Keep Your Friends Close? Supply Chain Design and Disruption Risk

In this article, we evaluate the relationship between supply chain design decisions and supply chain disruption risk. We explore two supply chain design strategies: (i) the dispersion of supply chain partners to reduce supply chain disruption risk versus (ii) the co‐location of supply chain partners to reduce supply chain disruption risk. In addition, we assess supply chain disruption risk from three perspectives: the inbound material flow from the supplier (supply side), the internal production processes (internal), and the outbound material flow to the customer (customer side) as a disruption can occur at any of these locations. We measure disruption risk in terms of stoppages in flows, reductions in flow, close calls (disruptions that were prevented at the last minute), disruption duration (time until normal operation flow was restored), and the spread of disruptions all the way through the supply chain. We use seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to analyze our data, finding that lead times, especially supply side lead times, are significantly associated with higher levels of supply chain disruption risk. We find co‐location with suppliers appears to have beneficial effects to the reduction of disruption duration, and, overall supply side factors have a higher impact when it comes to supply chain disruption risk than comparable customer side factors.     

The politics of pluriactivity in Britain

This paper examines the political context to policies promoting farm diversification in Britain, in an attempt to understand both the fundamental contradictions which lie within these policies and the particular emphasis placed upon on-farm diversification in Britain. The paper begins therefore with an analysis of the politics of British agriculture in the 1980s, and then focuses in detail on policies which promote farm diversification. Finally, the paper compares these policies with evidence of trends and characteristics of pluriactivity in Britain, and suggests three major contradictions between government policies and observed farm household behaviour. A majority of farm households see little need to diversify and have even less inclination to do so. Any redeployment of on-farm resources is most likely to occur on the sale or transfer of the farm, and is unlikely to offer a source of alternative income for poor farmers.     

Body Structure Perception in Infancy

Structural cues, such as the relative size and arrangement of parts, are key aspects of adults' representation of human bodies, and they are used to derive significant social information such as age, sex, and attractiveness. Prior studies have not clearly addressed young infants' sensitivity to these body characteristics. In the current experiments, 3.5‐month‐olds exhibited a preference between images of intact bodies versus those with parts in wrong locations. Infants also discriminated between intact bodies and those with distorted part proportions. In both cases, infants discriminated when images were presented upright but not when they were inverted. These results indicate that infants are sensitive to the arrangement and size of human body parts at least by 3.5 months of age. Thus, contrary to some prior reports, body representation early in life is developed enough to include structural information.     

American High School Students’ Perceptions of Determinants of Life Satisfaction

Life satisfaction can be assessed either globally or with regard to satisfaction with specific domains of life. The latter multidimensional approach presumes science has delineated with confidence the specific domains most relevant to evaluating whether the criteria for a good life have been met. This paper shares results of a qualitative study of the perceived determinants of life satisfaction among 30 high school students who were diverse in terms of mental health; 6–10 participants were classified as complete mental health, vulnerable, symptomatic but content, or troubled at two time points separated by a year. Thematic analyses of transcribed individual interviews suggested eight themes that capture the domains of life adolescents perceive influence their happiness. These themes are compared and contrasted to domains included in existing multi-dimensional measures of youth life satisfaction. The factors likely to be particularly salient to students with different levels of mental health are noted.

     

Coming Out and the Potential for Growth in Sexual Minorities: The Role of Social Reactions and Internalized Homonegativity

Coming out is a significant and sometimes difficult process in the lives of sexual minorities, but disclosure can also affect wellbeing in positive ways, including reduced distress and greater relationship satisfaction. This study investigates the possibility of stress-related growth and depreciation following coming out. To obtain a diverse sample with varying coming-out experiences, data were collected from undergraduate students as well as from online sources, including lesbian, gay, and bisexual support groups and Pride groups. Regression analyses indicated that negative social reactions to coming out predicted both growth and depreciation, although they more strongly predicted depreciation. Positive social reactions were positively related to stress-related growth, while internalized homonegativity was inversely associated with growth. Although the two sample sources (online and campus) differed in some ways, sample source was not a significant predictor in the regressions, nor was it indicated as a moderator in exploratory ANOVA analyses.     

Managing the National Status Group: Immigration Policy in Germany

This article challenges the established convention in immigration policy scholarship of treating economic utility and identity maintenance as logically distinct concerns. Drawing on work by Weber, Wallerstein and Bourdieu, we argue that concerns about economic utility and identity maintenance interact in the immigration policies of Western liberal democratic states, leading to policies designed to build and maintain middle‐class national status groups. Using the example of contemporary immigration policy in Germany, we illustrate how this impulse to build the middle‐class status group affects immigrant inclusion/exclusion in nuanced ways at both the group and individual levels, along class/status, ethnic and gender lines. We conclude by considering the policy implications of growing and shaping populations according to middle‐class ideals, particularly for the statistical monitoring of immigrant populations for integration benchmarking purposes.     

Manipulating an aggregation rule under ordinally fuzzy preferences

It is well known that many aggregation rules are manipulable through strategic behaviour. Typically, the aggregation rules considered in the literature are social choice correspondences. In this paper the aggregation rules of interest are social welfare functions (SWFs). We investigate the problem of constructing a SWF that is non-manipulable. In this context, individuals attempt to manipulate a social ordering as opposed to a social choice. Using techniques from an ordinal version of fuzzy set theory, we introduce a class of ordinally fuzzy binary relations of which exact binary relations are a special case. Operating within this family enables us to prove an impossibility theorem. This theorem states that all non-manipulable SWFs are dictatorial, provided that they are not constant. This theorem uses a weaker transitivity condition than the one in Perote-Peña and Piggins (J Math Econ 43:564–580, 2007), and the ordinal framework we employ is more general than the cardinal setting used there. We conclude by considering several ways of circumventing this impossibility theorem.     

Perceptions of transition-related health and mental health services among transgender adults

The opportunity to live authentically is critical for the well-being of transgender individuals. For many this requires accessing transition-related services. Current knowledge of transition-related care is limited. This study aims to elucidate experiences and needs of transgender individuals (N = 65) related to (a) therapeutic support, (b) medical care, and (c) aspects of living authentically in order to inform the development and delivery of trans-affirmative services. Findings reveal challenges accessing health care providers with trans-specific competency; gaps between critical aspects of transition-related care and receipt of services; and heterogeneity of experiences and needs. Recommendations for improving transgender-affirmative services are provided.     

Inheritance,poverty, and disability

Inheritance is a significant means of transferring wealth from one generation to the next, and therefore increasingly attracts attention from researchers and policy-makers working on intergenerational and multidimensional poverty. However, until now disabled persons have been overlooked in these discussions. This oversight is particularly unfortunate because, as a group, the estimated one billion people with disabilities (some 15% of the world’s population) are among the poorest and most marginalized of the global population. Over the past decade, a small but growing literature has examined the recursive connections between poverty and disability throughout the developing world. In this paper, we argue that disabled individuals are routinely denied inheritance rights in many low-income and middle-income countries, and that this is a significant and largely unrecognized contributor to their indigence. The denial of inheritance is both a social justice issue and a practice that can no longer be overlooked if disabled persons are to be brought into the development mainstream.