The fourth age and the concept of a ‘social imaginary’: A theoretical excursus

This paper explores the idea of the ‘fourth age’ as a form of social imaginary. During the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the cultural framing of old age and its modern institutionalisation within society began to lose some of its former chronological coherence. The ‘pre-modern’ distinction made between the status of ‘the elder’ and the state of ‘senility’ has re-emerged in the ‘late modern’ distinction between the ‘third’ and the ‘fourth’ age. The centuries-old distaste for and fear of old age as ‘senility’ has been compounded by the growing medicalization of later life, the emergence and expansion of competing narratives associated with the third age, and the progressive ‘densification’ of the disabilities within the older institutionalised population. The result can be seen as the emergence of a ‘late modern’ social imaginary deemed as the fourth age. This paper outlines the theoretical evolution of the concept of a social imaginary and demonstrates its relevance to aging studies and its applicability to the fourth age.     

Do self‐assessment and self‐directed support undermine traditional social work with disabled people?

In recent years, self‐assessment and self‐directed support have become mainstream options within disability services. The Disabled People’s Movement has advocated the need for such change for a long time but this has been persistently resisted by many social workers. In this article, it will be argued that both self‐assessment and self‐directed support undermine traditional social work and that social workers need to begin to work alongside disabled people, rather than ‘for’ disabled people, in order to achieve substantial system change.     

FATHERS’ USE OF LEAVE IN AUSTRALIA

This paper examines Australian fathers’ use of leave at the time of the birth of a child, drawing on data from The Parental Leave in Australia Survey, conducted in 2005, and a subsequent organizational case study. Our analysis shows that although most Australian fathers take some leave for parental purposes, use of formally designated paternity or parental leave is limited. This is unsurprising given the Australian policy framework, which lacks legislative provision for paid paternity or parental leave, and does not require any of the shared unpaid parental-leave entitlement to be reserved for fathers. Use of leave is shown to be influenced primarily by fathers’ employment characteristics, with those working in small organizations or non-permanent positions least likely to utilize paternity or other forms of leave. Overall, the analysis suggests that improvements in the policy framework would increase Australian fathers’ propensity to take parental leave, but highlights barriers to usage associated with labour market divisions and career pressures that will not be solved solely by the adoption of more progressive leave policies.     

Floating ideas—An experiment in enhancing hypergames with maps

Within the OR community, an increasing emphasis is being placed on developing approaches to tackle complex, ‘messy’ decision problems. The work described in this paper arose out of the premise that it would be desirable to integrate ideas from a number of different approaches of this type. Specifically, the paper describes one experimental attempt to link methods for modelling conflict situations (the analysis of options and hypergames) with the cognitive mapping approach to eliciting subjective data. Taking a personally-owned decision problem, mapping was used to enrich the game-based approaches by providing a way of documenting the argumentation underlying the models used. Though difficult to generalise from, the experiment not only suggested that such an extension is likely to be an improvement, but also highlighted some deficiencies in the existing versions of the game-based approaches themselves.     

Profile upper Confidence Limits from Discrete Data

When the data are discrete, standard approximate confidence limits often have coverage well below nominal for some parameter values. While ad hoc adjustments may largely solve this problem for particular cases, Kabaila & Lloyd (1997) gave a more systematic method of adjustment which leads to tight upper limits, which have coverage which is never below nominal and are as small as possible within a particular class. However, their computation for all but the simplest models is infeasible. This paper suggests modifying tight upper limits by an initial replacement of the unknown nuisance parameter vector by its profile maximum likelihood estimator. While the resulting limits no longer possess the optimal properties of tight limits exactly, the paper presents both numerical and theoretical evidence that the resulting coverage function is close to optimal. Moreover these profile upper limits are much (possibly many orders of magnitude) easier to compute than tight upper limits.     

Preaching to the converted: conversion language and the constitution of the TV evangelical community

A paradox is noted in the presentation of conversion in TV evangelism; this is that although the necessity of being converted is a common theme it is clear that the evangelists are aware that their audience is already converted. An attempt is made to resolve the paradox by showing how TV evangelists use conversion language as rhetoric to legitimate their role and the rationality of the organisation which they represent. It is further shown how this legitimation is itself made possible through another use of conversion language which creates a sense of moral community embracing evangelists, organisation and audience as copartners in the shared project of conversion. Finally, it is shown how the presentation of TV evangelism as the central ritual of a moral community generates a further conversion rhetoric which depicts the community as both exclusive of and yet open to non-members; a contradiction which is resolved through the establishment of distinctive roles within the community related to the activity of winning converts.     

The Corporate Management of Human Resources Under Conditions of Decentralization

This paper relates an aspect of recent corporate change – namely, decentralization – to the strategic management of human resources. Corporate attention to human resources in the decentralized organization is of particular interest because it represents a significant departure from decentralized norms, and signals a major revision of thinking about the role, status, and activities of the personnel function. At the centre of the argument is the notion of the internal labour market, a hitherto neglected theme in treatments of decentralization. The paper begins by outlining the circumstances that encouraged decentralization in the 1980s. It then sets out the influences on the operation of a corporate internal labour market, before identifying initiatives taken by some firms to offset the shortcomings of decentralization without overturning it. In the process, the shift in the centre of gravity of the corporate personnel function, away from industrial relations management and towards human resource development, has been reinforced.