Ability, disability, and the oldest old

A measure of range of ability is used to profile the 85-years-old-and-older (oldest old) population, including the highly disabled institutional population. This new measure uses two new questions available in the 1990 Decennial Census concerning a self-care limitation and a mobility limitation as well as the usual question concerning a work limitation. In addition to examining the extent of disability among the oldest old, the article examines the extent of care potentially available in the household as well as the economic characteristics of this age group. It is also profiled in terms of relevant personal characteristics, including age, gender, marital status, race, ethnicity, rural residence, education, and employment. A key question addressed is the need for help or care among the oldest old and how various long-term care proposals would meet such needs. A careful analysis of this unique and growing population is necessary to both allay fears of the cost of care or help as well as to dispel stereotypes of this age group as frail and dependent, and in need of institutional care.     

Reading,writing and word processing: Toward a phenomenology of the computer age

Ethnographers read cultures and in writing inscribe memory into texts; in literature, a reading is a dialogue with a writer through the medium the text, and writing translates text into action. In a study of humanists using the microcomputer as a writing technology, changes were perceived in the phenomenology of writing, the writer's relation to the text, and the relation to the reader. Typists remarked that the computer enabled them to recover a spoken voice because the screen gave the text a processual and temporal form which replaced the inflexible typed page. Handwriters often remarked that the computer changed humanistic craft labor into industrial production: the screen gave privilege to the lexical in place of the graphic; the sentence replaced the paragraph as a unit of meaning; writing became a medium for transmitting information rather than an artistic performance. Humanists perceived that technical norms were embedded in technical culture and software, and that the computer marked a shift in the reward structure of their professions toward productivity and efficiency. This suggests three issues for the writing crafts of ethnographers. Electronic memory may replace the interpretive text, making fieldnotes public and treating them as information. The technical capacity to organize fieldnotes in data bases may shift the fieldworker's conception of knowledge from interpretation to information. And consuming the norms and concepts of technical culture may shift the craftlike norms of the field worker's culture.

—Mallarme

     

Scientific management and class relations

Conclusion It has been the contention of this article that the true significance of the scientific management movement lies in what it can tell us about the engineering profession. Scientific management was not simply capitalist ideology, nor were the engineers who developed it simply the prisoners of capitalist ideology. Instead, scientific management was the product of the insertion of once-independent engineers into the complex, collective labor process in large corporations. It reflects both their inability to break loose fully from the dominant ideology and the fact that their interests as engineers were in conflict with the interests of their capitalist employers.The significance of this point, however, lies beyond the experience of turn-of-the-century shop culture engineers. For, if even as unpromising a group as the scientific managers could develop a program with implications inimical to the interests of capital, what of other, less commercialized groups? We have already seen that the early school-based engineers initiated a professionalizing project that included a claim to autonomy that was incompatible with the needs of their employers. It seems clear that the engineer's status as an employee, albeit an employee in an ambiguous position in the labor process, constitutes a basis for the development of conflicts with capitalist employers. This has been the thrust of our earlier discussion of the process of class formation. Gramsci's analysis of the situation of engineers in capitalist class relations, then, may not be without foundation:With the urban intellectuals it is another matter. Factory technicians do not exercise any political function over the instrumental masses, or at least this is a phase that has been superseded. Sometimes, rather, the contrary takes place, and the instrumental masses, at least in the person of their own organic intellectuals, exercise a political influence on the technicians.It may very well be that engineers, given a more militant labor movement, a more penetrating ideology, or a weaker capitalist class, could find themselves on the same side as more subordinate employees in conflicts with their employers.It is all the more important, then, that we understand the process by which American engineers have been domesticated. This has not happened automatically; far from it. Although there are ambiguities in the engineer's situation that make this process easier, the rapprochement of engineers with capital has had to be made. In this regard, the active intervention of business interests has been of particular importance, especially their efforts in fostering among engineers a safe variant of professionalism.Nor does this historical lesson apply only to engineers. For, there are other professional occupations that, increasingly, find themselves in situations comparable to engineers. Accountants, nurses, teachers, even certain kinds of lawyers have long been employed in large numbers by complex organizations. More recently, even doctors have begun to experience the condition of being an employee. For each of these occupations, we must avoid the easy assumption that there is something inherent in their social structural position that leads them into an accommodation with capital. On the contrary, as with engineers, we must stress the existence of real conflicts generated by capitalist relations of production, and then examine each occupation historically, asking what specific circumstances explain why its members do or do not enter into explicit conflict with their employers. However, while we must be aware of the possibility that professionals can (and sometimes do) enter into conflict with their employers, we also need to be sensitive to the complexity of the structural position of many professionals. Many professionals find themselves in positions of authority of some kind - either over subordinate workers in the case of engineers, or over clients in the case of doctors. This can be conducive to the attitude that the professionals' interests are different from those of the groups over which they have authority, or that their interests are the same as their employers'. Alternatively, as we saw in the case of engineers, this structural ambiguity may promote the formation of narrow occupational ideologies among professionals - i.e., the idea that their interests differ from those of both employers and subordinates. Therefore, while we need to be aware of the existence of employer/ professional conflict, we also need to recognize the existence of barriers to, and complexities within, the evolution of such conflicts.It is with this in mind that this article has stressed the importance of developing an adequate approach to the process of class formation. To restate briefly some of the arguments made earlier, the process of class formation in capitalist society is set in motion by the antagonisms inherent in capitalist relations of production. This is not, however, all that we need to know about the process of class formation - we also need to recognize the existence of both objective and historical barriers to this process. Nevertheless, one must be clear about what exactly these barriers are. There is, for example, an important difference between the relations of production that constitute class in the first place and workers' functions in the labor process. Similarly, one should not confuse barriers to the process of class formation with full-fledged class divisions. If we fail to distinguish among these various factors, we will be in danger of artificially placing a class barrier between engineers and other forms of wage-labor. If, on the other hand, we do make these distinctions, we will be able to account for both engineers' opposition to their employers and their domestication.

