Management commitment to safety and health in residential construction: HomeSafe spending trends 1991-1999

The support of good management is fundamental to the success of any safety and health program. Residential construction is a high-risk industry requiring significant commitment by management to impact day-to-day safety and health challenges. Investigators have evaluated management practices and spending trends in a cohort of 228 residential homebuilders in the Denver metro area of Colorado. Findings suggest that companies significantly increased dollars allocated to support safety and health practices between 1991 and 1999. In addition, the HomeSafe Pilot Program has positively impacted financial commitments of partner companies. Resource allocations were significantly greater for specific expense categories when comparing pre to post HomeSafe intervention. This paper presents data on the use of written safety and health programs, safety committees, and workers compensation premium cost containment certification, as well as allocations to safety incentive programs (SIP), personal protective equipment (PPE), other safety equipment (OSE), and safety training (ST).     

Mixture designs for constrained components in orthogonal blocks

It is often the case in mixture experiments that some of the ingredients, such as additives or flavourings, are included with proportions constrained to lie in a restricted interval, while the majority of the mixture is made up of a particular ingredient used as a filler. The experimental region in such cases is restricted to a parallelepiped in or near one corner of the full simplex region. In this paper, orthogonally blocked designs with two experimental blends on each edge of the constrained region are considered for mixture experiments with three and four ingredients. The optimal symmetric orthogonally blocked designs within this class are determined and it is shown that even better designs are obtained for the asymmetric situation, in which some experimental blends are taken at the vertices of the experimental region. Some examples are given to show how these ideas may be extended to identify good designs in three and four blocks. Finally, an example is included to illustrate how to overcome the problems of collinearity that sometimes occur when fitting quadratic models to experimental data from mixture experiments in which some of the ingredient proportions are restricted to small values.     

Codes and conflict

Conclusion If theory caused a more critical study of war, it would have achieved its purpose. (Clausewitz)In this article I have shown that in times of war, beneath the apparently rational surface of modern societies and states there lurks a powerful religious dimension that is of crucial importance in structuring political and military activity, in informing public, political, and intellectual discourse, and in shaping opinion, beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, and social action. The religious dimension is neither a mere jumble of diffuse sentiments, beliefs, and ideas, nor a simple ideological reflection of social interests — it is an autonomous, internally coherent, analogically organized code that specifies sacred and profane elements and embodies an endogenous apophantic logic. This analytically autonomous code provides for the specification of war as ritual in concrete historical sequences. If the reader comes away from this article feeling that she better understands the role and organization of culture in war, and that consequently war cannot be explained, understood, and interpreted only in terms of economic, geopolitical, and psychological variables, then I will have achieved my chief objective here. However, I hope that this article also has a larger contribution to make. Sociology has inherited a rich tradition of ideas from its founding fathers. This tradition, enshrined in the classic works of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, has informed and shaped the discipline. It seems a shame that contemporary trends in social thought and research draw increasingly upon selected strands of thought in the legacy of only two of those gentlemen. The result of this movement, I believe, is not just a trend toward impoverished uni-dimensional studies of social reality, but also the loss of the auto-critical possibilities engendered by a discourse that draws upon diverse theoretical resources. As I have tried to demonstrate here, Durkheim's legacy, with its unique emphasis on ritual and symbolism, still provides a useful resource for the critique of social theory and the analysis of social life — even in those areas where one would least expect any fruitful insights to arise. More importantly, as Clausewitz recognized, theory contains the possibility not merely for the formal study, but also for the critical study of war. With its stress on voluntarism, a Durkheimian theory of war provides a vital and distinct contrast to those theories of war that attribute causation to factors outside of human control, be they psychological, geopolitical, or economic. The awareness of ethical responsibility arising from such an under-standing provides, one would like to think, the possibility for change.     

Management and the social environment

Most social change in the past 50 years in the U.K. has been associated with the relatively slow maturing of a highly industrialized society. There are now clear signs that Britain is entering an ‘age of discontinuity’ and that, increasingly, social change will reflect transition from an industrialized to a post-industrial stage of development. This transition will inevitably involve a transfer of power in society, away from the industrial organization and on to other institutions—the state itself, organized labour, consumer organizations and various pressure groups. In the context of such changes it becomes more and more imperative that business organizations should take social factors into account in decision making and that managers should acquire new knowledge and techniques to enable them to contribute to this process. The role of the management educator should be to heighten social awareness among managers, to stimulate a need for knowledge of the social environment and of social change, to indicate where and how such knowledge can be acquired, and to help managers develop skills and techniques of analysis and decision-making appropriate to social data.     

Analysis of means: a generalized approach using R

Papers on the analysis of means (ANOM) have been circulating in the quality control literature for decades, routinely describing it as a statistical stand-alone concept. Therefore, we clarify that ANOM should rather be regarded as a special case of a much more universal approach known as multiple contrast tests (MCTs). Perceiving ANOM as a grand-mean-type MCT paves the way for implementing it in the open-source software R. We give a brief tutorial on how to exploit R's versatility and introduce the R package ANOM for drawing the familiar decision charts. Beyond that, we illustrate two practical aspects of data analysis with ANOM: firstly, we compare merits and drawbacks of ANOM-type MCTs and ANOVA F-test and assess their respective statistical powers, and secondly, we show that the benefit of using critical values from multivariate t-distributions for ANOM instead of simple Bonferroni quantiles is oftentimes negligible.     

Minimum Scoring Rule Inference

Proper scoring rules are devices for encouraging honest assessment of probability distributions. Just like log‐likelihood, which is a special case, a proper scoring rule can be applied to supply an unbiased estimating equation for any statistical model, and the theory of such equations can be applied to understand the properties of the associated estimator. In this paper, we discuss some novel applications of scoring rules to parametric inference. In particular, we focus on scoring rule test statistics, and we propose suitable adjustments to allow reference to the usual asymptotic chi‐squared distribution. We further explore robustness and interval estimation properties, by both theory and simulations.     

Debiasing illusion of control in individual judgment: the role of internal and external advice seeking

This paper builds on behavioral strategy and strategic decision making literatures to propose a stronger integration of information acquisition behaviors in debiasing research. We argue that the advice-seeking behavior of executives—as their dominant way of information acquisition—may have a fundamental effect on cognitive biases in individual judgment. Empirical results of a vignette-based survey of 186 top executives in German SMEs support this claim. We posit that internal and external advice affect individual judgment differently and that external advice, in particular, is likely to be effective for debiasing. These results suggest new avenues for debiasing research that go beyond the active intervention techniques that have been the focus of debiasing research thus far.