Caring while living apart

In recent years, researchers have paid increasing attention to the issue of care in the new types of family and partner relationships. The aim of this study is to examine expectations and attitudes concerning care among elderly people in LAT (Living Apart Together)- relationships in Sweden, that is, people who have a long-term intimate relationship, but who do not share a common home. Questionnaires were completed by 116 elderly people in LAT-relationships. Partners are ranked as the main providers of care, especially by men, but there is considerable variation in the answers. This seems to be principally related to the degree of flexibility in this type of relationship. Some individuals see a LAT-relationship as a marriage-like relationship, while others see it primarily as a type of relationship that guarantees them the possibility of maintaining their own independent way of life.     

Socially excluding housing support to homeless substance misusers: two Swedish case studies of special category housing

This article discusses special category housing for homeless addicts, based on case studies of two different housing programmes and using both qualitative and quantitative data. The staff and residents were interviewed about their experiences of the programmes. Longitudinal data were collected on various indicators of substance misuse and the frequency of contact with the social services at different levels. Our findings show that special category housing has positive direct effects on the housing stability of the residents and their feelings regarding their quality of life, but not on their substance misuse. However, the increased housing stability seems to be more a direct effect of their staying on the programme, rather than a long-term effect. Furthermore, although their quality of life improves, the residents still experience a lack of belonging and feel that their lives lack meaningful content. The choice of special category housing as an intervention model thus seems to perpetuate rather than prevent social exclusion and can possibly be described as an expression of 'institutionalised resignation'.     

The child welfare service's assessments in custody cases that involve minors

The percentage of breakdowns in marriages, cohabitations and civil partnerships is increasing in the Western world, resulting in questions of child custody. In Norway and other Western countries, there is little knowledge of the support system's work in child custody cases. This article focuses on the assessments Norwegian child welfare service employees conduct in 37 cases about child custody. We explain why they sometimes conduct investigations of reports and at other times do not.

‘Street-level bureaucracy’ is the theoretical reference framework for interpreting the interviews. Assessments and decisions of the child welfare service in custody cases vary from one service to another. It is relatively difficult to predict whether the notifications will be investigated or dropped. Decisions are the result of a jigsaw puzzle of risk assessment, interpretations of legislation, cooperative procedures and an understanding of the county social welfare board. Notifications concerning violence and notifications from family counselling offices stand out since generally they result in investigations.

Child welfare services' handling of notifications regarding custody questions is challenging as these cases are in the grey zone between the Children Act and the Child Welfare Act. Child welfare workers want clearer guidelines for the cases on which they are to work. However, new rules cannot replace the professional and ethical assessments the child welfare service workers have to make in each individual case.     

An Enhanced Concave Program Relaxation for Choice Network Revenue Management

The network choice revenue management problem models customers as choosing from an offer set, and the firm decides the best subset to offer at any given moment to maximize expected revenue. The resulting dynamic program for the firm is intractable and approximated by a deterministic linear program called the CDLP which has an exponential number of columns. However, under the choice‐set paradigm when the segment consideration sets overlap, the CDLP is difficult to solve. Column generation has been proposed but finding an entering column has been shown to be NP‐hard. In this study, starting with a concave program formulation called SDCP that is based on segment‐level consideration sets, we add a class of constraints called product constraints (σPC), that project onto subsets of intersections. In addition, we propose a natural direct tightening of the SDCP called , and compare the performance of both methods on the benchmark data sets in the literature. In our computational testing on the data sets, 2PC achieves the CDLP value at a fraction of the CPU time taken by column generation. For a large network our 2PC procedure runs under 70 seconds to come within 0.02% of the CDLP value, while column generation takes around 1 hour; for an even larger network with 68 legs, column generation does not converge even in 10 hours for most of the scenarios while 2PC runs under 9 minutes. Thus we believe our approach is very promising for quickly approximating CDLP when segment consideration sets overlap and the consideration sets themselves are relatively small.     

On the tacit side of organizational identity: Narrative unconscious and figured practice

It is a paradox of research on organizational identity formation that it cannot take place without reliance upon the expressive acts people use, yet the experience of identity cannot be reduced to such expressions. People are more than they can tell. Drawing from a study of a communication agency and building on notions of self in pragmatism, anthropology, and narrative philosophy, I identify two chief dimensions of tacit organizational identity: (1) the narrative unconscious in the stories that people live by and (2) the related figuring of formative organizational practice, in particular regarding choice of and framing of projects. In the case of organization, an episode revolving around the presentation of the ‘New Bohemian Laws’ provides a window to explore both these dimensions. Implications include a refined methodological approach to identity research. It involves acknowledging ‘feelings of identity’, attending to poetics, tuning-in to refrains and styles, and pursuing a relational subjectivity.     

Relationship between Online Retailers’ Reputation and Product Returns

Customer product returns are key cost drivers that eat into online retailers’ profits. However, management research has neglected to examine ways of reducing return rates without causing a concomitant decrease in sales. Drawing from signalling and dissonance theories, we investigate the relationship between online retailers’ reputation and product return rates. Two experiments designed to produce causal conclusions show that reputation reduces return rates (Studies 1 and 2) and that return motivation is a boundary condition for that relationship (Study 2). A field study based on an online consumer panel demonstrates the robustness of the negative impact of online retailer reputation on product returns in a setting that emphasizes external validity (Study 3), in comparison with Studies 1 and 2, which maximize internal validity. Study 3 also examines managerially important contingencies of the causal relationship by considering three variables: purchase frequency; retailer type; and customer gender. Overall findings indicate that an online retailer's reputation is a powerful means of reducing product return rates. The findings also show that the strength of the relationship between reputation and product returns is influenced by return motivation and the three variables investigated in the field study.