Civility: A Contemporary Context for a Meaningful Historical Concept

An overview of the relationship between social structure and social order is employed to highlight the importance of the civility concept to civic society. In discussing these issues, the author provides a brief historical and a contemporary context for assessing the civility concept. This assessment draws on an eclectic literature that addresses the relationship among civility, socialization, and learning, the role of education in the civility process, the changing emphasis of higher education, the culture of individualism, and technology. The author concludes with a brief discussion of culture and the future of civility.
The problem of order arises out of the dual circumstance that human beings have limited (though not nonexistent) capacities for sympathy with their fellows and that they inhabit an environment that fails to provide them with sufficient resources to satisfy fully the needs of all of them. The problem of order is therefore rooted in inescapable conflict between the interests and desires of individuals and the requirements of society: to wit, the pacification of violent strife among men and the secure establishment of cooperative social relations making possible the pursuit of collective goals. (Wrong 1994, p. 36)     

Privacy and profitability in the technological workplace

VI. Conclusion New communications technology inevitably creates new problems of privacy; think of the introduction of telephones (when party lines were common), faxes (which can lie in a room accessible by many people before reaching the addressee), and cell phones (which allow bystanders to hear one side of seemingly confidential communications). Computer monitoring of performance, e-mails, and Internet access are no different in this regard. Each development requires adjustments. I thank Holly Newell of the University of South Carolina Law School Class of 2004 for her diligent research on and editorial assistance with this article.     

Is comprehensive education really free?: a case-study of the effects of secondary school admissions policies on house prices in one local area

Summary. The paper reports on a study that tests the anecdotal hypothesis that parents are willing to pay a premium to secure places for their children in popular and oversubscribed comprehensive schools. Since many local education authorities use admissions policies that are based on catchment areas and places in popular schools are very difficult to obtain from outside these areas—but very easy from within them—parents have an incentive to move house for the sake of their children's education. This would be expected to be reflected in house prices. The study uses a cross-sectional sample based on two popular schools in one local education authority area, Coventry. Differences in quality of housing are dealt with by using the technique of hedonic regression and differences in location by sample selection within a block sample design. The sample was chosen from a limited number of locations spanning different catchment areas to reduce both observable and unobservable variability in nuisance effects while maximizing the variation in catchment areas. The results suggest that there are strong school catchment area effects. For one of the two popular schools we find a 20% premium and for the other a 16% premium on house prices ceteris paribus .     

Pathways to recovery after substance abuse treatment: leaving a life of crime behind

Changes in criminal activity following substance abuse treatment were examined among 941 individuals. The estimated cost to society of crimes committed in the 6 months prior to intake was used to classify participants into three groups: no-, low-, and high-cost. Logistic regression was used to predict criminal activity at 6 and 24 months following intake as a function of (a) intake status, (b) treatment, and (c) outcome status and changes. The three groups varied significantly at intake and what predicted subsequent criminal activity. Treatment effects on criminal activity were mediated by the extent to which treatment reduced substance use. Outcomes were also predicted by other factors (e.g. housing, employment, medical problems, psychological distress, and social support). The results support the need for multidimensional assessments for predicting the risk of illegal activity, the need for reassessments following treatment, and the value of addressing other problems in reducing subsequent criminal activity.     

Military leadership: A context specific review

The purpose of this article is to review the literature on military leadership and highlight research opportunities for leadership scholars. The review uses a context specific approach and turns to a simplified version of Hunt's (Hunt, J. G. (1991). Leadership: A new synthesis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage) extended multilevel leadership model as a template to examine the many facets of military leadership. The military leadership literature is stratified into the systems, organizational, and direct levels of leadership with an examination of studies on the critical tasks and individual capabilities required at each level. Additionally, studies on organizational culture and effectiveness at each level are addressed. The article emphasizes that the military is undergoing substantial change as it adjusts to the changing nature of war and a fluid world situation. Based on trends in the military, the review concludes with several general recommendations for future research.     

The first three years of NML: Central issues in the management of nonprofit organizations

The articles published in the first three years of NML define a broad spectrum of management challenges and problems for future research. These issues fall into five broad categories: governance, executive leadership, human resources management, development of financial resources, and strategic adaptation to change. This article summarizes the contributions of NML authors and suggests areas where new research would advance understanding and practice of nonprofit management and leadership.     

Inverse regression for ridge recovery: a data-driven approach for parameter reduction in computer experiments

Parameter reduction can enable otherwise infeasible design and uncertainty studies with modern computational science models that contain several input parameters. In statistical regression, techniques for sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) use data to reduce the predictor dimension of a regression problem. A computational scientist hoping to use SDR for parameter reduction encounters a problem: a computer prediction is best represented by a deterministic function of the inputs, so data comprised of computer simulation queries fail to satisfy the SDR assumptions. To address this problem, we interpret SDR methods sliced inverse regression (SIR) and sliced average variance estimation (SAVE) as estimating the directions of a ridge function, which is a composition of a low-dimensional linear transformation with a nonlinear function. Within this interpretation, SIR and SAVE estimate matrices of integrals whose column spaces are contained in the ridge directions’ span; we analyze and numerically verify convergence of these column spaces as the number of computer model queries increases. Moreover, we show example functions that are not ridge functions but whose inverse conditional moment matrices are low-rank. Consequently, the computational scientist should beware when using SIR and SAVE for parameter reduction, since SIR and SAVE may mistakenly suggest that truly important directions are unimportant.