Trends in health expectancies in Australia 1981–1993

Health expectancy indices combine the mortality and morbidity experience of a population into a single composite indicator. This paper summarizes and evaluates methods for the calculation of health expectancies and presents trends in the expectation of life with disability and handicap in Australia from 1981 to 1993. Unlike other countries for which recent health expectancy time series are available, Australian results indicate that the expectation of years with disability has increased for both males and females. Possible explanations for this are examined.     

Direct Payments and Disabled People in the UK: Supply, Demand and Devolution

Direct payments have brought new opportunities for self-determinationand independent living to disabled people in the UK, featuringprominently in government strategy and the 2006 White Paper,‘Our Health, Our Care, Our Say’. However, ten yearsafter direct payments legislation, take-up remains low and implementationvaries greatly. Rates of take-up in England remain more thandouble those in other parts of the UK, raising questions aboutdevolution and equity. This paper presents data from a nationalstudy to examine some of the mechanisms underlying uneven outcomesfor disabled people in different parts of the United Kingdom,with particular reference to the politics of devolved governance.The analysis focuses on scope for interpretations of policy;resources for information and training; the impact of mandatoryduties and targets; extensions to new user groups; and the roleof support organizations and disability activism. The evidencesuggests that local variations have been produced not only by‘local’ factors, but also by different opportunitystructures for policy development in England, Scotland, Walesand Northern Ireland. This raises questions about the impactof devolution on equity and opportunity for disabled peoplein the UK.     

Toward a Sociology of Nature

Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociology's neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on “the sociology of nature.” I argue that sociology's disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing society's “Great Transformation” from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft: while early anthropologists studied “primitive” societies that allegedly had not yet completed “the passage from nature to culture” (Lévi‐Strauss 1963 : 99), pioneering sociologists presumed that industrialization and urbanization liberated “modern” society from nature and therefore focused their attention on “urbanism as a way of life” (Wirth 1938 ). As exemplified by the articles in this symposium, environmental sociology critiques the nature‐culture and town‐country dualisms. One of environmental sociology's core contributions has been demonstrating that nature is just as much a social construction as race or gender; however, its more profound challenge to the discipline lies in its refutation of the sociological axiom that social facts can be explained purely through reference to other social facts. “Environmental facts” are a constitutive feature of social life, not merely an effect of it.     

La dimension économique de la législation protectrice de l'emploi,y compris sous ses modalités différentes: analyse sur un panel de 117 pays, 1990–2013

Les auteurs replacent l'évolution de la législation protectrice de l'emploi (y compris de durée déterminée, intérimaire et à temps partiel) dans une perspective économique en utilisant un indice de la rigueur de la réglementation établi par le Centre for Business Research de l'Université de Cambridge pour 117 pays (1970–2013). L'analyse économétrique repose sur des méthodes pour données de panel non stationnaires. Elle fait apparaître un renforcement de la protection, associé à une hausse de la part salariale dans le revenu national, une progression des taux d'activité et d'emploi et une baisse du chômage, des relations qui restent faibles cependant au regard de la tendance économique globale.     

Neither real nor fictitious but ‘as if real'? A political ontology of the state

The state is one of series of concepts (capitalism, patriarchy and class being others) which pose a particular kind of ontological difficulty and provoke a particular kind of ontological controversy – for it is far from self‐evident that the object or entity to which they refer is in any obvious sense ‘real’. In this paper I make the case for developing a distinct political ontology of the state which builds from such a reflection. In the process, I argue that the state is neither real nor fictitious, but ‘as if real’ – a conceptual abstraction whose value is best seen as an open analytical question. Thus understood, the state possesses no agency per se though it serves to define and construct a series of contexts within which political agency is both authorized (in the name of the state) and enacted (by those thereby authorized). The state is thus revealed as a dynamic institutional complex whose unity is at best partial, the constantly evolving outcome of unifying tendencies and dis‐unifying counter‐tendencies.     

Adaptive penalized quantile regression for high dimensional data

We propose a new adaptive L₁ penalized quantile regression estimator for high-dimensional sparse regression models with heterogeneous error sequences. We show that under weaker conditions compared with alternative procedures, the adaptive L₁ quantile regression selects the true underlying model with probability converging to one, and the unique estimates of nonzero coefficients it provides have the same asymptotic normal distribution as the quantile estimator which uses only the covariates with non-zero impact on the response. Thus, the adaptive L₁ quantile regression enjoys oracle properties. We propose a completely data driven choice of the penalty level _λn${\lambda }_n$, which ensures good performance of the adaptive L₁ quantile regression. Extensive Monte Carlo simulation studies have been conducted to demonstrate the finite sample performance of the proposed method.     

Forum introduction

This piece is an abstract to a commentary section on Alexander Wendt's (2015) book, Quantum mind and social science : unifying physical and social ontology. In this book, Wendt, one of the core theorists of constructivism in international relations, undertakes a bold new initiative in grand theorizing. The commentators, followed by Wendt's own response to them, analyze this new direction from a number of angles.