Professional Power and Managerial Control: The Case of GP Assessments of the Over-75S

The creation of Family Health Services Authorities from the old Family Practitioner Committees in 1990 marked a turning point in the introduction of managerialism into primary health care services. One of the FHSAs' first responsibilities was the administration of a new Contract for General Practitioners, which had generated considerable opposition from within the profession. This Contract included a new requirement for GPs to make, each year, a written offer of a health check, at home, to all patients aged 75 and over. Particular scepticism was expressed by GPs about the value and effectiveness of routine annual assessments's of this kind. Drawing on interviews with FHSA managers and their professional medical and nursing advisors, this paper examines the strategies adopted by FHSAs in tackling the administration of this particularly controversial requirement. Although apparently effective in the short-term, the paper concludes that these strategies may have considerable longer-term short-comings. The constraints and pressures experienced by FHSAs and the strategies employed to deal with them provide a useful insight into the tensions generated in the course of developing a managerial relationship with professional practitioners who have traditionally enjoyed very high levels of autonomy and independence.     

Hope: An empirical study of attitude toward the timing of uncertainty resolution

Hope is experienced when there is enjoyment in delaying the resolution of uncertainty. The main objective of this article is to identify the phenomenon of hope. In addition, we empirically test several axiomatic theories of temporal preferences which have implications for attitudes toward the timing of uncertainty resolution. Overall, the data support the extension of recursive expected utility specification to incorporate a weighted utility model of attitude toward future uncertainty. We find that the instances where hopefulness are more prevalent tend to be associated with a small probability of occurrence of a large gain. Interestingly, the degree of hopefulness is not correlated with risk attitude.     

AN ALTERNATIVE METACRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES FROM A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context.     

The Revolving Door to Gold Mountain: How Chinese Immigrants Got Around U.S. Exclusion and Replenished the Chinese American Labor Pool, 1900–19101

This study provides a quantitative perspective on the Chinese American migratory system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the magnitude of various means for evading the U.S. embargo on Chinese immigration. Three sources are explored, including federal immigration summaries, census microdata, and a sample of person‐voyage records for steamship arrivals at the port of San Francisco (n = 5,707). Whereas parameter estimates vary among the sources from nearly twofold (gross migration) up to fourfold (net migration), all results are consistent with a revolving‐door system in which young male workers arrived as replacements for departing older male workers.     

Event Exchangeability: Probabilistic Sophistication Without Continuity or Monotonicity

Building on the Ramsey–de Finetti idea of event exchangeability, we derive a characterization of probabilistic sophistication without requiring any of the various versions of monotonicity, continuity, or comparative likelihood assumptions imposed by Savage (1954), Machina and Schmeidler (1992), and Grant (1995). Our characterization identifies a unique and finitely‐additive subjective probability measure over an algebra of events.     

Bandwagon Effects and Two-Party Majority Voting

Empirical studies of voting behavior provide evidence of bandwagon effects. Some voters, believing that a particular candidate will win, vote for this candidate even though they prefer the alternative. This paper provides a non-expected utility explanation of such behavior by positing that voters may be averse to the uncertainty associated with an election.     

Decomposition of aggregate defective rate in batch production

In batch/short run production, changes in productmix (or inter-product demand) can have a significant impact on the overall process defective rate, but this effect neglected in process quality analysis. This paper describes the use of a decomposition technique to single out this effect and the effect associated with changes in real process performance. The technique allows both effects to be expressed in indices which conveniently summarize information in a more concise and is often usable form. The results of an application study using a set of batch/short-run production data are presented.     

Hidden in Plain Sight: Global Labor Force Exchange in the Chinese American Population, 1880–1940

Despite a once‐conspicuous presence in the Western United States, little is known demo‐graphically about the Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States. The widely accepted model of a declining male “sojourner society,” beset by draconian restrictions on immigration and the impossibility of family formation, is seemingly contradicted by the continuous economic vitality of urban Chinatowns in the United States. This article tests the largely unexamined demographic structure of the Chinese population in the United States through the application of cohort‐component projection on census data from 1880 through 1940, including data recently made available as part of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The results fail to support the model of passive population decline, suggesting instead that the Chinese actively engaged in a collective strategy of long‐distance labor exchange to maximize economic productivity among Chinese workers in the United States.     

American children in multiracial households

This study provides a demographic portrait of multiracial households, using children as the units of analysis. The authors conceptualize 3 dimensions for understanding multiracial qualities: 1) the racial composition of a household overall, 2) where in the household a racial difference exists relative to the household head, and 3) where in the household a racial difference exists relative to each child. Using microdata from the 1980 US census, the authors explore the 1st 2 of these dimensions and test 2 propositions about the links between racial diversity and other nonracial attributes of children's household environments. The finding is made, among other things, that the largest proportion of children live in Asian-white households, and that about 60% live in households headed by mixed-race couples. Support for the notion that attributes of multiracial households fall between those of their same-race counterparts was mixed. Nonetheless, there appears to be a link between location of diversity and some nonracial characteristics of household.     

Effects of urbanization on butterfly species richness,guild structure,and rarity

We evaluated the effects of landscape characteristics associated with urbanization, as well as local features, on butterfly species richness at four spatial scales (50, 150, 500, and 1,000 m from survey plots). We also evaluated these effects separately by butterfly guilds based on their region-wide rarity and on degree of specialization. The distribution of abundances of the 44 species observed showed an excess of uncommon species compared to a log-normal distribution, and the two most abundant species were exotic (Thymelicus lineola and Pieris rapae). We used an information theoretic approach to model selection to determine the most important correlates of butterfly species richness. Models of mean butterfly richness per visit explained greater variance than did models of cumulative richness across the season. Cumulative butterfly species richness was affected more at larger spatial scales, while richness per visit was affected similarly at all spatial scales. The most consistent local factor affecting butterfly diversity was the number of nectar producing plants that were flowering. The most consistent landscape-level correlates of species richness were number of people (at small spatial scales) and green space. Measures of increased urbanization were associated with decreased butterfly species richness, and rare and specialized species were most affected. Species that were regionally rare, and those that specialized both in host plants and had few broods, disappeared with declining richness across sites 2.9–4.5 times faster than did generalists and less restricted specialists.