Measuring and Analysing Community Action for Health: An Indicator-Based Typology and Its Application to the Case of Barcelona

Social welfare systems face major challenges, particularly in a context of social transformation, austerity and growing inequalities. This process is highly visible in the health sector. In this context, many voices ask for public sector reforms and community action for health as a relevant practice. However, analyses and evaluations of this kind of practices are still limited, particularly beyond the cases of single community health actions or interventions. We still need to identify key indicators for measuring and characterising what community action for health consists of, as well as to what degree this kind of intervention has been developed across a city. Based on a research about 49 neighborhoods in Barcelona, this paper creates an index to measure and characterize community action for health, using different indicators: citizen engagement programs in community health, organizational transformation of the health and social protection systems, stable participatory structures with specific teams, and urban health policies. We apply the index to the case of Barcelona and build a map of community action for health in the city using 4 categories: strong community health development (one neighbourhood), middle (9 neighborhoods), emergent (25 neighborhoods) and without specific community health promotion (14 neighbourhoods). We find that community action for health is extensive within the city of Barcelona, have great potential as a response to the need for change in the relationship between the public (health) sector and the citizenry, but is still implemented unequally across the urban territory in terms of types and methods.     

Managing business portfolios in German companies

This study analyzes the behavior of top managers in managing their firms' business portfolios. A review of the existing literature provides a conceptual framework for a research design combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. Data were collected through interviews with 35 top managers of well-known German business firms and the findings of this study translated into guidelines for managers. The results suggest that successful top managers should be concerned with the social relationships and management processes within the corporate office, as well as with their use of management concepts in managing the business portfolio.     

Nachhaltige Alltagsmobilit?t �� soziale Ungleichheiten und Milieus

Modern societies aremobile societies in a threefold aspect: socialmobility, international migrations and physical mobility (traffic). The article concentrates on the third, within sociological discourses more or less neglected aspect of mobility as physical mobility. From the perspective of sustainability and environment protection the production of greenhouse gases by individual motor car traffic is mostly debated resulting in reflections about alternative drive systems. In these debates social aspects of sustainable mobility are more or less neglected, partly as traditional mobility (system) research does not attach great importance to reflexive leeway. Based on recent studies the authors pick out two social aspects: unequal access to mobility systems as hardly any discussed aspect of social inequalities and the socio-cultural diversification alongside social milieus and lifestyles, which both are expressions and catalysts of (non-)sustainable forms of mobility.     

Symbolische Gewalt und ihr potenzielles Scheitern. Eine Ann?herung zwischen Butler und Bourdieu

The article discusses the similarities and differences between the contributions of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler regarding symbolic power. While both share core arguments such as the discursive constitution of symbolic power, its disguised effectiveness due to naturalization processes, and the notion that symbolic power is part of domination (as it is interwoven with the social logic of personal recognition), there are also important differences between Butler and Bourdieu. Latter insists on discerning the social dimension of discourse??asking who speaks from which position???from the immanent linguistic realm of discourse. Butler instead highlights the impossibility of separating the social from the discursive and stresses the imponderability of discursive acts due to their performativity and iterative logic. Thus, Butler argues, ??social imperatives?? (Bourdieu) can and actually do ??fail??. This becomes especially evident within processes of subjectivation (Butler). Considering the systematic possibility of ??failure?? in Butlers work, I argue that Butler and Bourdieu offer distinct notions of critique: While Butler??s notion is framed as heterotopy (Foucault), Bourdieu??s is utopic.     

Die symbolische Macht der Individualisierung und der Kampf um die Kritik

In the article we highlight an aspect of the crisis of criticism which we call ??speechlessness of criticism??. The heterogeneous criticism cannot be bundled up to a critical story any more. A common language with explicatory pictures and grammars is missing. Two explanations are offered for the ??speechlessness?? of criticism: the changes of the normative power of justification orders and the individualisation process. Both developments are a symbolic power which can explain the speechlessness of the criticism of capitalism at least partially. After the sketch of the symbolic power of the legitimation order of project and individualisation, starting points for a renaissance of criticism are analysed. Finally we explore the relevance of a reflexive combination of critical sociology and sociology of criticism for the concept of a critical sociology of criticism.     

Kooperation bei Großschadensereignissen

In cases of major emergencies a whole range of organizations has to cooperate quickly and efficiently. This situation poses a challenge to cooperation and communication. The article sketches some problem areas typical for the cooperation in disaster situations which have been identified in interviews with representatives of the organizations involved, by participatory observation and in a survey of the relevant literature. These problem areas are analyzed against the background of systems-theoretical considerations on cooperation in organizational networks. On this basis the authors develop a multi-level counselling model for improving the cooperation in major emergencies.     

Do Markets Favor Agents able to Make Accurate Predictions?

Blume and Easley (1992) show that if agents' have the same savings rule, those who maximize the expected logarithm of next period's outcomes will eventually hold all wealth (i.e. are ‘most prosperous’). However, if no agent adopts this rule then the most prosperous are not necessarily those who make the most accurate predictions. Thus, agents who make inaccurate predictions need not be driven out of the market. In this paper, it is shown that, among agents who have the same intertemporal discount factor (and who choose savings endogenously), the most prosperous are those who make accurate predictions. Hence, convergence to rational expectations obtains because agents who make inaccurate predictions are driven out of the market.     

Goodness-of-fit tests based on the distance between the Dirichlet process and its base measure

The Dirichlet process is a fundamental tool in studying Bayesian nonparametric inference. The Dirichlet process has several sum representations, where each one of these representations highlights some aspects of this important process. In this paper, we use the sum representations of the Dirichlet process to derive explicit expressions that are used to calculate Kolmogorov, Lévy, and Cramér–von Mises distances between the Dirichlet process and its base measure. The derived expressions of the distance are used to select a proper value for the concentration parameter of the Dirichlet process. These tools are also used in a goodness-of-fit test. Illustrative examples and simulation results are included.