Comments on globalization, interdisciplinary research, myopia and parochialism, government, convergence, and culture

Globalization presents social scientists with a wide variety of issues and challenges that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Disciplinary boundaries encourage specialization and advances in understanding aspects of social behavior, but specialization also creates barriers to more comprehensive understanding of social behavior such as globalization. Successful interdisciplinary efforts entail gains from trade across disciplinary specializations. The papers in this volume help outline an agenda for interdisciplinary investigation of globalization to knock down disciplinary boundaries and encourage gains from trade that further our understanding of globalization. But much work remains before we see real fruits from such efforts.     

Technology,Geography, and Trade

We develop a Ricardian trade model that incorporates realistic geographic features into general equilibrium. It delivers simple structural equations for bilateral trade with parameters relating to absolute advantage, to comparative advantage (promoting trade), and to geographic barriers (resisting it). We estimate the parameters with data on bilateral trade in manufactures, prices, and geography from 19 OECD countries in 1990. We use the model to explore various issues such as the gains from trade, the role of trade in spreading the benefits of new technology, and the effects of tariff reduction.     

Effectiveness, accountability, and efficiency

Management of health care is compromised by its singular reliance on billing information--i.e., a claims trail tells little of what providers think. It relates to neither prevention of disease nor reduction of unnecessary health care costs. Billing information is not the substrate to be used in the pursuit of appropriateness, effectiveness, and value. To improve medical management of health care, a protected, but accessible clinical database is needed.     

Work, pregnancy, and distress

Increasing numbers of pregnant women are working throughout much, if not all, of their pregnancies. In this secondary analysis of existing longitudinal data on family health, pregnant women were grouped according to employment status: 126 homemakers, 70 employed part-time, and 135 employed full-time. There were no significant differences between the groups in measures of distress, including depression, trait and state anxiety, and perception of negative life events. Homemakers were significantly younger, less educated, and had lower family incomes than either group of employed women. There was also a non-significant trend towards higher distress scores among homemakers. Overall, among these women, it was the similarities which were more striking than the differences, which supports recent research findings about distress among pregnant women.     

Computers,People, and Productivity

No abstract available for this article.     

Leaders, followers, and time

In order to consider leadership from a temporal perspective, we examine extant leadership research that refers to temporal variables in its theorizing and/or empirical testing. We consider rhythmic patterns manifested in leader and follower behavior and employ entrainment, polychronicity, pace/speed, punctuality, and temporal depth as categorization concepts for the analysis. Further, we propose general theoretical statements about temporal dimensions and their prospective roles in relationships and processes related to leadership.     

Adaptive Governance,Uncertainty, and Risk: Policy Framing and Responses to Climate Change,Drought, and Flood

As climate change impacts result in more extreme events (such as droughts and floods), the need to understand which policies facilitate effective climate change adaptation becomes crucial. Hence, this article answers the question: How do governments and policymakers frame policy in relation to climate change, droughts, and floods and what governance structures facilitate adaptation? This research interrogates and analyzes through content analysis, supplemented by semi‐structured qualitative interviews, the policy response to climate change, drought, and flood in relation to agricultural producers in four case studies in river basins in Chile, Argentina, and Canada. First, an epistemological explanation of risk and uncertainty underscores a brief literature review of adaptive governance, followed by policy framing in relation to risk and uncertainty, and an analytical model is developed. Pertinent findings of the four cases are recounted, followed by a comparative analysis. In conclusion, recommendations are made to improve policies and expand adaptive governance to better account for uncertainty and risk. This article is innovative in that it proposes an expanded model of adaptive governance in relation to “risk” that can help bridge the barrier of uncertainty in science and policy.     

GMM,GEL, Serial Correlation,and Asymptotic Bias

For stationary time series models with serial correlation, we consider generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators that use heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) positive definite weight matrices and generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) estimators based on smoothed moment conditions. Following the analysis of Newey and Smith (2004) for independent observations, we derive second order asymptotic biases of these estimators. The inspection of bias expressions reveals that the use of smoothed GEL, in contrast to GMM, removes the bias component associated with the correlation between the moment function and its derivative, while the bias component associated with third moments depends on the employed kernel function. We also analyze the case of no serial correlation, and find that the seemingly unnecessary smoothing and HAC estimation can reduce the bias for some of the estimators.     

Bacon, Boole, the EPA, and Scientific Standards

The scientific standards of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) include the use of retrospective meta-analysis. This analysis entails a use of the theory of probability that is only a simulation and cannot accurately measure the confidence that should be placed in the results. The uncertainty necessary for probability is, in a retrospective study, simulated rather than real. There are three logical forms for establishing a proposition. In the logic of the syllogism, a proposition is established by deduction from assumed propositions. In the logic of the physical sciences, a proposition is established by its ability to predict the outcomes of future experiments. In the logic of the courtroom, a proposition is established by its ability to explain past events. The logic of the courtroom operates under the handicap of working with nonrepeatable events. It is more subject to the preferences of the judge than the logic of the physical sciences or that of the syllogism. Because the logic of the courtroom is less reliable than either the logic of the physical sciences or that of the syllogism, it is the logic of last resort, i.e., it is used only when the other two are not applicable. Under the EPA scientific standards, the logic of the courtroom is accepted for establishing propositions about the physical world. As the logic of the courtroom is less reliable than that of the physical sciences, this practice increases the likelihood of errors.     

Culture, Cosmopolitanism, and Risk Management

Most cultural approaches to risk management deal with the connections between the forms of social relations within groups and the risk concerns of those groups. According to these theories, a certain limited set of different relational forms (usually three, four, or five) lead to specific, different and conflicting, risk concerns. In contrast to these theories, cosmopolitanism is an approach to culture that focuses, not on forms of sociality, but on changes among forms—expansions and contractions in the inclusivity of forms and movement by persons from one form of sociality to another. Relative to other cultural theories, cosmopolitanism thus is much more concerned with the solution of risk management problems than with their origins. Cosmopolitanism can be thought of as a cultural continuum, with cosmopolitanism at one end and pluralism at the other. Cosmopolitan persons are more open to cultural change—and thus the solution of risk management problems. In this article, we outline our new theory of cosmopolitanism, describe a method for measuring it and present an experimental study that tests some implications of the theory. Results from the study support the theory by showing that, compared to pluralistic respondents, cosmopolitan respondents are more inclusive in their risk management judgments—that is, they express equal concern for a local and a national issue, whereas the pluralistic respondents express greater concern in the local case. We discuss the risk management implications of a cosmopolitan approach to culture.     

Teachers,Schools, and Academic Achievement

This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. Unique matched panel data from the UTD Texas Schools Project permit the identification of teacher quality based on student performance along with the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. Semiparametric lower bound estimates of the variance in teacher quality based entirely on within‐school heterogeneity indicate that teachers have powerful effects on reading and mathematics achievement, though little of the variation in teacher quality is explained by observable characteristics such as education or experience. The results suggest that the effects of a costly ten student reduction in class size are smaller than the benefit of moving one standard deviation up the teacher quality distribution, highlighting the importance of teacher effectiveness in the determination of school quality.     

Organizational strategy, structure, and process

Organizational adaptation is a topic that has received only limited and fragmented theoretical treatment. Any attempt to examine organizational adaptation is difficult, since the process is highly complex and changeable. The proposed theoretical framework deals with alternative ways in which organizations define their product-market domains (strategy) and construct mechanisms (structures and processes) to pursue these strategies. The framework is based on interpretation of existing literature and continuing studies in four industries (college textbook publishing, electronics, food processing, and health care).