Measuring the non-profit sector cross-nationally: a comparative methodology

As a result in part of the way non-profit institutions are defined and treated in the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), little is known about the size, scope, financial base and role of this set of institutions at the international level, even though their importance is increasingly being recognised throughout the world. To remedy this significant lack of systematic information on non-profit institutions cross-nationally, the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project has undertaken a major analysis of the economic role of this sector in twelve countries throughout the world, utilising a more meaningful definition of the sector and an approach that is otherwise consistent with the overall thrust of the SNA system. This paper outlines the basis of the more inclusive definition of the non-profit sector embodied in this project, the classification system formulated to structure data-gathering on this more broadly-defined sector and the data assembly strategy developed to build up key estimates of the scale, structure and revenue sources of the non-profit sector in the project countries. The article concludes with a recommendation to incorporate a similar approach to the assembly of data on the non-profit sector into the ongoing SNA system on a regular basis.Professor Lester Salamon is Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and Director of the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218.Helmut Anheier is Research Scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08903. He is co-editor ofVoluntas.     

Commuting and the rural-urban hierarchy

The purpose of this paper is to consider the relation between commuting and the settlement structure, with particular attention to rural and nonmetropolitan areas. I examined commuting flows between metropolitan central cities, other metropolitan areas, nonmetropolitan places with more than 10,000 people, those with 2500–10000 people, and other rural areas. Despite the deconcentration of population, industry and trade that was especially marked in the 1970s, commuting in 1980 was predominantly toward larger places in the ruralurban hierarchy, and particularly from rural areas and the other metropolitan category to cities. Overall levels of commuting were high, and most were within either nonmetropolitan or metropolitan areas. Smaller nonmetropolitan places particularly had high proportions of both in- and out-commuters. Differences in commuting flows by gender, socioeconomic status and industry were small, but generally in the directions expected on the basis of prior research. The findings reveal a high degree of work-residence interdependence among settlement units in nonmetropolitan America, with social and economic differences in commuting flows representing an important aspect of community structure.     

Gender and returns to promotion: The role of social and power relations

This study extends a theoretical framework of structural resources and vulnerabilities to an examination of individual promotion outcomes. Promotions of 454 individuals to administrative and professional staff positions in one higher education organization are analyzed. The findings confirm that both individual and structural resources are important for explaining the administrative level achieved by promotion in this setting. Although the returns to resouces do not vary by gender, women receive significantly less return to their promotions than men do to theirs. These findings underscore the importance of examining not only individual and structural resources but also the role of gender in the social and power relations that influence the promotion of women and men in organizations.     

Medicine on the line? Computer‐mediated social support and advice for people with diabetes

The advent of thousands of Usenet groups on the Internet, covering a vast range of medical and welfare issues and ostensibly devoted to the mutual social support of participating members, has raised the potential for the development of new forms of 'virtual' health care. This article critically analyses the use by people with diabetes of one such Usenet group. It seeks to establish, first, the extent to which such a site provides some demonstrable measure of social support to its participants. This is approached by undertaking a structural analysis of the site to identify the extent of usage, and the nature of supporting interventions using a fivefold classification (instrumental, informational, esteem and social companionship and other). Second, the article attempts to identify any disparity between the lay health-knowledge in evidence and biomedical opinions proffered by the use of a panel of consultant diabetiologists. The results of the analysis suggest that the diabetes newsgroup provides an example of an active forum for largely well-informed participants who routinely use the media as an aid to the reflexive management of their medical condition. It also raises the prospect of a renegotiated relationship between medical knowledge and lay experience based upon shared learning     

Population Policy in Early Victorian England

This paper argues that the generally-held belief that there was no population policy in Great Britain during its fertility transition is incorrect. There were, in fact, clear and implicit and explicit policies in place by the early 19th Century which aimed at reducing population growth. These were negative, involving elimination of family allowances (the famous Poor Laws), and also positive, through subsidised emigration and ``transportation' of felons to the colonies. Moreover, a changed ``ideation' on the part of the nation's political, intellectual and spiritual leaders, changed norms about marriage and child-bearing, raising sharply the perceived economic and psychic cost of children. Lacking acceptable means to control pregnancies, many working class women resorted to abortion, infanticide and child abandonment to reduce their family size. The policy's actual impact on overall fertility is uncertain but it did constitute a deliberate attempt by society to affect demographic behaviour and outcomes.     

Stress at work and psychological and immunological parameters in a group of Norwegian female bank employees

This study concerned the immunological correlates of stress and work. Self reported stress, emotional state, ego-strength, and defensiveness were examined in relation to measures of cellular immunity (T-cell response to Con A and number of T4 and T8 cells) and humoral immunity (concentrations of immunoglobulins and complement components in plasma) in a group of 96 Norwegian female bank employees. The analyses showed that workload, the stress factor with the highest group mean, was associated with number of T-cells, while strain due to body posture during work was related to concentrations of IgM and C3. Further, depression was significantly correlated with IgM concentration and T-cell number, and anxiety with C3 concentration. T-cell activity was the immunological parameter most consistently associated with psychological well-being, showing positive correlations with defensiveness and ego-strength and negative correlations with anxiety and depression. In conclusion, T-cell number and concentrations of IgM and C3 were sensitive to both work-related stress experience and emotional distress. Coping abilities, indicated by the MMPI Ego-strength scale and emotional distress, were reflected in T-cell activity; insufficient coping was associated with low T-cell activity.     

林业发展阶段研究概述

阶段性是事物发展必须遵循的一个客观规律,林业的发展同样也具有阶段性.只有充分认识各个时期林业发展所处的历史阶段和相应特征,才能更好地制定政策和发展战略.该文将以往的林业方面的阶段性研究加以综述,以期获得收益和启发,并为以后的研究打下基础.     

Modelling data from single-photon emission computerized tomography

The completely random character of radioactive disintegration provides the basis of a strong justification for a Poisson linear model for single-photon emission computed tomography data, which can be used to produce reconstructions of isotope densities, whether by maximum likelihood or Bayesian methods. However, such a model requires the construction of a matrix of weights, which represent the mean rates of arrival at each detector of photons originating from each point within the body space. Two methods of constructing these weights are discussed, and reconstructions resulting from phantom and real data are presented.