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Planning for productivity

In the 1980s the subject of productivity will receive increasing attention as the old macro economic policies are replaced by micro economic policies. Everyone in various ways will discover the changes which will be involved in learning the real economic facts of life. The need to improve productivity and business performance is urgent and yet it is an area which is being neglected by management.     

The certainty of judgments in health evaluations

Most evaluators seem to presume that all evaluative studies should result in conclusive evidence. Often, however, less than conclusive evidence may not only suffice, but be the only real alternative under conditions of limited evaluation resources. Three levels of evidence common to evaluation studies are discussed: suggestive evidence, preponderant evidence, and conclusive evidence. Ten factors are also presented which can be used to determine the level of certainty appropriate for a given evaluation study. Consideration of these factors enables the evaluator to specify when less than conclusive evidence is acceptable.     

An analysis of simple counting methods for ordering incomplete ordinal data

Measurement in the social sciences often involves an attempt to completely order a set of entities on the basis of an underlying attribute. However, limitations of the measurement process often prevent complete empirical determination of the desired ordering. Nevertheless, the ordinal data obtained from the measurement process can be used in attempting to recover or construct more of the underlying order than is provided by the data. Previous research (Fishburn and Gehrlein, 1974a) has shown that a simple one-stage construction method, referred to as the cardinal rule, is fairly effective in correctly identifying ordered pairs in the underlying linear order that are not identified by the measurement process. The present paper re-examines the cardinal rule from the perspective of construction methods based on simple counting measures derived from the data, and argues that it is the best one-stage method in this class when a natural monotonicity assumption holds for the measurement process. The paper then examines two-stage construction rules that are based on the cardinal rule and the simple counting measures. It is shown that one of the two-stage rules gives better overall results than does the cardinal rule by itself.     

Public opinion and the privatization of welfare: some theoretical implications

The social policy of the Thatcher government is characterized by an abrupt shift in the direction of the private sector. To what extent does this reflect what people want? The Institute of Economic Affairs conclude from the only suitable national opinion survey that such a move is strongly supported. Our reanalysis of their data shows that this strand in public opinion can coexist with, and need not contradict, an equal public enthusiasm for state welfare. Such results have important implications for our understanding of social policy. We conclude, therefore, with a discussion of contrasting marxist and liberal accounts which seeks to show that the evidence of ambivalence in popular attitudes about the welfare state supports particular developments in theory.