John Stuart Mill – Contributions to the Principles of Managemen

Although John Stuart Mill was a senior officer in the East India Company (EIC), he is best known for his outstanding contributions to economic and political thought during the 19th century. Close analysis of his writings and career in the EIC also reveals an important contribution to the evolution of management thought.     

A model for the assessment of static and dynamic factors in sexual offenders

A sample of 519 sexual offenders who were consecutive admissions to the Ontario Region of Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) were assessed with reference to a large series of variables thought to be related to sexual offending. We grouped these variables into five domains: criminality, social competence, sexual deviance, substance abuse and treatment readiness. We standardized scores on each of these domains to facilitate the calculation of total scores for each domain. We then performed a variety of analyses to determine whether these domains might constitute a reasonable model for the comprehensive evaluation of sexual offenders. Analyses indicated that overall the model received a moderate level of support.     

"Fundamental causes" of social inequalities in mortality: a test of the theory

Medicine and epidemiology currently dominate the study of the strong association between socioeconomic status and mortality. Socioeconomic status typically is viewed as a causally irrelevant "confounding variable" or as a less critical variable marking only the beginning of a causal chain in which intervening risk factors are given prominence. Yet the association between socioeconomic status and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in the diseases and risk factors that are presumed to explain it. This suggests that the effect of socioeconomic status on mortality essentially cannot be understood by reductive explanations that focus on current mechanisms. Accordingly, Link and Phelan (1995) proposed that socioeconomic status is a "fundamental cause" of mortality disparities-that socioeconomic disparities endure despite changing mechanisms because socioeconomic status embodies an array of resources, such as money, knowledge, prestige, power, and beneficial social connections, that protect health no matter what mechanisms are relevant at any given time. We identified a situation in which resources should be less helpful in prolonging life, and derived the following prediction from the theory: For less preventable causes of death (for which we know little about prevention or treatment), socioeconomic status will be less strongly associated with mortality than for more preventable causes. We tested this hypothesis with the National Longitudinal Mortality Study, which followed Current Population Survey respondents (N = 370,930) for mortality for nine years. Our hypothesis was supported, lending support to the theory of fundamental causes and more generally to the importance of a sociological approach to the study of socioeconomic disparities in mortality.     

Attachment and depression differentially influence nicotine dependence among male and female undergraduates: a preliminary study

The authors surveyed a convenience sample of 208 undergraduate students who reported that they smoked cigarettes. The primary hypothesis they tested was whether gender predicted nicotine dependence. They further tested whether depression and attachment would mediate or moderate this relationship. Hierarchical regression analyses with social desirability and smoking stage of change entered as covariates indicated that women exhibited greater nicotine dependence than men did (p < .01). Lower attachment scores fully mediated this relationship, whereas elevated depression scores moderated the relationship. These findings suggest that depression and the inability to bond with peers may promote nicotine dependence among young female students.     

Probabilistic Risk Analysis for a High-Level Radioactive Waste Repository

A probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) for a high-level radioactive waste repository is very important since it gives an estimate of its health impacts, allowing comparisons to be made with the health impacts of competing technologies. However, it is extremely difficult to develop a credible PRA for a specific repository site because of large uncertainties in future climate, hydrology, geological processes, etc. At best, such a PRA would not be understandable to the public. An alternative proposed here is to develop a PRA for an average U.S. site, taking all properties of the site to be the U.S. average. The results are equivalent to the average results for numerous randomly selected sites. Such a PRA is presented here; it is easy to understand, and it is not susceptible to substantial uncertainty. Applying the results to a specific repository site then requires only a simple, intuitively acceptable "leap of faith" in assuming that with large expenditures of effort and money, experts can select a site that would be at least as secure as a randomly selected site.