Refugee resettlement and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) created pathways for people who are refugees with disabilities to resettle and build new lives. Resettlement country Australia, in response to its CRPD obligations, created greater access to the waiver of visa health requirements for humanitarian entrants. This article chronicles key documents demonstrating that the CRPD has been an effective instrument for improving access to resettlement for people with disabilities. The article also describes new challenges to Australia’s compliance with the CRPD as it fails to address multiple discrimination of people from refugee backgrounds with disabilities, an area of concern to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for which it has issued guidance. This article proposes creating a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Resettlement Submission Category for disability to improve resettlement programmes’ compliance with the CRPD.     

The Social Structuring of Mental Health over the Adult Life Course: Advancing Theory in the Sociology of Aging

The sociology of aging draws on a broad array of theoretical perspectives from several disciplines, but rarely has it developed its own. We build on past work to advance and empirically test a model of mental health framed in terms of structural theorizing and situated within the life course perspective. Whereas most prior research has been based on cross-sectional data, we utilize four waves of data from a nationally representative sample of American adults (Americans' Changing Lives Study) collected prospectively over a 15-year period and find that education, employment and marital status, as well as their consequences for income and health, effectively explain the increase in depressive symptoms after age 65. We also found significant cohort differences in age trajectories of mental health that were partly explained by historical increases in education. We demonstrate that a purely structural theory can take us far in explaining later life mental health.     

Forecasting the Incidence of Cancer in Regional Victoria,Australia

Loddon Mallee Integrated Cancer Service plays a key role in planning the delivery of cancer services in the Loddon Mallee Region of Victoria, Australia. Forecasting the incidence of cancer is an important part of planning for these services. This article is written from an industry perspective. We describe the context of our work, review the literature on forecasting the incidence of cancer, discuss contemporary approaches, describe our experience with forecasting models, and list issues associated with applying these models. An extensive bibliography illustrates the world-wide interest in this forecasting problem. We hope that it is useful to researchers.     

基于价值链的中国企业社会责任对财务价值的影响

为了支持企业持续地将履行社会责任作为一种长期的战略,探讨企业社会责任与业务相结合对财务绩效的影响以及如何选择既造福社会又有利于商业的社会责任项目.基于价值链视角,采用利益相关者理论和归因理论,用实证方法,选择中国公司社会责任披露的数据,采用因子分析法划分企业社会责任活动,采用面板数据回归分析每种社会责任活动及其交互作用对企业财务绩效的影响.研究结果表明,把社会责任活动分为与价值链基本活动相关的社会责任、与价值链支持活动相关的社会责任和一般性社会责任(与价值链活动无关),与价值链基本活动相关的社会责任和与价值链支持活动相关的社会责任对财务绩效有积极影响,与价值链活动无关的一般性社会责任对财务绩效有消极影响,他们的交互作用对财务绩效也有方向不同的显著影响,即基本活动与支持活动的交互作用对财务绩效有积极影响,基本活动与一般性活动的交互作用对财务绩效有积极影响,而支持活动与一般性活动的交互作用对财务绩效有消极影响.研究结果对企业将履行社会责任与价值创造相结合、实现社会效益和经济效益双赢提供具体的参考.     

Short- and long-term stability in organizational networks: Temporal structures of project teams

Network research focuses on patterns of stable relationships, where stability represents the unfolding of social processes over long time frames. We argue that social interactions exhibit important regularities in different time frames (short and long term), reflecting distinct social processes. We illustrate the value of this distinction through a comparative case study of technology-mediated communication, within two project teams in a digital marketing agency. We examine how the embedding of interpersonal interactions in processes of reciprocity and closure over different time horizons enables the emergence of cohesion in the face of constant compositional changes. We propose that the time frames in which stable patterns of interactions develop are the key to understanding the nature of the underlying social processes with short-term patterns of closure and reciprocity representing adaptation to change while longer term patterns indicate cohesion. Our results are supportive of this argument and show that the two teams exhibit the same regularities in interactions but across different time horizons. We discuss the implication of our findings and argue that distinguishing between short- and long-term stability of social networks offers a novel and promising avenue for network research.