Management paradigms for the new millennium

A proliferation of paradigms is occurring in management thought and practice, defining paradigms as means of understanding the world and a basis for informing action. Frequent paradigm shifts are essential for survival in a business context of constant innovation. While the idea of paradigms has been widely received in management, it has been so more as a contested than a settled domain. Management paradigms are far more numerous than those of the natural sciences that Kuhn studied. Kuhn expected the long periods of normality to be marked by an absence of paradigmatic questioning and strife. In management, at any time, there are a number of competing paradigms available.
Kuhn was concerned to chart how changing realities of investigation were tied up with changing perceptions. In business the focus has been much more on the changing realities rather than changing perspectives. In any system that is ecologically interdependent, if you change any paradigmatic part then you change the whole. When there is sufficient change and fluidity in a system then we can speak of a 'paradigm shift': that period when a shift occurs from one paradigm set to another, the transition from one wave to the next. In these conditions uncertainty and ambiguity will apply. Discontinuous change is a step shift in the rate of change that invalidates existing assumptions and begins to transform the rules of competition.     

Education and affinity? pedagogies of sexual citizenship in LGBTIQ youth support videos

ABSTRACT

This article provides an analysis of some of the ways in which educational resources for youth frame identity, sexuality and normativity within broader contexts of support and sexual citizenship. It focuses on online video resources for young people produced in Australia by the LGBTIQ support and curriculum advocacy organisation Safe Schools Coalition Australia and by the Minus18 Foundation. Developed as part of the larger All of Us educational package, these videos are explicitly pedagogical, presenting the viewer with ‘real life’ experiences from a range of young Australians. We consider the work the All of Us videos do in engaging with concepts of sexual citizenship, particularly as they seek to help young people navigate multiple forms of belonging and support. Of special interest is a series of tensions between normalising tendencies and the complexification of identities, communities, intimacies and belongings. While the videos may be perceived to operate within largely normative conceptualisations of sexuality, they explore ways of building affinity, peer support, and alternative ways of being that extend well beyond the logics usually offered by these frameworks.     

A fast robust method for fitting gamma distributions

The art of fitting gamma distributions robustly is described. In particular we compare methods of fitting via minimizing a Cramér Von Mises distance, an L ₂ minimum distance estimator, and fitting a B-optimal M-estimator. After a brief prelude on robust estimation explaining the merits in terms of weak continuity and Fréchet differentiability of all the aforesaid estimators from an asymptotic point of view, a comparison is drawn with classical estimation and fitting. In summary, we give a practical example where minimizing a Cramér Von Mises distance is both efficacious in terms of efficiency and robustness as well as being easily implemented. Here gamma distributions arise naturally for “in control” representation indicators from measurements of spectra when using fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. However, estimating the in-control parameters for these distributions is often difficult, due to the occasional occurrence of outliers.     

Bayesian Weibull tree models for survival analysis of clinico-genomic data

An important goal of research involving gene expression data for outcome prediction is to establish the ability of genomic data to define clinically relevant risk factors. Recent studies have demonstrated that microarray data can successfully cluster patients into low- and high-risk categories. However, the need exists for models which examine how genomic predictors interact with existing clinical factors and provide personalized outcome predictions. We have developed clinico-genomic tree models for survival outcomes which use recursive partitioning to subdivide the current data set into homogeneous subgroups of patients, each with a specific Weibull survival distribution. These trees can provide personalized predictive distributions of the probability of survival for individuals of interest. Our strategy is to fit multiple models; within each model we adopt a prior on the Weibull scale parameter and update this prior via Empirical Bayes whenever the sample is split at a given node. The decision to split is based on a Bayes factor criterion. The resulting trees are weighted according to their relative likelihood values and predictions are made by averaging over models. In a pilot study of survival in advanced stage ovarian cancer we demonstrate that clinical and genomic data are complementary sources of information relevant to survival, and we use the exploratory nature of the trees to identify potential genomic biomarkers worthy of further study.     

He wahine tangi tikapa 1 …: Statutory investigative processes and the grieving of Maori families who have lost a baby to SIDS

Abstract

Among Maori families, the loss of an infant to SIDS is a terrible burden that reverberates through social networks for years after the event. The statutory services that investigate the death have a huge impact on such processes. This qualitative investigation studied the experiences of whanau following a SIDS death by reporting narrative data, gathered from families, police officers, coroners, and pathologists. Thematic analyses revealed multiple domains of high significance—police actions, post‐mortem, and coronial process—to bereaved whanau, and this paper considers their implications for grieving, service provision, and social justice.     

LATIN AMERICA

Abstract

This article draws on theories of colonial discourse, cultural representation, subjectivity, feminist studies, cultural studies, and historical analysis to examine how the representations of American Indians in 1990s television fiction are constructed, especially in the American television fictions Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks and Paradise. Central to this analysis is the discussion of colonial discourse and representations of American Indians as Other on popular American television and, more generally, in mainstream American discourse. This examination is set in the context of the issues surrounding the treatment of Indian people in mainstream history, in film, and in contemporary television fiction. It is the authors' position that in the easy acceptance of a stereotyped cultural construction, mainstream America has come to little knowledge or understanding of American Indian nations, their contemporary concerns, or their discrete identities. For the mass market, their contemporary concerns, or their discrete identities. For the mass market, the Indian is either the Vanishing Race of Edward Curtis's photographs or the savage of the captivity narratives, and the process by which that imaginary functions to contain American Indian identity continues in our most popular narrative today: television fiction.