Integrated Analysis: Combining Risk and Economic Assessments While Preserving the Separation of Powers

This article presents a process for an integrated policy analysis that combines risk assessment and benefit-cost analysis. This concept, which explicitly combines the two types of related analyses, seems to contradict the long-accepted risk analysis paradigm of separating risk assessment and risk management since benefit-cost analysis is generally considered to be a part of risk management. Yet that separation has become a problem because benefit-cost analysis uses risk assessment results as a starting point and considerable debate over the last several years focused on the incompatibility of the use of upper bounds or "safe" point estimates in many risk assessments with benefit-cost analysis. The problem with these risk assessments is that they ignore probabilistic information. As advanced probabilistic techniques for risk assessment emerge and economic analysts receive distributions of risks instead of point estimates, the artificial separation between risk analysts and the economic/decision analysts complicates the overall analysis. In addition, recent developments in countervailing risk theory suggest that combining the risk and benefit-cost analyses is required to fully understand the complexity of choices and tradeoffs faced by the decisionmaker. This article also argues that the separation of analysis and management is important, but that benefit-cost analysis has been wrongly classified into the risk management category and that the analytical effort associated with understanding the economic impacts of risk reduction actions need to be part of a broader risk assessment process.     

Evaluation of error across natural gas pipeline incidents

This paper demonstrates how qualitative analysis can be a novel means of investigating theories of error and causation in natural gas pipeline incidents. Qualitative analysis offers unique opportunities to understand process, interactions, and the role of context in identifying active error and latent conditions in incident causation. Through the coding of text from 24 onshore natural gas pipeline incident reports on leaks and explosions in the United States and Canada, our findings reveal a proportion of active and latent errors consistent with other hazardous infrastructure contexts (roughly 3:1 latent-active ratio across 817 coded errors). These findings underscore the robustness of extant error theory and support the argument for documenting multiple, connected causes of disaster in aggregate. Conclusions highlight the utility of in-depth case analyses and critique present pipeline incident database aggregation. Our interpretation provides a means to convey complex causation in aggregate form thus enabling more nuanced future qualitative and qualitative analyses.     

Enterprise risk management for automation in correctional facilities with pandemic and other stressors

Real-time tracking of tool and equipment inventories is a critical function of many organizations and sectors. For prisons and correctional facilities, tracking and monitoring of assets such as cookware, hardware, keys, janitorial equipment, vocational/technical specialty tools, etc., is essential for safety, security, trust, efficiency, education, etc. The performance of automated systems for this purpose can be diminished by a variety of emergent and future sociotechnical factors alone and in combination. This article introduces a methodology for contractor evaluation and selection in acquisition of innovative asset management systems, with an emphasis on evolving system requirements under uncertainty. The methodology features a scenario-based preferences analysis of emergent and future conditions that are disruptive to the performance of the asset-control system. The conditions are across technologies, operating environments, regulations, workforce behaviors, offender behaviors, prices and markets, organizations, cyber threats, etc. The methodology addresses the influence and interaction of the conditions to disrupt system priorities. Examples include: (i) infectious disease disrupting priorities among requirements and (ii)  radio-frequency identification (RFID) and wireless-technology innovations disrupting priorities among stakeholders. The combinations of conditions that most and least matter for the system acquisition are characterized. The methodology constitutes a risk register for monitoring sources of risk to project performance, schedule, and cost throughout the system lifecycle. The results will be of interest to both practitioners and scholars engaged in systems acquisition as the pandemic interacts with other factors to affect risk, uncertainty, and resilience of organizational missions and operations.     

Politics and Growth

Theories of growth have made progress in understanding the mechanisms of growth in economic terms. However, there is less understanding of the political processes that enable or obstruct these mechanisms. This article provides a four‐stage framework to clarify and analyse the connections between politics and growth: (i) discussing the basic conditions essential for growth; (ii) suggesting that whether or not these conditions emerge depends on specific forms of public‐private interaction; (iii) linking these relationships to the incentives facing those in political power and investors; and (iv) considering the factors at country level that may help to push incentives in a pro‐growth direction.     

The Sociological Significance of Sleep: Progress, Problems and Prospects

Sleep is something we all 'do' on a daily or nightly basis, consuming approximately a third of our lives. It is only relatively recently, however, that sociologists have begun to address the social significance of sleep. This paper, therefore, provides an invitation of sorts to a rich and fascinating new field of sociological inquiry, charting and commentating on the sociological significance of sleep in relation to the following seven key themes: (i) body and society; (ii) roles and routines; (iii) history and culture; (iv) work and employment; (v) gender and the life course; (vi) health and illness; and finally, (vii) politics and ethics. The paper concludes with some further critical thoughts and reflections on this sociological engagement with sleep to date and the theoretical, conceptual and methodological challenges ahead.     

