The Effects of Personality and Management Role on Perceived Values in Business Settings

This paper examines the effects ofpersonality variables and functional management role,either entrepreneur, manager in an entrepreneurialfirm, manager in a traditional firm, or small businessowner, on perceived business values. Functionalmanagement role had minimal discernible effects;personality variables differentiated entrepreneursfrom managers and produced many effects for ratings ofbusiness values. Results are discussed in terms ofMBTI and DISC theoretical constructs and theirimplications for entrepreneurship and management.     

RIGHT‐WING EXTREMISM IN CONTEMPORARY FRANCE: A “Silent Counterrevolution”?

Postmaterialist theory (PMT) challenges Lipset and Rokkan's freezing hypothesis by arguing that conflict over noneconomic values is transforming the political sociology of advanced industrial societies. Hardly studied is PMT's claim that support for the contemporary far Right stems from a reaction against the social and moral libertarianism of postwar generations. An analysis of cross-time data on the class, generational, and ideological profiles of voting for a French far Right party (the Front national) provides weak support for PMT. The discussion focuses on class and religious cleavages in postwar France and the discrepancy between voter attitudes and party platforms.     

ANOTHER STEP IN THE STUDY OF RACE RELATIONS

Recent qualitative researchers have argued the need for a more sensitizing approach to race research that elevates in importance the concerns and interests of those under study. This article illustrates how Herbert Blumer's work on race relations, critical race theory, and participatory action research may help this objective. These projects' similar epistemologies advance a type of social imagery that has powerful emancipatory implications in regard to racial oppression. Simply put, dominant renditions of social reality–including structural imperatives and racial identities–are illustrated to be socially constructed and hence open to negotiation. As a result of this shift, sensitizing methodologies (e.g., storytelling and collaboration) are employed that allow minorities an opportunity for self-representation. The liberating potential of all these projects can be further enhanced by relating their conceptual links to recent developments in contemporary social theory. Specifically, the typical concerns with process, interaction, and experiential meanings are intersubjectively mediated and not reducible to an objective subjective theoretical framework. Rather than simply personal or external, all knowledge is recognized to be fluid and coproduced. By grounding research on this intersubjective region, equitable exchanges are possible.     

Social choice with independent subgroup utility scales

In this article, the kinds of utility comparisons that can be made may differ in distinct population subgroups. Within each subgroup, utility is either ordinally or cardinally measurable. Levels and differences of utility may or may not be interpersonally comparable within a subgroup. No utility comparisons are possible between subgroups. Given these informational assumptions, it is shown that any continuous social welfare ordering that satisfies the weak Pareto principle only depends on the utilities of one of the subgroups. The class of social welfare orderings consistent with these assumptions is determined by the scale type of the dictatorial subgroup. Received: 25 May 1999/Accepted: 4 November 1999     

Civil Society Transformed: International Aid to New Political Parties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - How do international nonprofit organizations influence political party formation in new democracies? Despite recent...     

Young people in Britain at the beginning of a new century

The intention of this review article is to consider some of the major social changes that have had an impact on adolescents during the latter part of the last century, and to suggest ways in which the behaviour and development of young people in the present century will alter in response to such a change. It is argued that alteration in the labour market and in family composition and structure will have particular effects on young people in the coming years. The article also considers race, gender, sexuality, mental health and social exclusion. The review concludes with some tentative predictions concerning the attitudes and likely behaviours of young people in the twenty first century. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Default and Punishment in General Equilibrium1

We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment by thinking of assets as pools. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of adverse selection and signalling phenomena in a perfectly competitive, general equilibrium framework. Perfect competition eliminates the need for lenders to compute how the size of their loan or the price they quote might affect default rates. It also makes for a simple equilibrium refinement, which we propose in order to rule out irrational pessimism about deliveries of untraded assets. We show that refined equilibrium always exists in our model, and that default, in conjunction with refinement, opens the door to a theory of endogenous assets. The market chooses the promises, default penalties, and quantity constraints of actively traded assets.     

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.     

Robust modified profile estimating function with application to the generalized estimating equation

We consider methods for reducing the effect of fitting nuisance parameters on a general estimating function, when the estimating function depends on not only a vector of parameters of interest, θ$\theta$, but also on a vector of nuisance parameters, λ$\lambda$. We propose a class of modified profile estimating functions with plug-in bias reduced by two orders. A robust version of the adjustment term does not require any information about the probability mechanism beyond that required by the original estimating function. An important application of this method is bias correction for the generalized estimating equation in analyzing stratified longitudinal data, where the stratum-specific intercepts are considered as fixed nuisance parameters, the dependence of the expected outcome on the covariates is of interest, and the intracluster correlation structure is unknown. Furthermore, when the quasi-scores for θ$\theta$ and λ$\lambda$ are available, we propose an additional multiplicative adjustment term such that the modified profile estimating function is approximately information unbiased. This multiplicative adjustment term can serve as an optimal weight in the analysis of stratified studies. A brief simulation study shows that the proposed method considerably reduces the impact of the nuisance parameters.     

Stagnation of Heights Among Second‐Generation U.S.‐Born Army Personnel*

Objectives. The physical stature of a population is a useful supplementary indicator of the living standards of children and youth insofar as it is sensitive to income and medical care. It is, thus, somewhat of a conundrum that U.S. heights tended to stagnate between around the mid‐1950s to the mid‐1970s birth cohorts, an otherwise economically prosperous period. Because of the controversial nature of the finding based on the NHANES data sets we seek independent corroborating evidence. Methods. The height of U.S.‐born army personnel is analyzed in order to explore ethnic and second‐generation effects on height, in particular if these affect the trend among the birth cohorts of the 1950s and 1960s. We limit the regression analysis to U.S.‐born (non‐Hispanic) blacks and whites, controlling for ethnicity (own, mother's, and father's), foreign‐born parents, and region of their birth within the United States stratified by race and gender. Results. We find that none of the above variables affect the trend meaningfully: the height of U.S. military personnel tended to stagnate during the period considered. Only black males showed some improvement in height. Hence, the army data support the trends obtained from the civilian population, which cannot be controlled for second‐generation effects. Conclusion. The quality of nutritional intake and of medical care was not improving among children and youth in these decades in spite of the fact that the income of their parents was increasing.