Unmet needs in addressing child neglect: Should we go back to the drawing board?

Intervention in child neglect faces many challenges to effectiveness, including: (a) The lack of a cohesive, agreed-upon conceptual/theoretical framework and inconsistent definition of the problem; (b) disjointed intervention in various components of the problem; and (c) the social justice issues of inequity based on class, race, and gender. These conditions have led to a situation in which the role of poverty, potentially one of the most important contextual factors in neglect, can be overlooked. This article presents an argument for the need to pay more explicit attention to the definition of neglect, with particular focus on the role of poverty, in order to improve intervention in this pervasive problem. It concludes with recommendations for research, policy, and practice in child welfare.     

Education,Training and Economic Performance: Evidence from Establishment Survival Data

We consider the links between training, the quality of labor and establishment performance, using an indicator of firm performance, commercial survival. We place our evidence in the framework of a model in which managers have varying beliefs about the efficacy of education and training, leading to potential variation in their provision. We find that training and education yield significant positive effects on firm performance. Moreover, education and training interact positively in their effect on survival.     

Collectivistic leadership and George C. Marshall: A historiometric analysis of career events

Many of the prevailing approaches to understanding leadership assume that leadership operates as an individual-level phenomenon, in which one person takes on the role of a leader. However, a number of recently developed leadership models now describe leadership as a shared process. These collectivistic theories present leadership as a dynamic process in which a leader may selectively utilize the skills of followers and distribute elements of the leadership role among these followers as the situation demands. In this study, we conduct an investigation into the viability of core elements of the collectivistic theories through a historiometric analysis of events from the career of a notable leader, George C. Marshall. One hundred and two events from Marshall's career were identified from historical biographies and were then content coded and analyzed with regard to the components of a collectivistic leadership model. The results of this historiometric analysis indicated that there are key antecedents to collectivistic leadership and that the use of this form of leadership can result in positive team outcomes.     

Metropolitan deconcentration: Subareal inmigration and central city to ring moiillty patterns among southern SMSAs

The analysis of in-migration streams and subareal residential mobility patterns for moves made between 1965 and 1970in SMSAs in the East South Central and South Atlantic census divisions indicates that, despite their historical contexts, these metropolitan areas now show spatial differentiation patterns similar to those of the great cities of the Northeast. The white population has increased in ring areas primarily because of in-migration rates; the black population in the central cities has increased primarily because of in-migration rates to those subareas. Little variation in these patterns across SMSA size categories was apparent.     

A Critical Evaluation of Acupuncture Research

As Chinese medicine is going global, it is simultaneously adapting swiftly to local patterns of perception and interpretation, thereby being shaped into hitherto unknown forms. The globalization of Chinese medicine produces multiple localized visions of a healing system whose trademark is an “innate heterodoxy”. Barnes described the “psychologizing” of Chinese medicine in the USA (Barnes Cult Med Psychiatry 22(4):413–443, 1998). In Germany, however, biomedical instead of “holistic” patterns of perception and interpretation and a tendency to “physiologize” prevail among patients and Chinese Medical therapists. Here the recent German Acupuncture trials, and Acupuncture Randomized Trials (ART) and Cochrane data base metaanalysis (Linde et al., 2009a) shall serve as a prominent example of how German research centers around physiological phenomena and how these studies have triggered an international debate concerning the point-specific nature of acupuncture interventions. In order to evaluate the specific effect of acupuncture in randomized controlled trials, verum acupuncture, defined as acupuncture at “classical” acupuncture points, and sham acupuncture, defined as acupuncture at “non-acupuncture points”, are frequently compared. The anatomically exact location and specificity of acupuncture points are basic assumptions underlying this concept. But how clearly divisible are verum and sham acupuncture points if acupuncture physiology itself is a historical construct? To more adequately evaluate acupuncture’s effectiveness future clinical studies will have to tailor their methodology to the reality of the acupuncture encounter.     

Do Transformational Leaders Affect Employee Performance and Normative Commitment Through General Self-Efficacy? Analysis in Ghanaian Public Sector Organizations

Public Organization Review - The study sought to evaluate whether transformational leaders affect employee performance and normative commitment through general self-efficacy in the public sector...