On the nature of problems in consulting practice

OR consultants who wish to help clients with complex policy issues need to find ways of taking account of personal and illegitimate features of a client's understanding of his situation, as well as the technical features which are usually considered. This paper is an attempt to discuss the practice of operational research in ways which reflect its political complexity, rather than the techniques, which are more commonly described in the published papers and texts. The discussion leads to the suggestion that practitioners could usefully devote some energy to reflecting upon the processes used in effective problem solving.     

Out of the shadows: Classifying economies by the extent and nature of employment in the informal economy

Given the prevalence of informality, this article proposes a typology for classifying countries by the extent and nature of employment in the informal economy, rather than by the composition of their formal economies. The author analyses ILO data on employment in the informal economy in 36 developing countries, and shows that there is a significant correlation between cross‐national variations in the degree and intensity of informalization and cross‐national variations in social and economic indicators such as levels of GNP per capita, corruption, poverty, taxation and social contributions. The article concludes by discussing implications for theory and policy.     

Bare Bodies: Nudity,Gender, and the Looking Glass Body1

This article examines the role of nude embodiment as it affects sexuality, intimacy, and pleasure when people seek to align their nude body with cultural values. This research, based on open‐ended and closed‐ended data from 184 young heterosexual adults attending a large Midwestern university, finds the experience of nude embodiment and its effects to be strongly gendered. For example, among both men and women, comfort with one’s nude body is associated with a sexually expansive point of view, but it is only found to be associated with sexual behavior and pleasure among the women. For women, too, feelings of objectification in nude embodiment are shown to be mitigated through positive relationships with their male partner. Throughout we emphasize the “lived experience” of the body, especially as experienced in the body techniques used in the pursuit of sexual intimacy and pleasure. Discussion relates these results to objectification theory and how wider social changes may impinge on sexual embodiment in general.     

The need to bring an end to the era of eligibility policies for a person-centred,financially sustainable future

Attention within the social care sector in England is moving away from consumerist notions of choice towards good professional practice as the route to personalisation. This demands a new focus on how to make practice that is person-centred the norm. The following sets out that this is unlikely to happen until the use of eligibility policies is ended. The lessons are relevant not only to England, but to other countries who may be looking to the United Kingdom as pioneering in the personalisation agenda.     

Reconceptualizing the Role of Conformity Behaviors in Family Communication Patterns Theory

Family communication patterns theory is one of the most influential theories in the field of family communication. The current article examines the construct of conformity, arguing that current conceptualizations of conformity paint this behavior as largely a negative familial element. Instead, this research argues for the concept of warm conformity behavior, where parents communicate their ideas in ways that promote warmth and closeness rather than just adherence to hierarchy and rules. This move does not add to the two dimensions of the theory, but rather speaks to the different ways in which parents might communicate the dimension of conformity to their child. To further this idea, our article includes a series of three studies designed to create and validate new measures of warm and cold conformity. Overall, the studies found general support for the validity of the scales. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Local Box–Cox transformation on time-varying parametric models for smoothing estimation of conditional CDF with longitudinal data

Nonparametric estimation and inferences of conditional distribution functions with longitudinal data have important applications in biomedical studies, such as epidemiological studies and longitudinal clinical trials. Estimation approaches without any structural assumptions may lead to inadequate and numerically unstable estimators in practice. We propose in this paper a nonparametric approach based on time-varying parametric models for estimating the conditional distribution functions with a longitudinal sample. Our model assumes that the conditional distribution of the outcome variable at each given time point can be approximated by a parametric model after local Box–Cox transformation. Our estimation is based on a two-step smoothing method, in which we first obtain the raw estimators of the conditional distribution functions at a set of disjoint time points, and then compute the final estimators at any time by smoothing the raw estimators. Applications of our two-step estimation method have been demonstrated through a large epidemiological study of childhood growth and blood pressure. Finite sample properties of our procedures are investigated through a simulation study. Application and simulation results show that smoothing estimation from time-variant parametric models outperforms the existing kernel smoothing estimator by producing narrower pointwise bootstrap confidence band and smaller root mean squared error.     

Optimal direction Gibbs sampler for truncated multivariate normal distributions

Generalized Gibbs samplers simulate from any direction, not necessarily limited to the coordinate directions of the parameters of the objective function. We study how to optimally choose such directions in a random scan Gibbs sampler setting. We consider that optimal directions will be those that minimize the Kullback–Leibler divergence of two Markov chain Monte Carlo steps. Two distributions over direction are proposed for the multivariate Normal objective function. The resulting algorithms are used to simulate from a truncated multivariate Normal distribution, and the performance of our algorithms is compared with the performance of two algorithms based on the Gibbs sampler.