Action as Will-Power

The concept of power, as commonly formulated in contemporary sociology, is noted to lack any reference to the critical dimension of personal conative striving, or will-power. This deficiency is shown to stem from an overly cognitive conception of action, one in which acts are seen to embody choice and meaning but not emotion or effort, a view that has been reinforced by the use of trivial, easily-accomplished acts as examples to illustrate the nature of action. A perspective is advocated that redresses this imbalance; one that accepts that the immediate cause of all true actions is an act of will and that action is best conceived of as behaviour that individuals allow to happen to them. Power is then defined as an individual's ability to initiate and maintain action despite behavioural resistance, a conceptualization that closely links it to the concept of 'character'. This perspective on human conduct is then shown to be identical to that adopted by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism .     

Aids and Bereavement

People bereaved by AIDS are likely to be in special need of support by reason of the social situations that accompany this type of loss and the risk of infection in the survivors. Problems associated with grief, depression, and the misuse of medicinal and other drugs are common. Special problems arise when the bereaved are partners, spouses, or parents of the deceased. Issues requiring special attention include emotional overload in both clients and counselors, judgmental attitudes, secrecy, anger, guilt, and the vicious circles that easily arise and can perpetuate problems.     

Disability,politics and poverty in a majority world context

This paper argues that the spread of free market economics throughout the world has generated unprecedented inequalities within and between nation states. This has led to the systematic exclusion of people with perceived impairments from the mainstream of economic and community life in almost all societies, the generation of an international disabled people’s movement, and their demand for legal frameworks with which to address the multiple deprivations encountered by people viewed as ‘disabled’. It is argued that the poverty and exclusion encountered by disabled people and other oppressed groups in all societies will not be eliminated without fundamental structural change at the international level.     

Detection of multiple undocumented change-points using adaptive Lasso

The problem of detecting multiple undocumented change-points in a historical temperature sequence with simple linear trend is formulated by a linear model. We apply adaptive least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) to estimate the number and locations of change-points. Model selection criteria are used to choose the Lasso smoothing parameter. As adaptive Lasso may overestimate the number of change-points, we perform post-selection on change-points detected by adaptive Lasso using multivariate t simultaneous confidence intervals. Our method is demonstrated on the annual temperature data (year: 1902–2000) from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.     

Piece rates and workplace injury: Does survey evidence support Adam Smith?

While piece rates are routinely associated with higher productivity and wages, they can also generate unanticipated effects. Using cross-country European data, we provide among the first general survey evidence of a strong link between piece rates and workplace injury. Despite controls for workplace hazards, job characteristics and worker effort, piece rates workers suffer a 5 percentage point greater likelihood of injury. This remains despite attempts to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity. As piece rate wage premium estimates rarely control for injury likelihood, this raises the specter that part of that premium reflects a compensating wage differential for risk of injury.     

Testing Multiple Forecasters

We consider a cross‐calibration test of predictions by multiple potential experts in a stochastic environment. This test checks whether each expert is calibrated conditional on the predictions made by other experts. We show that this test is good in the sense that a true expert—one informed of the true distribution of the process—is guaranteed to pass the test no matter what the other potential experts do, and false experts will fail the test on all but a small (category I) set of true distributions. Furthermore, even when there is no true expert present, a test similar to cross‐calibration cannot be simultaneously manipulated by multiple false experts, but at the cost of failing some true experts.     

LESSONS FOR RESEARCHERS AND FUNDING AGENCIES FROM HURRICANE KATRINA: A RESEARCH NOTE FROM MISSISSIPPI

We surveyed National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research in Mississippi to determine the economic extent of research damage and delays due to Hurricane Katrina. While several facilities were physically damaged, we found that the largest effects were time delays and missed opportunities. While psychological factors were not part of the original economic impact study, it became clear that they played an important role. Specifically, the Principal Investigator's (PI's) attitude of “just another delay” was one cultural barrier to fully accounting for the cost of these research delays. We concluded that Principal Investigators, with the assistance of funding agencies, should be better trained to measure time and opportunity costs associated with their research, so future disaster recovery efforts can more fully address those needs.     

Time-on-task, technology and mathematics achievement

Information and communication technologies hold much promise for use in education in developing countries. This study reports on an evaluation conducted on the introduction of computers in the delivery of the mathematics curriculum in one of the provinces of South Africa. Although the request was for an outcome evaluation very early in the implementation of the program, it was tailored in such a way as to fulfill a more formative role. Despite substantial variability in implementation, and in most cases with very weak exposure of the learners to the intervention, sufficient evidence emerged to indicate that this mode of curriculum delivery may be effective. Improvement in mathematics performance was related to a range of variables: some concerned classroom teaching practices, some referred to social differences between the learners, and some to the specific intervention. The strongest of these predictors in the sample was the strength of the intervention: the more time learners spent on using the software to study mathematics, the more improvement they showed from 1 year to the next in their performance in the subject.     

Beyond the make-or-buy dichotomy: outsourcing creativity in the fashion sector

Both a resource-based view and transaction cost economics perspective point to firms deciding to either make-or-buy an input. In practice, this tends to result in low-skill functions being outsourced while those of higher value are retained. In this article, we explore a situation counter to the prevailing literature. We study a highly creative industry – fashion – and discover the relationship between core competence and outsourcing is not as simple as previously conceptualised. Creativity, fashion's assumed competency, rather than being guarded within a firm is instead often outsourced or borrowed. More mundane tasks such as marketing and logistics are what each firm rather develops. The effects of resulting co-dependencies are mapped and analysed in order to offer managerial insight as well as contribute to discussion within the outsourcing and resource based literatures.