Professional Perspectives on Decision Making about the Long-term Care of Older People

With the increasing pressure on social and health care resources,professionals have to be more explicit in their decision makingregarding the long-term care of older people. This groundedtheory study used 19 focus groups and nine semi-structured interviews(99 staff in total) to explore professional perspectives onthis decision making. Focus group participants and intervieweescomprised care managers, social workers, consultant geriatricians,general medical practitioners, community nurses, home care managers,occupational therapists and hospital discharge support staff.The emerging themes spanned context, clients, families and services.Decisions were often prompted by a crisis, hindering professionalsseeking to make a measured assessment. Fear of burglary andassault, and the willingness and availability of family to helpwere major factors in decisions about living at home. Serviceavailability in terms of public funding for community care,the availability of home care workers and workload pressureson primary care services influenced decision ‘thresholds’regarding admission to institutional care. Assessment toolsdesigned to assist decision making about the long-term careof older people need to take into account the critical aspectsof individual fears and motivation, family support and the availabilityof publicly funded services as well as functional and medicalneeds.     

Temporary workers in Canada: a multifaceted program

"This article highlights important developments in the character of temporary worker flows to Canada between 1973 and 1985 through the use of unpublished data and new measures for analyzing this data. The number of employment authorizations are converted to person years to indicate the overall labor market impact of temporary worker flows and this measure is employed in an analysis of unpublished data from Employment and Immigration Canada. The analysis reveals that a significant and growing proportion of employment authorizations are exempted from governmental procedures which link the admission of temporary workers to the Canadian labor market." Reasons for these exemptions and policy implications are discussed     

The context of correctness: A comment on rushton

According to Philippe Rushton, the equalitarian fiction, a scientific hoax that races are genetically equal in cognitive ability, underlies the politically correct objections to his research on racial differences. He maintains that there is a taboo against race unequaled by the Inquisition. I show that while Rushton has been publicly harassed, he has had continuous opportunities to present his findings in diverse, widely available, respectable journals, and no general suppression within academic psychology is evident. Similarly, Henry Garrett and his associates in the LAAEE, dedicated to preserving segregation and preventing race suicide, disseminated their ideas widely, although Garrett complained of the equalitarian fiction in 1961. Examination of the intertwined history ofMankind Quarterly, German Rassenhygiene, far right politics, and the work of Roger Pearson suggests that some cries of political correctness must be viewed with great caution.Preparation of this paper was not supported by any grant, foundation, political, or religious organization.specializing in the history of psychology and psychological aesthetics.     

Strategies for planning

In recent years there has been a good deal of discussion amongst planning specialists and academics about the gap which exists between the theory of planning as set out in journals and textbooks, and the practice of planning in private and public organizations. Planners are continually complaining about the resistance to planning by top management and operating managers in divisions and departments.In this article the author aims to produce a reconciliation between theory and practice and to discuss what alternative strategies are open to planners in devising planning systems for their organizations.He suggests that the problem has its origin in the fact that corporate planning theory was first developed by management scientists as a total systems approach. Corporate planners have failed to sell an integrated planning system either as programme budgeting or as corporate planning. Research suggests that a management team can only adopt and implement a comprehensive planning system in very special circumstances, e.g. when the organization's survival is threatened, a new management team has been appointed and the staff of the organization are ready to accept radical change.In normal circumstances the planner is wrong to advocate a ‘root and branch’ solution. He must diagnose the planning needs of the organization and his objective must be not merely to establish a particular planning procedure but rather to discover how he can best improve the quality of management decisions.Recent studies on strategy formation indicate that the introduction of a formal planning procedure is only a partial answer to the problem of improving the quality of management decisions.The paper reviews various approaches to planning and considers how they relate to organizations with different strategic problems, with differing organization structures and various management styles.     

Determinants of Organizational Flexibility: A Study in an Emerging Economy

This paper examines the processes of organizational adaptation and competitiveness of firms in an emerging economy. The study is set in the Argentinian context of the 1990s when a combination of economic and political change triggered a massive change in the competitive context of indigenous firms. Two highly flexible firms and two less‐flexible firms are studied from the pharmaceutical and edible oil industries and longitudinal data are supplied to explore the determinants of organizational flexibility in those organizations.     

Making sense of the senses across species boundaries: designing the Animal Senses gallery at National Museums Scotland

As one of a suite of natural science galleries in the National Museum of Scotland, Animal Senses presents a comprehensive overview of how animals have evolved senses as they have adapted to different ecological niches in order to find food or avoid predation. Using different sensory channels, they also have evolved means of communication to attract mates, deter rivals, and remain hidden from predators and prey. Some of the most extraordinary examples of evolution are those which mimic the appearance of another unrelated species or some feature of the environment such as a thorn on a bush or a piece of coral. New taxidermy and models, engaging text presented hierarchically, and fun interactives were developed specifically for this gallery in order to present an up-to-date review of senses and communication. However, its real strength is the wide array of real specimens and life-size models which allow visitors to see what these animals really look like and how big they are, experiences which cannot be emulated by books or electronic media. By taking a thematic approach, we have created an unrivalled opportunity to compare animals from different taxonomic groups to see how they have solved the problems of life by evolving similar structures or completely different ones in order to find food, avoid being eaten, navigate, find mates and deceive rivals and predators.     

Estimation of nonseparable models with censored dependent variables and endogenous regressors

In this article we develop a nonparametric estimator for the local average response of a censored dependent variable to endogenous regressors in a nonseparable model where the unobservable error term is not restricted to be scalar and where the nonseparable function need not be monotone in the unobservables. We formalize the identification argument put forward in Altonji, Ichimura, and Otsu (2012 Altonji, J. G., Ichimura, H., Otsu, T. (2012). Estimating derivatives in nonseparable models with limited dependent variables. Econometrica 80:1701–1719.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), construct a nonparametric estimator, characterize its asymptotic property, and conduct a Monte Carlo investigation to study its small sample properties. Identification is constructive and is achieved through a control function approach. We show that the estimator is consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. The Monte Carlo results are encouraging.