A Look at State‐Level Risk Assessment in the United States: Making Decisions in the Absence of Federal Risk Values

State environmental agencies in the United States are charged with making risk management decisions that protect public health and the environment while managing limited technical, financial, and human resources. Meanwhile, the federal risk assessment community that provides risk assessment guidance to state agencies is challenged by the rapid growth of the global chemical inventory. When chemical toxicity profiles are unavailable on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Risk Information System or other federal resources, each state agency must act independently to identify and select appropriate chemical risk values for application in human health risk assessment. This practice can lead to broad interstate variation in the toxicity values selected for any one chemical. Within this context, this article describes the decision‐making process and resources used by the federal government and individual U.S. states. The risk management of trichloroethylene (TCE) in the United States is presented as a case study to demonstrate the need for a collaborative approach among U.S. states toward identification and selection of chemical risk values while awaiting federal risk values to be set. The regulatory experience with TCE is contrasted with collaborative risk science models, such as the European Union's efforts in risk assessment harmonization. Finally, we introduce State Environmental Agency Risk Collaboration for Harmonization, a free online interactive tool designed to help to create a collaborative network among state agencies to provide a vehicle for efficiently sharing information and resources, and for the advancement of harmonization in risk values used among U.S. states when federal guidance is unavailable.     

Institutionalising a cross-sectional policy area? Ministerial competences for migrant integration in EU member states

Migrant integration is a cross-sectional policy issue and its governance involves a network of actors operating on different regional and government levels. Its emergence as a distinct policy area in many European democracies has reinvigorated the role of state actors, particularly at the national level. National governments face a growing need to coordinate formerly disparate domestic integration measures, yet they are also encouraged by increasing activities and resources that have evolved at the EU level. From an institutional perspective, this spread of both norms and resources is likely to result in the emergence of new governmental actors assigned with these tasks. Yet, little scholarly attention has so far been dedicated to the comparison of ministerial competences for migrant integration across Europe and their relation to integration policies. The paper addresses this gap in a comparative study, presenting data on the ministerial competences in 27 EU member states and Switzerland between 2010 and 2014 and linking them to data on migrant integration policies using the MIPEX dataset. The findings show no general European trend towards top-level institutionalisation and instead reveal substantial differences between Western and Eastern European democracies associated with the respective patterns of integration policies.     

Muster des schulischen Erfolgs von jugendlichen Migranten in Deutschland: Evidenz für segmentierte Assimilation?

Using the extension of the national PISA 2003 sample (PISA 2003-E) of 15-year-old students, this study analyzes assimilation patterns of immigrants from Turkey, the former USSR, and Poland in terms of educational attainment and performance in mathematics. It explores the extent to which segmented assimilation processes are observed for these groups. Increasing similarity of immigrant students across generations with native students on these dimensions would support the notion of straight-line assimilation, whereas stability in disparities would point to downward assimilation. The results of the study suggest downward assimilation for immigrant students of Turkish descent regarding educational attainment and performance in mathematics. Students whose families immigrated from the former USSR or Poland, in contrast, show patterns of straight-line assimilation. In addition, our analyses suggest that capturing immigrant status as precisely as possible (1.5 generation, intermarriage) is important, as significant differences in educational success and living conditions of these groups would otherwise be overlooked.     

Ethnic Mobilization in south Tyrol: A primordial identity in crisis

South Tyrol and the German minority are portrayed as one of the most successful forms of ethnic mobilization in Western Europe. Its distinct historic roots and the related symbolic codes of collective identity formation can be seen as a classical example for territorially‐based minority politics. On the basis of a constructivist approach the thesis is developed that the primordial collective identity, dominant in South Tyrol, has generated very particular patterns of ethnic mobilization and conflict. On the one hand, it has secured the intransigent protest of the German population fighting an enforced Italianization ‘ over decades. On the other hand, however, this firm of collective identity is simultaneously fostering the recent crisis of ethnic politics in South Tyrol. The more general argument is made that in highly modem, European‐oriented society a primordial understanding of ethnic loyalty is no longer able to provide stable patterns of social integration and political loyalty. In this respect, the South Tyrolean case is interpreted as an example of how primordial patterns of collective identity and related political mobilization tend to lose their firm base in highly modern society.     

Randomization of neighbour balanced generalized Youden designs

If a crossover design with more than two treatments is carryover balanced, then the usual randomization of experimental units and periods would destroy the neighbour structure of the design. As an alternative, Bailey [1985. Restricted randomization for neighbour-balanced designs. Statist. Decisions Suppl. 2, 237–248] considered randomization of experimental units and of treatment labels, which leaves the neighbour structure intact. She has shown that, if there are no carryover effects, this randomization validates the row–column model, provided the starting design is a generalized Latin square. We extend this result to generalized Youden designs where either the number of experimental units is a multiple of the number of treatments or the number of periods is equal to the number of treatments. For the situation when there are carryover effects we show for so-called totally balanced designs that the variance of the estimates of treatment differences does not change in the presence of carryover effects, while the estimated variance of this estimate becomes conservative.     

The Identity‐Matching Principle: Corporate and Organizational Identification in a Franchising System*

This paper examines corporate and organizational identification in franchisee organizations from the perspective of the social identity approach. We propose the identity‐matching principle (IMP) as a heuristic for understanding and predicting the different effects of nested identifications. According to the IMP, when identifications and relevant behavioural or attitudinal outcomes address the same level of categorization, their relationship will be stronger. A study is presented with employees (n=281) matched to managers (n=101). Supporting the IMP, organizational identification (but not corporate identification) predicted customer‐oriented behaviour on the level of the local organization, whereas corporate identification (but not organizational identification) predicted attitude toward corporate citizenship behaviour. Furthermore, multilevel analyses showed that these relationships were enhanced in organizations where managers displayed the respective behaviours themselves to a greater extent. Implications for theorizing about leadership and organizational attachments are discussed alongside recommendations for organizational practitioners.