Aiming for Excellence: Reflections on the Advanced Institute of Management Research and its Elite

In 2002, the UK government launched the Advanced Institute of Management Research, a major initiative intended to raise the quality of research in business schools. Rather than offering research grants in open competition, AIM deliberately funded a select few leading lights in management. Insufficient allowance was made for the Research Assessment Exercise, which measured research excellence in terms of papers published in top journals. The AIM's elite exploited its existing publishing advantage, and AIM provided further resources to aid their efforts. The AIM recruited willing acolytes to work with its elite in fashioning the sort of papers required by the top journals of management – positive papers, consensual and endlessly citable. Analysis of the publishing patterns of AIM senior fellows reveals research cliques and publication silos rather than a network organization. Much as the elite saw its AIM funding as recognition of its own excellence, so AIM itself came to be seen as acknowledgement of the excellence of management research as a whole. That AIM existed to raise management research from intellectual poverty was forgotten. The AIM was wound up in 2012, having spent £30 million, most of it on the subject's elite. The problems that beset management research remain.     

Image warping using radial basis functions

Image warping is the process of deforming an image through a transformation of its domain, which is typically a subset of R². Given the destination of a collection of points, the problem becomes one of finding a suitable smooth interpolation for the destinations of the remaining points of the domain. A common solution is to use the thin plate spline (TPS). We find that the TPS often introduces unintended distortions of image structures. In this paper, we will analyze interpolation by TPS, experiment with other radial basis functions, and suggest two alternative functions that provide better results.     

Assessment in Adult Protective Services: do multidisciplinary teams make a difference?

This study compared 2 approaches to the assessment of Adult Protective Services (APS) cases. Using administrative data from 869 cases in 2 counties in Maryland, the differences between a nurse/social worker team and a lone social worker in case disposition, risk reduction, recidivism, and cost effectiveness were examined. Lone social workers were significantly more likely to confirm financial exploitation, physical abuse, and neglect by others; while the team approach resulted in significantly greater risk reduction. No differences were observed in relation to recidivism, self-neglect and cost savings. Given limited resources, research that examines optimal staffing patterns in APS agencies is warranted.     

A Model Curriculum for Occupational Social Work

This paper reports the results of a survey experiment in which a national sample of NASW members was presented with systematically altered versions of a summary of a hypothetical study of casework effectiveness and asked to make judgments about the quality of the research, its importance to social work, and its significance for their own practice. It was found that although respondents distinguished between studies with good and bad research designs, their judgments of the quality of the research and its implications for their own practice were significantly influenced by whether the findings were positive or negative.     

The Phallus and the Person: Commentary on Paper by Taras Babiak

This discussion of Babiak's clinical account traces the macrotrajectory of Bart's therapeutic process toward broadly competent personhood rather than narrowly phallic compensation. The steps toward accomplishing this complex macrotransition are delineated in the microtrajectory of the “crunch” session between Babiak and Bart, during which Babiak traverses shock and challenge by introducing between them empathic recognition, evidence of mentalization, survival of boundaries and containing limits, down-regulation of raw affective urgency, “paternal” improvisation and a metaphorization of concrete action imperatives, interpretive linking, and a negotiation process that widened potential space for an eventual approach to intersubjectivity.     

Remeasuring ageing in Hong Kong SAR; or ‘keeping the demographic window open’

Hong Kong SAR has among both the lowest fertility rates and highest life expectancy in the world. Under the current calculation of the Old Age Dependency Ratio (OADR), Hong Kong is, understandably, ageing extremely rapidly. This is a cause of significant concern among policy makers. However, OADR assumes that the entire population aged above 65 is both ‘old’ and ‘dependent’, neither of which is clearly defined, and that all aged below 65 are active in the labour force. Furthermore, because the rate is fundamentally based upon a European/North American model of pension and retirement it is arguably less appropriate to areas of the world where retirement ages are more fluid and pension systems less developed. We apply and extend a method for Hong Kong, designed by Sanderson and Scherbov, to ‘remeasure ageing’ by taking remaining life expectancy as the constant, rather than years lived by using projected life tables and 1 × 1 population projections. In doing so, we show that Sanderson and Scherbov’s new ‘prospective’ measurements of ageing more accurately reflect the increased longevity and vitality of Hong Kong’s population. Rather than passively accepting fate as a ‘rapidly ageing’ population, East Asian economies can be active in rethinking society’s relationship to work and other activities across the life-cycle. By adapting existing measurements to take into account the different welfare regimes in East Asia, we can radically alter the timeframe in which population ageing becomes ‘critical’. This allows more time to develop a more holistic life-course view of the relationship between work, longevity and fertility and to actively tackle ageing in an optimistic way.