Impacts of domestic population dynamics and foreign wood trade on deforestation: a world-system perspective

World system theory posits that core nations control global production processes through their economic and political-military strength, while countries at the periphery remain technologically underdeveloped and operate from a position of dependency. Rapid changes such as population growth and rural encroachment have spurred environmental degradation in the intermediary semi-periphery countries. The effects of world system structure on national deforestation were investigated in a quantitative, cross-national analysis of data from 60 core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral countries. This analysis revealed that rural population growth has had a deleterious effect on forestation throughout the world system. However, the impact of general population growth has been negative only in non-core countries. As hypothesized, forest exports have resulted in ecologic devastation in the periphery of the world system, but have exerted a favorable effect for core countries where reforestation programs dominate. These findings suggest that population growth per se is not the critical factor in environmental degradation. Urged are further quantitative evaluations of the environmental impact of other international commodity trades.     

Gauss or Bernoulli? A Monte Carlo comparison of the performance of the linear mixed-model and the logistic mixed-model analyses in simulated community trials with a dichotomous outcome variable at the individual level

This Monte Carlo study compares performance of the linear and the logistic mixed-model analyses of simulated community trials having event rates of 37%, 13%, or 5%, intraclass correlations between 0.01 and 0.05, and 17 or 5 denominator degrees of freedom. Type I or Type II error rates showed no essential difference between the two analysis methods. They showed depressed error rates when the event rate or the denominator degrees of freedom were small. The authors conclude that in studies with adequate denominator degrees of freedom, the researcher may use either method of analysis but should accept negative estimates of components of variance to avoid depression of error rates.     

Sociological research and social policy: The case of family violence

Articles in sociological journals on physical and sexual assault within the family show that research on family violence has grown exponentially since 1970, despite the fact that evidence indicates no increase in family violence. The paper suggests that this extraordinary growth in research is explained by changes in American society and in sociology as a discipline. The experience of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire is used to examine the interrelation of family violence research with social movements, and some pervasive and difficult aspects of these interrelationships, including the role of values in research, the selective use of research findings, and the involvement of the mass media in efforts to promote application of sociological research.Revised version of a presidential address presented to the Eastern Sociological Society in Providence, Rhode Island, April 13, 1991.     

Living Together and Eating Together: Changes in Food Choice and Eating Habits during the Transition from Single to Married/Cohabiting

In 1995 we recruited twenty-two heterosexual couples from Edinburgh and Glasgow to examine the changes which took place in their eating habits and food related activities when they began to live together. Semi-structured interviews were carried out three months before and after moving-in dates and on each occasion both men and women were interviewed separately. Both felt that eating together had a symbolic importance when they set up home together and most couples made efforts to eat a main meal together most evenings, while shopping and eating patterns tended to become more regular and formalised than they were at the pre-marriage/cohabitation stage. In a small majority of cases the women were mainly responsible for buying and preparing food. A significant difference between these women and those of other, earlier studies is that they tended to be less deferential to their husbands' food choices. However, associations between women, food and nurturing were evident in the efforts women made to improve their husbands' diets. Where food purchase and preparation were shared, so was choice of food. The goal of enjoying food together was achieved by learning, influence and compromise but no significant gendering of power in food choice was identified.     

When a scratch becomes 'a scary story': the social construction of micro panics in center-based child care

This study analyzes the everyday world of center‐based child care and the climate of suspicion that permeates that world. Based on four and a half years of participant observation field research and thirty focused interviews with men and women child care workers, the author examines the existence of ‘micro panics’ which occur in child care centers when deviant labels are attached to caregiving acts or activities. Drawing from traditional Moral Panic Theory, this paper demonstrates how the context of suspicion surrounding center based child care and the ‘micro panics’ that sustain it are generated historically, structurally, and interactionally. These phenomena, in other words, are in part, a historical artifact from the 1980s moral panics concerning day care abuse, an interactional product of the gendering of child care as ‘women's work’, and a phenomenological byproduct of the positioning of paid child care in the everyday lives of workers, children, and parents.     

