Towards a social history of suffering: Dignity,misery and disrespect

ABSTRACT

This article examines the working-class audience in Soviet Ukraine and the changes in its reading appetites during the 1920s. Under the Soviet nationalities policy of korenizatsiia introduced in 1923, the print-runs of Ukrainian-language literary products increased significantly. Nonetheless, as this article argues, those numerous publications often did not reach Ukrainian readers and if they did, they could hardly satisfy the interest appetites of an ever-growing Ukrainian audience. As the book reviews collected in the second half of the 1920s showed, the worker readers were interested in a certain type of literature – entertaining, easy to comprehend, dealing with contemporary issues and characters – that was not yet available in Ukrainian. Nevertheless, once that literature began to emerge in the late 1920s, the interest in contemporary books in Ukrainian increased. By examining every aspect of reading in Ukrainian – production, dissemination and consumption of the printed word – this article highlights the decisive role of Soviet readership in determining future official Soviet Ukrainian literature. The case of Soviet Ukraine emphasizes regional specifics and introduces an important language component to the Bolshevik reading revolution of the 1920s to early 1930s, largely ignored in the scholarship.     

Environmental Refugees? Classifying Human Migrations Caused by Environmental Change

What distinguishes environmental refugees from other refugees—or other migrants? Are all environmental refugees alike? This essay develops a classification to begin to answer these questions and facilitate future policies and research on environmental refugees. Environmental refugees may have considerable control over the decision to migrate, but this varies by the type of environmental disruption. The origin, intention, and duration of environmental disruptions shape the type of refugee. Refugees from disasters and expropriations have limited control over whether environmental changes will produce migration. Gradual degradation allows “environmental emigrants” to determine how they will respond to environmental change.     

What Does it Mean to Listen to People with Dementia?

A total of 19 people with dementia were interviewed as part of a study into unmet respite care need amongst caregivers and day-care attenders in Sheffield. Some important contextual debates associated with conducting social research with people with dementia are considered. These include informed consent, competency, and how the interests of caregivers and people with dementia are bound together. A form of process consent was used in conducting semi-structured interviews with day-care attenders. Day-care attenders spoke about 'being here' in a number of ways. These include their initial experiences, their sources of satisfaction and their sense of being in families. These substantive findings and the associated methodological insights suggest day-care attenders have important things to say as service-users if appropriate strategies for listening are employed. Service-providers can collaborate imaginatively with day-care attenders to actively explore how care might be shaped by the experiences of persons with dementia.     

Validation of the Learning Transfer System Inventory (LTSI) in the Korean corporate context

Lack of a valid instrument to measure learning transfer predictors has been the major obstacle hindering Human Resource Development (HRD) professionals from moving forward. This problem is one of the lingering HRD issues in South Korea, in which human resources have been strategically emphasized as a critical asset due to the scarcity of natural resources. To address this issue, this study aims at testing the validity and reliability of the data collected with the Korean Learning Transfer System Inventory (LTSI) Version 4. A sample of 753 managers from 16 Korean industries was divided into two subsamples for exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Reliability and the effect of common method variance on the factor structure were examined, with the results suggesting that the LTSI is valid for use in the Korean industry.     

Management consultancy’s role in delivering lasting [triple bottom line] benefits

Abstract

Management consultants have become ubiquitous in helping improve organizational performance. This paper presents an investigation of the impact of their interventions on organizational sustainability and growth through the performance improvement work carried out for and with their clients. The paper presents the findings of a questionnaire survey of 440 respondents from 206 countries; 197 of respondents were Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and 243 from large organizations. There is a particular focus on knowledge transfer in terms of urgency and impact of the work with regard to the extent to which consulting interventions in SMEs, as well as large multinational corporations, embed long-term sustainability practices.     

On comparing two methods for approximate conditional inference

Approximate conditional inference for a real parameter in the presence of nuisance parameters was examined from a sample-space differential viewpoint in Fraser and Reid (1988) and a conditional inference procedure was proposed. Conditional likelihood-based inference in the same setting was discussed in Cox and Reid (1987), where emphasis was placed on orthogonalizing the nuisance parameter to the parameter of interest. In this paper the sample-space partitions of the two methods are examined for the case that the minimal sufficient statistic has the same dimension as the parameter space. The methods are identical if observed and expected information gives the same orthogonality; an example indicates how they can differ more generally. A specially chosen reparameterization provides some geometrical insight to the methods and allows a comparison in terms of score functions and locally defined orthogonal parameters.     

Adult youth workers’ conceptions of their work in an under-resourced community in the United States

This study examined adult workers’ conceptions of their work with youth in a large, underserved, urban region in the northeastern United States. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 18 youth workers from various organizations, affiliated with a community coalition focused on substance abuse prevention, we explored how adults viewed their role of working with youth. We were particularly interested in whether these workers saw youth empowerment and collaboration with youth for community change as part of their role. Our data suggested that while workers in this study were very supportive of youth, the support and actions they provided were on behalf of rather than with them and that, in general, partnering with youth for community change was not a part of what they envisioned their work to be. While a few of the adults attempted to work more collaboratively with youth, they were clearly in the minority.