A theory of justice?

This is a critical analysis of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Rawls offers a theoretical justification of social democratic principles of justice. He argues that they are the principles which rational men would choose, under defined constraints, in an original position of social contract. The author criticises Rawls's assumption that men of any background, of any socialisation, would choose these principles in the original position. He argues that the choice which Rawls imputes to his contractors reflects a specific socialisation — one dominant in Western democracies. The theory is useful because it systematises a particular sense of justice; it is in no sense however a universal theory.My warm thanks go to Jimmy Altham, Harry Bracken, Stefan Collini, Martin Hollis, Steven Lukes, Quentin Skinner and Denys Turner. Without their comments this paper would certainly have been a poorer effort. I am also grateful to Professor Rawls for a useful correspondence about his position.     

The Correspondence Between Fertility Intentions and Behavior in the United States

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we describe the correspondence between intended family size and observed fertility for US men and women in the 1957–64 birth cohorts. Mean fertility intentions calculated from reports given in the mid‐20s modestly overstate completed fertility. But discrepancies between stated intent and actual fertility are common—the stated intent at age 24 (for both women and men) is more likely to miss than to match completed fertility. We focus on factors that predict which women and men will have fewer or more children than intended. Consistent with life‐course arguments, those unmarried, childless, or (for women) still in school at approximately age 24 were most likely to underachieve their intended parity (i.e., had fewer children than intended at age 24). We discuss how such discrepancies between intentions and behavior may cumulate to produce sizable cross‐group fertility differences.     

The Interpretation of Line of Regard by Prelingually Deaf Children

The ability of 5- to 12-year-old deaf children to utilise and interpret another person's visual line of regard (where the eyes are looking) was studied in four experiments using cartoon faces. The children had little difficulty in determining whether or not a face was looking directly at them. They had more difficulty, however, with more complex tasks requiring them to infer mental states of desire and intention from line of regard and to ignore line of regard when it was inappropriate to attend to this cue. Deaf children raised in a hearing environment appear to have more difficulty with these more complex tasks than hearing children. The results are discussed in terms of the special difficulties facing some deaf children in the development of skills involving utilisation of line of regard and the implications for the development of joint attentional behaviour, theory of mind and dyadic social interaction in deaf and hearing children.     

On trends and constants in periodic autoregressions

Periodic autoregressions are characterised by autoregressive structures that vary with the season. If a time series is periodically integrated, one needs a seasonally varying differencing filter to remove the stochastic trend. When the periodic regression model contains constants and trends with unrestricted parameters, the data can show diverging seasonal deterministic trends. In this paper we derive explicit expressions for parameter restrictions that result in common deterministic trends under periodic trend stationarity and periodic integration.     

Inner and outer worlds: a psychosocial framework for child and family social work

Social workers need a framework for understanding and helping children and families which takes into account the inner world of the self and the outer world of the environment, both in terms of relationships and in terms of practicalities such as housing. It is the capacity of social workers to be aware of and integrate in their practice these different areas of concern which defines the distinctive nature of their professional identity. This paper argues that in order to address both inner and outer worlds, social workers need to use relationship-based practice at all stages of their professional involvement with families. It considers what this psychosocial approach means in relation to individual case examples, where the assessment of need and the offering of help can only be achieved in the context of a relationship. At a time when social work is being defined in terms of case management and service provision, it is necessary to reflect on traditional social work skills and values in order to defend what the professional social worker offers as a service in herself.     

EMPIRICALLY ACCELERATED CONVERGENCE OF THE SPACINGS STATISTICS TO NORMALITY

If the asymptotic normality of a statistic is inadequate for approximating its distribution in practice, then the statistic may be transformed in order to improve the approximation by accelerating the convergence to normality. We treat a goodness-of-fit statistic, the sum of the logarithms of generalized uniform spacings introduced by Cressie (1976, 1978), in this spirit. Specifically, we apply the method of maximum likelihood to simulations of the statistic in order to estimate a power transformation, as in Box & Cox (1964), and hence develop a small sample normal approximation. This approximation provides a more versatile method of applying the statistic than currently available tables of percentiles.     

Evaluating Application Service Provisioning Using System Dynamics Methodology

Despite the hype surrounding the value‐added potential of e‐business for contemporary firms, the recent technology downturn was marked by poor customer satisfaction from investment in e‐business initiatives. An apparent mismatch between customer expectations and vendor offerings suggested a lack of appropriate methods and techniques for evaluating e‐business. This article draws from a longitudinal research study on the deployment, hosting and integration of application service provisioning (ASP), an e‐business model targeted mainly at small and medium‐sized businesses (SMBs). Using system dynamics as a methodology that addresses the inherent complexity of the ASP model, the article demonstrates how a series of complex inter‐relationships between key performance indicators (KPIs) will impact the business value for customers from ASP vendor products and services. The lessons from this research will be particularly relevant for existing and future ASP vendors and customers.