Consideration of Background Exposures in the Management of Hazardous Waste Sites: A New Approach to Risk Assessment

The current approach to health risk assessment of toxic waste sites in the U.S. may lead to considerable expenditure of resources without any meaningful reduction in population exposure. Risk assessment methods used generally ignore background exposures and consider only incremental risk estimates for maximally exposed individuals. Such risk estimates do not address true public health risks to which background exposures also contribute. The purpose of this paper is to recommend a new approach to risk assessment and risk management concerning toxic waste sites. Under this new approach, which we have called public health risk assessment, chemical substances would be classified into a level of concern based on the potential health risks associated with typical national and regional background exposures. Site assessment would then be based on the level of concern for the particular pollutants involved and the potential contribution of site contaminants to typical background human exposures. While various problems can be foreseen with this approach, the key advantage is that resources would be allocated to reduce the most important sources of human exposure, and site remediation decisions could be simplified by focussing on exposure assessment rather than questionable risk extrapolations.     

Evaluating qualitative management research: Towards a contingent criteriology

The term qualitative management research embraces an array of non‐statistical research practices. Here it is argued that this diversity is an outcome of competing philosophical assumptions which produce distinctive research perspectives and legitimate the appropriation of different sets of evaluation criteria. Some confusion can arise when evaluation criteria constituted by particular philosophical conventions are universally applied to this heterogeneous management field. In order to avoid such misappropriation, this paper presents a first step towards a contingent criteriology located in a metatheoretical analysis of three modes of qualitative management research which are compared with the positivist mainstream to elaborate different forms of evaluation. It is argued that once armed with criteria that vary accordingly, evaluation can reflexively focus upon the extent to which any management research consistently embraces the particular methodological principles that are sanctioned by its a priori philosophical commitments.     

Querulous Citizens: Welfare Knowledge and the Limits to Welfare Reform

Governments face pressures to improve services and (at the same time) to contain taxes and to ensure that their decisions are accountable to increasingly well‐informed and challenging citizens. The dilemma of “squaring the welfare circle” confronts New Labour in a particularly acute form, since the party has set ambitious targets for improvements in the NHS, education and elsewhere, and is also committed to economic prudence and transparency. This article uses new data from a major national survey to investigate knowledge and beliefs in the main policy areas. It shows that most people are generally strikingly well‐informed in some areas and ill‐informed in others. A government which wishes to pursue a progressive direction in redistribution, increasing taxation of the better‐off, or expanding provision for those on low incomes, faces real difficulties because many people hold inaccurate beliefs about policy impact and the policy context in these areas. However, NHS costs are more accurately perceived across the population, and the proposed expansion is likely to create less controversy. Current high‐profile policies appear to follow the contours of public knowledge reasonably accurately, but further policy development will require positive efforts to lead debates and improve public knowledge.     

Psychological Distress and Counseling Duration of Career and Noncareer Clients

This study compared the presenting psychological symptom status and the counseling duration of career and noncareer clients. Although no significant differences in the psychological status of the two groups were noticed, career clients did attend significantly fewer counseling sessions than did clients with noncareer concerns. Implications of these findings for college counseling centers are offered.     

The Theory Behind the Traps — Considerations for the Practice of Family Therapy in a Multi-frame Work Team*

Family systems theory as an approach to problem generation and change is practiced in many settings where other theoretical stances are also held. The issue of successful team work within a clinic where other therapists work from psychoanalytic and behavioural models is addressed. Structural, strategic and systemic approaches are compared with the psychoanalytic and behavioural. Particular attention is paid to apparent similarities between psychoanalytic and systemic family therapy theory. It is concluded that basic differences exist which make successful merging of the two views impossible. Practical examples of difficulties and attempted solutions are offered.     

Playing with conflict: a longitudinal study of varieties of spontaneous verbal conflict during mother-child interaction at home

Although conflict is central to major developmental theories, relatively little is known about the ways in which young children and caregivers argue at home. The existing psychological research focuses narrowly on serious, ‘problem-solving’ conflicts. In contrast, this in-depth longitudinal study describes varieties of spontaneous conflict talk occurring at home between nine middle-class Caucasian American mothers and their 2- to 4-year-old children. All dyads produced conflicts with nonse-rious, imaginary and/or ritual markings for a mean of 31% (± 2.8%) of all mother-child conflicts. Overall, most mother-child marked conflicts were nonserious, but the percentage of marked conflicts that were imaginary increased with age. Mothers used marked conflicts to manage ongoing problematic interactions with their children, while children apparently introduced marked conflicts primarily during play. Available data on child-child conflicts showed that some of these conflicts also were marked and were introduced primarily during play. Implications for how varieties of conflict may contribute to social competence within the family and peer group are discussed.     

Primal and Dual Capacity Utilization: An Application to Productivity Measurement in the U.S. Automobile Industry

Capacity utilization measures have traditionally been constructed as indexes of actual, as compared to “potential,” output. This potential or capacity output (Y*) can be represented within an economic model of the firm as the tangency between the short- and long-run average cost curves. Economic theoretical measures of capacity utilization (CU) can then be characterized as Y/Y* where Y is the realized level of output. These quantity or primal CU measures allow for economic interpretation; they provide explicit inference as to how changes in exogenous variables affect CU. Additional information for analyzing deviations from capacity production can be obtained by assessing the “dual” cost of the gap.

In this article the definitions and representations of primal-output and dual-cost CU measures are formalized within a dynamic model of a monopolistic firm. As an illustration of this approach to characterizing CU measures, a model is estimated for the U.S. automobile industry, 1959–1980, and primal and dual CU indexes are constructed. Application of these indexes to adjustment-of-productivity measures for “disequilibrium” is then carried out, using the dual-cost measure.