Succession,strategy, culture,and change at Santropol Roulant

Santropol Roulant is an innovative nonprofit organization in Montreal focused on youth training, food security, and intergenerational community building. Since its inception, the Roulant has delivered more than 250,000 meals to isolated seniors and trained more than sixteen hundred young volunteers. Within a few short months, the Roulant will lose half its board members, five senior staff members, and its dedicated and wellliked executive director. The leadership turnover will be a highstakes test for the Roulant: Can they turn a period of vulnerability into an opportunity for growth and rejuvenation? This teaching case is intended to develop familiarity with key issues related to succession planning, transition management, and organizational change. Students will learn about managing a period of complex, high‐intensity organizational change, develop an understanding of the linkages between organizational form and strategic objectives, and become familiar with the structural and substantive issues facing transition teams.     

Do Intentional Efforts to Improve Boards Really Work? The Views of Nonprofit CEOs

Commentators on the effectiveness of nonprofit boards of directors usually find them wanting in a number of ways and urge that they reform themselves. A study to ascertain how many boards actually accept this advice and intentionally attempt to change the way they operate also examines what changes boards attempt to make, what provokes their efforts, and what outcomes result.     

Reexamining the Nurse Scheduling Problem: Staffing Ratios and Nursing Shortages*

Legislators at the state and national levels are addressing renewed concerns over the adequacy of hospital nurse staffing to provide quality care and ensure patient safety. At the same time, the well‐known nursing shortage remains an ongoing problem. To address these issues, we reexamine the nurse scheduling problem and consider how recent health care legislation impacts nursing workforce management decisions. Specifically, we develop a scheduling model and perform computational experiments to evaluate how mandatory nurse‐to‐patient ratios and other policies impact schedule cost and schedule desirability (from the nurses' perspective). Our primary findings include the following: (i) nurse wage costs can be highly nonlinear with respect to changes in mandatory nurse‐to‐patient ratios of the type being considered by legislators; (ii) the number of undesirable shifts can be substantially reduced without incurring additional wage cost; (iii) more desirable scheduling policies, such as assigning fewer weekends to each nurse, have only a small impact on wage cost; and (iv) complex policy statements involving both single‐period and multiperiod service levels can sometimes be relaxed while still obtaining good schedules that satisfy the nurse‐to‐patient ratio requirements. The findings in this article suggest that new directions for future nurse scheduling models, as it is likely that nurse‐to‐patient ratios and nursing shortages will remain a challenge for health care organizations for some time.     

Private Polls and Presidential Policymaking: Reagan as a Facilitator of Change

Did the Reagan administration disregard majority will when craftingits policy initiatives? Did it cater to a narrow partisan constituencyinstead? The answers to these questions will help with an assessmentof Jacobs and Shapiro’s (2000b) hypothesis that presidentssince the late 1970s have used private White House survey researchas a tool to manipulate or assuage centrist public opinion whilemeeting the policy demands of their partisan core supporters,resulting in a decline in presidential responsiveness to majoritywill. Using the actual surveys administered by Richard Wirthlin(Reagan’s pollster) between 1981 and 1983, this articlewill demonstrate the level of consistency between majority opinionon 129 policy issues and Reagan’s behavior through 1984,and it will explore the conditions under which the presidentwas more or less likely to respond to public preferences. Thedata reveal that the Reagan administration was constrained bythe popular will in predicable ways: if the policy issues wereabout domestic concerns, highly popular, and visible in themedia, then the administration acted in line with public preferencesmore than 70 percent of the time. Further, Reagan and his adviserswere selective in responding to party activists: they championedissues drawn from their conservative ideological agenda thatfit with the current tide in public opinion, while sidesteppingother issues dear to party activists that encountered strongmajority resistance. While I do not contest Jacobs and Shapiro’s(2000b) important observation that presidents often use surveyresearch to "craft talk" in an attempt to channel the publicdebate, the evidence here highlights how the president nonethelessremains constrained by the popular will, at least on domesticissues.