An innovative approach to selecting an executive director

As a guide for how to select a new executive director, a family agency adopted the search committee process from higher education. The approach included clarifying agency goals and the director's qualifications, a board-staff screening, and interviews held jointly with public representatives before final board selection.     

Fertility differences between the family of orientation and the family or procreation in Barbados

Data from an island-wide probability sample of 4119 Barbadian females aged 16-50 were used to study whether there has been an intergenerational fertility decline between the respondents and their mothers. The fertility of the respondents, all from the low or lower middle class, was significantly lower than that of their mothers. However, the size of the family of procreation was seen to be positively related to the size of the family of orientation; i.e., those from large families tended to have large families and vice versa. There was, however, a regression to the mean. There were no differences between women from small and large families as to fertility norms, age at 1st use of contraceptives, or actual practice of contraception. Women from small families did tend to enter sexual relationships and get pregnant at a later age. The women from small families were better educated, earned higher incomes, and had higher status occupations, all factors which might have influenced their fertility. Women from larger families cited higher numbers for both small and large families than did the women from small families. This indicates a perceptual difference which was, in turn, related to fertility differences.     

Culture, Cosmopolitanism, and Risk Management

Most cultural approaches to risk management deal with the connections between the forms of social relations within groups and the risk concerns of those groups. According to these theories, a certain limited set of different relational forms (usually three, four, or five) lead to specific, different and conflicting, risk concerns. In contrast to these theories, cosmopolitanism is an approach to culture that focuses, not on forms of sociality, but on changes among forms—expansions and contractions in the inclusivity of forms and movement by persons from one form of sociality to another. Relative to other cultural theories, cosmopolitanism thus is much more concerned with the solution of risk management problems than with their origins. Cosmopolitanism can be thought of as a cultural continuum, with cosmopolitanism at one end and pluralism at the other. Cosmopolitan persons are more open to cultural change—and thus the solution of risk management problems. In this article, we outline our new theory of cosmopolitanism, describe a method for measuring it and present an experimental study that tests some implications of the theory. Results from the study support the theory by showing that, compared to pluralistic respondents, cosmopolitan respondents are more inclusive in their risk management judgments—that is, they express equal concern for a local and a national issue, whereas the pluralistic respondents express greater concern in the local case. We discuss the risk management implications of a cosmopolitan approach to culture.     

Beyond Planning:: Strategies for Successfully Implementing Strategic Decisions

This article brings strategy back to managers and their organizations. It argues and demonstrates empirically that what managers do, and the kind of organization they lead, matter in terms of achieving stated objectives. Managerial action involves a set of activities from assessing the problem to prioritising action, and takes place within an organizational context which has two important elements for decision-making. First, organizations have an accumulated stock of experience, and the more managers can access and utilise this experience base the better. Secondly, the culture and structure of an organization may exhibit more or less readiness for the changes that decisions bring about, and contexts less ready for change pose problems for managers in the implementation of decisions.This long-term study of 55 decisions in UK firms shows that careful managerial planning does not of itself guarantee successful outcomes: the organizational context is crucial in framing actions and influencing achievement, and decisions may send a firm on a trajectory beyond the point at which it can plan with confidence. Where experience and readiness are strong, decisions achieve stated objectives—where both are lacking, decisions tend to fail. But, as examination of two illustrative cases indicates, strength in either domain may be enough: sound experience may win out in comparatively unreceptive situations, and decisions may still succeed where experience is lacking but the organization is ready for change. The article closes with some implications for managers.     

GM Foods and the Misperception of Risk Perception

Public opposition to genetically modified (GM) food and crops is widely interpreted as the result of the public's misperception of the risks. With scientific assessment pointing to no unique risks from GM crops and foods, a strategy of accurate risk communication from trusted sources has been advocated. This is based on the assumption that the benefits of GM crops and foods are self-evident. Informed by the interpretation of some qualitative interviews with lay people, we use data from the Eurobarometer survey on biotechnology to explore the hypothesis that it is not so much the perception of risks as the absence of benefits that is the basis of the widespread rejection of GM foods and crops by the European public. Some respondents perceive both risks and benefits, and may be trading off these attributes along the lines of a rational choice model. However, for others, one attribute-benefit-appears to dominate their judgments: the lexicographic heuristic. For these respondents, their perception of risk is of limited importance in the formation of attitudes toward GM food and crops. The implication is that the absence of perceived benefits from GM foods and crops calls into question the relevance of risk communication strategies for bringing about change in public opinion.     

Žumberak: A Sixteenth-Century Refugee Settlement Zone

This article examines the movement of Orthodox Christian refugees from Bosnia to the Habsburg Monarchy in the 1530s and their settlement in a district called ?umberak. The movement of these Uskoks has never been examined in the context of refugee studies. This study of a refugee movement and settlement over a five-century period offers the possibility of reaching a better understanding of the long-term outcome of refugee movements. Ultimately, this article suggests that the refugees affected the land they settled as much as the settlement zone affected them, and that, in this case, the refugees were able to define their own outcome.     

Why social status matters for understanding the interrelationships between testosterone,economic risk‐taking,and gender

We conduct an extensive review of the literature on testosterone and economic risk‐taking behavior. In sum, there is evidence of a positive association between testosterone and economic risk taking, although it is unlikely to be a strong association given the abundance of null results. However, we argue that the existing literature may overstate the causal effects of testosterone on economic risk taking (or even report a spurious correlation) because this research has not considered the potentially confounding role of social status. Status could concurrently influence both testosterone and economic risk taking, given that testosterone is a social hormone with a reciprocal relationship with social status, and social status has been found to drive risk‐taking behavior. We also argue against using findings from this literature to make gender essentialist claims, primarily because social phenomena influence the size—and existence—of gender differences in economic risk‐taking behavior. We conclude with suggestions for future research.     

The Development of Object Construction From Infancy Through Toddlerhood

Early in development, children explore and combine objects in increasingly complex ways. One manual skill, object construction, represents a major shift in how objects are explored relative to other objects. Despite recent connections with cognitive functioning such as spatial skills, the development of object construction ability has rarely been studied and its trajectory has not been adequately described. The purpose of this study was to describe the development of three types of object construction (stacking, nesting, and affixing) across 5 monthly infant visits and 7 monthly toddler visits using a longitudinal design and a large sample size. Infants (10–14 months, n = 131) and toddlers drawn from the infant sample (18–24 months, n = 65) were given sets of age‐appropriate toys each of which elicited at least one type of constructive play. We described success at different construction tasks and identified trends for construction skill for infant and toddler development using multilevel modeling. We found that each of the three construction actions developed in unique ways across the 10‐ to 24‐month period. Infant construction skill predicted the development of toddler skill, but toddler construction skill diverged from infant trajectories. We discuss the role of combination strategies in the development of object construction skill and how object construction could be related to other domains of development.     

Cash Transfers and Children's Education and Labour among Malawi's Poor

This article examines the impact on children's education and labour of monthly cash grants targeted on ultra‐poor households and designed to reduce poverty and enable families to invest in human development. It conducts a randomised community trial, with baseline and endline surveys of intervention and control households; verifies school enrolment; and completes key‐informant interviews and focus‐group discussions. Compared with non‐beneficiaries, intervention children experienced a 5 percentage point difference in enrolment, higher educational expenditures, fewer absences, and a 10 percentage point decrease in labour outside the home. Qualitative data confirm the quantitative findings. Transfers to poor households had a positive impact. However, the Malawian educational system needs to be improved for short‐term impacts to lead to long‐term development in human capital.