools move from schools with scores near the bottom of the state SAT score distribution to schools with scores near the median. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the most selective of these schools move from above‐average schools to schools with students whose scores fall in the extreme upper tail. Exam school students can also expect to study with fewer nonwhite classmates than unsuccessful applicants. Our estimates suggest that the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.     

Sensing Abnormal Resource Flow Using Adaptive Limit Process Charts in a Complex Supply Network*

Supply networks are becoming increasingly complex with multiple overlapping relationships between firms that may span across industries. Consequently, inventory management is becoming more difficult as managers have to cope with variability in the supply flows that originate from different parts of the network. Managers that quickly sense abnormal flows may intervene and adapt their inventory policies in response to system changes. In this article, we present a framework for sensing abnormal flows originating within the upstream supply network of a focal organization. Our framework combines time series modeling with process charts to identify abnormal flow patterns in the incoming supply streams. It is a flexible framework that uses off‐the‐shelf technology to provide managers with a process that can be employed for monitoring multiple individual or aggregated data streams originating within any complex system such as complex adaptive supply networks. We illustrate our framework on four years of longitudinal supply data from the second largest food bank in the United States. We identify multiple instances of abnormal supply flows and validate our results through rigorous inventory analysis as well as field‐based expert interviews. We discuss the implications of our findings for inventory management in complex supply networks, both from academic and practitioner points of view.     

Estimating Social Influences from Social Networking Sites—Articulated Friendships versus Communication Interactions

Despite the ubiquity of social networking sites, the online social networking industry is in search of effective marketing strategies to better profit from their established user base. Social media marketing strategies build on the premise that the social network of online users can be predicted and social influences among online users can be estimated. However, the existence of various heterogeneous social interactions on social networking sites presents a challenge for social network prediction and social influence estimation. In this article we draw upon the literatures on self‐presentation on social networking sites and signaling in online social networking to categorize six heterogeneous online social interactions on social networking sites into two types—articulated friendships and communication interactions. This article provides empirical evidence for the differences between articulated friendships and communication interactions and the corresponding articulated and communication networks. In order to compare the impacts of the social influences based on these two networks, we utilize support vector machines to build a classifier to predict virtual community membership and we further estimate the marginal effects of these social influences using a two‐stage probit least squares method. We find significant explanatory power of social influences in predicting virtual community membership. Although the communication network is much sparser than the articulated network, social influences based on the communication network achieve similar performance as the articulated network. These findings provide important implications for social media marketing as well as the management of virtual communities.     

‘Presentable’: the body and neoliberal subjecthood in contemporary India

The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as new spaces of consumption have necessitated new bodily dispositions and practices. In this paper, I focus on how access to new commodities and discourses has affected understandings of the modern Indian body. In particular, I concentrate on appearance and the notion of exercising consumer agency to be ‘presentable’ as a lens through which to examine broader aspects of the body in the creation of neoliberal subjects in India.     

Ethopolitics and the financial citizen

While personal debt has been the subject of intense research activity over the past decade, in particular from think tanks and government bodies, it remains relatively undertheorized and neglected in general by the social sciences. This article offers a novel theoretical frame for the analysis of personal debt – and personal overindebtedness in particular – by highlighting the construction of deviance from financial behavioural normativities. Using Nikolas Rose's concept of ‘ethopolitics’ to describe the relocation of government from questions of rational administration to those of everyday morality and ethics, this article presents two characterizations of deviance from an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship: irresponsibility and incapability. From this framework, the article explores the nature of the state sponsored normalization of indebtedness and the stigmatization of overindebtedness as a corollary of ‘delinquent’ dispositions and dependencies. This article suggests that UK government policy concerning financial responsibility has been shaped by an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship which is based upon a skewed understanding of structure and agency which has its parallel in the attribution of unemployment to ‘worklessness’.     

Infant and child mortality in India: trends in inequalities across economic groups

This paper examines the trends in economic inequalities with respect to infant and child mortality in India using three rounds of the Indian National Family Health Survey conducted in 1992–1993, 1998–1999, and 2005–2006. The paper uses concentration index, and pooled discrete-time survival regression model to examine the aforementioned trends and regional patterns. The findings suggest a decreasing trend in economic inequality in infant mortality but an upward trend in economic inequality in child mortality in India. Economic inequalities in infant mortality have narrowed in the southern region, whereas they have widened in the western region and risen in the northern region. However, mixed trends in concentration indices were found in the different regions of India in the case of child mortality.