Disabling Environments and the Geography of Access Policies and Practices

Writings about disabled people are usually aspatial or lack geographical frames of reference. This is curious because geography is fundamental to an understanding of the social, economic, and political opportunities and/or constraints underpinning the lives of disabled people. This paper develops the contention that geographical and/or spatial terms of reference are important in understanding disabled people's lives. In developing this point, the paper seeks to describe and account for geographical variations in local authority policies and practices in addressing disabled people's access needs in the built environment. The paper adopts and develops, after Mark-Lawson & Warde (1987), the concept of 'local political environment' as a basis for understanding spatial variations in local authority policies and practices. Such ideas, in turn, are deployed with reference to postal survey and case study data, where I describe and explain aspects of the geography of access policies and practices in the United Kingdom. I conclude by noting that geographical frameworks and/or perspectives ought to be incorporated, where appropriate, into studies of disabled people and public policy processes.     

Do early life and contemporaneous macroconditions explain health at older ages?

This paper presents an approach that assesses the role of early life and contemporaneous macroconditions in explaining health at older ages. In particular, we investigate the role of exposure to diseases and economic conditions during infancy and childhood, as well as the effect of current health care facilities. Specific attention is paid to the impact of unobserved heterogeneity, selective attrition, and omitted relevant macrovariables. We apply our approach to self-reports on functional limitations of Dutch older individuals. The prevalence of functional limitations is found to increase in the 1990s, in part due to restricted access to hospital care.     

The H-1B visa: Free market solutions for business and labor

The H-1B visa program opened the US information technology labor market to temporary, skilled immigrant labor. But the immigrant worker was bound to a specific employer for the duration of the visa. The non-portability of the H-1B visa has benefitted the employer at the expense of immigrant and domestic workers. Much of the political debate surrounding the H-1B program has focused on raising the annual visa cap based on inconclusive evidence of a domestic IT labor shortage. The labor shortage question has obscured the more importantissue of reforming the H-1B program to level the playing field between business and labor.     

Migration,International Telecommunications,and Human Rights1

World polity embeddedness has traditionally been measured by state and civil participation in formal venues, including international organizations, multilateral agreements, and world conferences. In this study, we highlight an alternative form of embeddedness found in cross‐national social relations and apply this framework to the human rights sector of the world polity. Specifically, we propose that the international migrant community diffuses human rights values and practices via (1) local performance and (2) cross‐national communication. Using data from the World Values Survey, we first show that immigrants are more likely to embrace, and actively participate in, the human rights movement. Next, using network data that report country‐to‐country bilateral flows, we observe a high degree of correspondence between international migration and telecommunications, confirming previous studies that trace telephone traffic to the flow of people. Finally, analyzing a balanced data set of 333 observations across 111 countries spanning the 1975–2000 period, we use ordered probit regression to assess the local and cross‐national effects of migrants on a state’s human rights record. We find that a country’s immigration level and its in‐degree centrality in international telecommunications both positively affect its Amnesty International rating, and that these effects are robust to a number of alternative specifications.     

Designing field experiments which are subject to representation bias

The term 'representation bias' is used to describe the disparities that exist between treatment effects estimated from field experiments, and those effects that would be seen if treatments were used in the field. In this paper we are specifically concerned with representation bias caused by disease inoculum travelling between plots, or out of the experimental area altogether. The scope for such bias is maximized in the case of airborne spread diseases. This paper extends the work of Deardon et al. (2004), using simulation methods to explore the relationship between design and representation bias. In doing so, we illustrate the importance of plot size and spacing, as well as treatment-to-plot allocation. We examine a novel class of designs, incomplete column designs, to develop an understanding of the mechanisms behind representation bias. We also introduce general methods of designing field trials, which can be used to limit representation bias by carefully controlling treatment to block allocation in both incomplete column and incomplete randomized block designs. Finally, we show how the commonly used practice of sampling from the centres of plots, rather than entire plots, can also help to control representation bias.     

‘Let's share!’ The mediating role of employees' self-determination in the relationship between transformational and shared leadership and perceived knowledge sharing among peers

Building on social-exchange and self-determination theory, this study aimed to contribute to the scholarly literature on leadership and knowledge sharing by simultaneously testing how shared and transformational leadership and their interrelatedness may foster employees' perceptions of knowledge sharing behaviour among peers. Additionally, we investigated the mediating role of employees' basic psychological needs satisfaction (in terms of autonomy, competence and relatedness, respectively) as an additional explanatory mechanism to reveal how shared and transformational leadership may foster individuals' perceptions of knowledge sharing behaviour among peers. We employed PLS structural equation modelling to analyse survey data obtained from professionals in an R&D unit of a knowledge-intensive firm. We found shared leadership to be the most important factor enhancing employees' perceptions of knowledge sharing among peers, both directly and indirectly through employees' satisfaction of the need for autonomy. Transformational leadership was found to foster employees' knowledge sharing ultimately, through shared leadership and the need for autonomy satisfaction. We concluded that shared forms of leadership supplemented with transformational leadership on the part of formal leaders are important in contemporary work environments as they can foster employees' perceptions of knowledge sharing among peers and contribute towards employees' self-determination, which ultimately enhances perceptions of knowledge sharing among peers.     

找到自己的“最适客户”

每个营销者都梦想发现未经染指或需求未得到充分满足的大规模客户群体,并为其开发正中下怀的产品何乐而不为呢?该公司(姑且称之为“普罗公司”)拥有世界一流的市场研究人员,能够熟练使用人群统计、心理测验和统计分析方面的最新工具。每过两三年,他们就会搬出一项雄心勃勃的调查计划,用来确定具有吸引力的大型客户群体以及大量诱人的“市场空白点”,以便