Bodies, Disability and Spaces: the social model and disabling spatial organisations

This essay examines the relevance of socio-material space to the social model. The social model has been criticised as being disembodied. While there is some basis for this critique, the social model, in fact, has 'bodies in space' as a central concern. A distinction is made between disability as a sociocultural and biomedical category, and as a state of 'not being able to'. The latter usage is not just relevant to people with disabilities. In order to illustrate the strength of the social model, disabling social organisations of space-time practises are examined with a special emphasis on transport-public space. It is concluded that the social model offers insights into relationships between bodies, embodied agency and the social organisation of space-time.     

Developing Young Leadership Within the Ethiopian Immigrant Group in Israel

When over 8000 Ethiopian Jews fled to Israel in 1982 and 1994, whole communities were uprooted from a longstanding traditional way of life. Their abrupt introduction to a Western-style Israeli culture, different language and customs contradicted their almost mystical expectations of their religious homeland, resulted in a culture shock that threatened their entire way of life—especially the hierarchical leadership of elders that they were accustomed to. This article offers a glimpse into the Ethiopian Jews' life prior to the migration, as well as the Israeli reality they now face. Our project, initiated in 1996 and lasting one year, sought to locate and train young immigrant Ethiopian leaders to help bridge the gap between their communities and their new life-preserving Ethiopian values and traditions while promoting adaptation. This article outlines the development of the model, from the conception of the idea through the formation of the multidisciplinary team, the establishment of criteria for locating and selecting the target leadership population, the training process, and the final evaluations and conclusions during the year-long operation of the project.     

Book reviews

Qualitative Sociology -     

Sexual assault while in the military: violence as a predictor of cardiac risk?

The purpose of this article is to determine whether known cardiac risk factors are more prevalent among women veterans who report having sustained sexual assault while in the military. We surveyed a random sample of 3,632 women veterans using Veterans Administration (VA) ambulatory care nationally. Obesity, smoking, problem alcohol use, sedentary lifestyle, and hysterectomy before age 40 were found to be more common in women reporting a history of sexual assault while in the military than in women without such history. An association between myocardial infarction and prior sexual assault history may be mediated in part by known cardiac risk factors.     

Search based job scheduling and sequencing with setup times

The problem of sequencing jobs on a machine in a job shop has been approached by a number of researchers and practitioners. One of the most popular methods is to apply a priority rule to the queue at each machine. The authors have previously published details of an approach which sets the priority of a job as a linear combination of the operation times and due date for that job. The coefficients in the linear combination are set by a simulation and search procedure so as to give good performance based on the performance measure specified. This paper extends this approach to include setup time factors. This extended approach is then applied to data from an actual manufacturing system. The extended approach is shown to improve the performance of the manufacturing system in relation to existing techniques.