“How Edge Are You?” Constructing Authentic Identities and Subcultural Boundaries in a Straightedge Internet Forum

We analyze how participants in an internet forum dedicated to the straightedge subculture articulate and express subcultural identities and boundaries, with particular attention to how they accomplish these tasks in a computer‐mediated context. Through participant observation, “focused discussions,” and interviews, we explore the complexity of identity‐making processes in terms of cyberspace and subculture, conceptualizing identification as occurring at the intersection of biography, subculture, and technology. We find that the internet influences how individuals participate in subcultural communities by analyzing their claims for authenticity and how they position themselves in relation to subcultural boundaries. This article provides insight into the dialectic relationship between participation in a subculture and in an internet community.     

Experience of maltreatment as a child and acceptance of violence in adult intimate relationships: mediating effects of distortions in cognitive schemas

Links exist between being subjected to maltreatment as a child and tendencies to accept violence as normative in adult relationships. Constructivist Self Development Theory suggests that such relationships may be affected by "cognitive disruptions" in "self" and "other" schemas. Mediating effects of distorted cognitive schemas on the association between history of child maltreatment and the acceptance of violence in intimate interpersonal relationships were investigated among 433 men and women. Outcomes indicated that individuals who reported childhood maltreatment were more likely to display distortions in their cognitive schemas and those individuals with disrupted schemas were more likely to accept relationship violence. Least-square multiple regression analyses revealed that distorted beliefs fully mediated the relationship between reporting childhood maltreatment and acceptance of violence, for both men and women. Subsidiary analyses suggested that this full mediation was replicated for schemas involving the self but not for schemas about others.     

Resource Centers: A Foundation's Strategy to Support Nonprofit Grantees

Resource centers (RCs) are one strategy used by foundations to provide technical assistance to, and to help disseminate the efforts of, multisite demonstration projects. Foundation goals must fit with RC purposes. Establishing the RC early in project development, carefully defining the scope of responsibilities, and locating leaders who can solve problems are critical considerations for foundation officers considering this strategy.     

Gender and Clinical Pharmacy: The Career of an Occupational Ideology*

Cet article étudie le concept selon lequel, dans une profession en mutation, la pharmacie en l'occurrence, les femmes sont les principales personnes à transmettre les valeurs liées à la pharmacie clinique - une idéologic professionnelle prétendument instaurée afin de redonner sa place à la pharmacie dans la hiérarchie des professions. Si on constate la force des convictions des membres de la profession à l'endroit de la pharmacie clinique, on observe également que les femmes ne sont pas les premières à les dèfendre. Ni la socialisation des rapports entre les sexes ni une formation particulière en pharmacie n'ont rendu les femmes mieux disposées que les hommes à l'egard de la pharmacie clinique. Les divergences - et elles sont très importantes - au sein de la profession au sujet de la pharmacie clinique se font sentir selon les différents cadres de travail des pharmaciens et selon l'année d'obtention de leur permis d'exercice. Ce sont plus les lieux de travail que les rapports entre les sexes qui permettent de prévoir les attitudes à l'égard de la pharmacie clinique. Il semble done peu probable que le fait d'équilibrer le nombre d'hommes et de femmes dans un milieu de travail soit de nature à le faire évoluer. Quelle que soit, au départ, la conception des pharmaciennes à l'égard de leur profession, elle influe peu sur leur rapport à la pharmacie clinique. This paper explores the idea that in a changing profession, women are the principal value carriers of clinical pharmacy—an occupational ideology professedly developed to restore pharmacy's precarious standing in the occupational hierarchy. While the investigation uncovers considerable evidence for the vitality of clinical pharmacy beliefs among practitioners, women were not at the forefront of this trend. Neither general gender socialization nor specific pharmacy training has rendered females more sympathetic to clinical pharmacy than males. Differences within the pharmacy community regarding clinical pharmacy—and they are quite considerable— emanate from the varied work settings that practitioners occupy and their year of licensure. Attitudes to clinical pharmacy are better predicted by workplace than by gender. On the basis of our findings, it seems unlikely that balancing the number of men and women in an occupation or work organization will, in and of itself, change it. Whatever distinctive prior orientations to work that female pharmacists may hold, they have little impact upon how they think about clinical pharmacy.