Additive manufacturing technology adoption: an empirical analysis of general and supply chain-related determinants

Despite experiencing immense growth in the past decade, additive manufacturing (AM) technologies—colloquially known as 3D-printing—are still rarely used in industrial fabrication. Being at the interface between technology, innovation, behavioral science and operations management research, this paper identifies multifaceted factors that determine the decision to adopt AM technologies for the production of industrial parts. A review of the relevant literature revealed eight potential factors. These can be classified into four interdisciplinary categories: technology-related factors, firm-related-factors, market structure-related factors, and supply chain-related factors. Special focus is placed on the impact of supply chain-related issues, because there are indicatives that these aspects have an influence on the decision to adopt AM technologies since AM may offer distinct opportunities for both, the supply- and demand-side of a firm’s operations. No work in the field of manufacturing technology adoption has examined the role of such inter-organizational factors before. The results of an empirical study among 195 firms indicate that demand-side benefits and compatibility are the main determinants of AM technology adoption. This suggests that not only intra- but also inter-organizational factors should be considered when investigating the adoption of technological innovations. Furthermore, it is carved out that the adoption of AM technologies has an interdisciplinary nature.     

Sexually transmitted disease services at US colleges and universities

The authors' objectives in this study were to describe the proportion of schools providing and the percentage of students with access to HIV and sexually transmitted disease (STD) education, treatment, and prevention services at 2-year and 4-year US colleges and universities. The authors mailed self-administered questionnaires to a stratified random sample (n = 910) of the 2,755 US schools with an enrollment of more than 500 students; 736 (81%) returned the survey. Four hundred seventy-four schools (60%) had a health center, representing 73% of students. Schools with a health center or housing for students were more likely to provide STD education; 52% of the schools made condoms available to students. Sixty percent of schools with health centers could test for both Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, but only 67% of these schools screened women for these infections. Although most schools provided some prevention education, access to prevention, testing, and education should be increased at schools where these services are possible but not available.     

Systemic differences in views on risk: A comparative case vignette study of risk assessment in England,Norway and the United States (California)

This article examines how child welfare workers from three countries assess risk to a child in the context of different risk assessment tools, child welfare systems and welfare regimes. Previous research suggests that there are distinct differences between child protection-oriented child welfare systems such as England and the U.S., and family service-oriented child welfare systems such as Norway (Gilbert et al., 2011). We use a case vignette method to analyze how 299 child welfare workers from England, Norway and California (U.S.) assess risk. The case vignette describes the case of ‘Beatrice’, a nine year-old girl of Black African descent who was born with an organic heart disease and a cleft palate. We found that respondents from California assessed the risk to be the lowest, followed by respondents from England and Norway. The risk factors that respondents highlighted as important for their assessment also varied significantly between countries, displaying different perceptions of elements in a case constituting risk. Respondents from Norway, who, comparatively, practice within the context of the least regulated assessment platform, identified the most homogenous assessments and types of reasoning, whereas both the assessment of risk levels and identifications of risk factors were more heterogeneous among workers in England and California. We argue that the different risk assessment tools only partly influence what workers identify as risk factors in a case, and that type of welfare states and child welfare systems is also an influence. This study thus supports existing scholarship on the distinctions between child welfare systems. However, we also found significant differences in perceptions of risk factors between England and the United States.     

Fear management: How child protection workers engage with non-citizen immigrant families

Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a sample of 24 child protection workers in the northeastern United States, we analyze how workers engage with non-citizen immigrant families. Confirming findings from previous scholarship on immigrants' fears when interacting with Child Protection Services (CPS), workers reported encountering different fear factors—the organizations, events, or people that instill fear in immigrant families. These included fear of deportation, fear of CPS workers as the people who remove children, and fear of CPS as a potentially repressive government agency. We also found that workers seek to minimize or leverage these fears in the engagement process—we refer to this process as fear management. Most of the workers interviewed seek to minimize immigrant families' fears, and we show that they employ four strategies to do so: providing knowledge, brokering services, doing dignity and status work, and learning culture.     

How child welfare workers view their work with racial and ethnic minority families: The United States in contrast to England and Norway

This study builds on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 93 child welfare workers employed in public child welfare agencies in the United States, Norway and England, and examines their perceptions of working with racial and ethnic minority families in contrast to White service users. Almost all workers reported on differences. In the United States, workers regarded cultural pluralism as a given and considered it an inherent feature of their work, regardless of the racial and/or ethnic background of the family. Further, they identified poverty, racism, and lack of feelings of entitlement as dimensions to practicing with minority families. A few mentioned language as an issue. The views of workers in the U.S. stand in stark contrast to the perceptions of workers in both England and Norway. They thought that communication challenges constituted a major problem, and that minority clients' lack of language proficiency and knowledge about society and social systems made it difficult for workers to understand families' meaning and intent (Kri? & Skivenes, 2009; 2010b). We discuss how caseworkers' perceptions may influence their decisions and affect minority disproportionality in the child protection system and analyze what factors may account for the cross-country differences we found. We also relate our findings to the broader question of citizenship and social rights in American society.     

Fathers' encounters with the Child Welfare Service

In this article, we examined fathers who were or had been in contact with the Child Welfare Services in Norway. All of the fathers included in this study had children with women who were unable to take care of them, either because of substance abuse or mental health problems. Hence, the fathers had the primary responsibility for the children. We looked at how these fathers experienced being met and assessed as caregivers by the Child Welfare Service, as well as how they experienced their own competency as caregivers. To explore these themes, seven fathers who were in contact with or had recently been in contact with the Child Welfare Service were interviewed. The discourses on fatherhood, inspired by Scourfield (2003), were used as a framework for the analysis, and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyse the interviews. We found the fathers' experiences to be considered within the discourses on “fathers as a threat”, “fathers as irrelevant” and “fathers as better than mothers”. In addition, we shed light on topics such as the cultural lag, being single-handedly responsible for the children, and the fathers' views on what is important in their contact with the children.Our goal was to increase awareness about fathers who are in contact with the Child Welfare Service so that they are met in a way that helps to support them in their role as fathers for the benefit of their children.