An adolescent services plan to incorporate status offenders into the child welfare system

A model plan is presented for adolescent services that would facilitate the current trend to shift troubled but nondelinquent youngsters from the juvenile justice system into the child welfare system.     

Wo sind die Bachelorabsolventen heute und wie sehen sie ihr Studium?

The paper is based on a survey of graduates of the BA course Social Sciences at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. The course, which is a combination of Sociology, Political Science and Communication and Media Studies, was set up in 1999. In 2002 the first students completed the course. Therefore, the BA course Social Sciences is one of the BA courses with the longest experience in Germany. Four graduate years were interviewed for the survey. The aim of the survey was to find out where the graduates now stand and how they judge the course in retrospect. The results show that half of the graduates currently have an occupation, slightly over a third is doing a Master’s degree and about 10 % are in a temporary situation or performing other activities. Overall, the graduates are satisfied with the course. The evaluation of the individual course elements shows the strengths and weaknesses of the course.     

THE EFFECTS OF DEGENERACY ON COST-COEFFICIENT RANGES AND AN ALGORITHM TO RESOLVE INTERPRETATION PROBLEMS

The problems of determining valid shadow prices and of performing a valid sensitivity analysis for managerial purposes are considered. For primal degenerate optima, earlier results on finding shadow prices are used to propose a clear and efficient method for finding valid cost-coefficient ranges. An example is used to demonstrate how managerial information can be obtained at degenerate optima.     

Progrès économiques et avancées sociales au sein des chaînes d'approvisionnement mondiales: plusieurs exemples dans les pays du cône Sud

Les auteurs s'interrogent sur la nature et la diffusion des progrès induits par les chaînes d'approvisionnement mondiales (CAM), en s'appuyant sur les conclusions de neuf études de cas portant sur des filières implantées dans des pays du sud de l'Amérique latine. Des progrès économiques, associés à certaines avancées en matière sociale, sont observés parmi les entreprises têtes de file, mais les fournisseurs en amont n'en tirent pas toujours profit. Après avoir isolé trois types d'évolutions possibles au sein des CAM (développements «antagoniste», «tronqué» et «intégré»), les auteurs formulent des recommandations en ce qui concerne l'action des pouvoirs publics, des entreprises et des acteurs sociaux.     

Cooperation in the Face of Conflict: Effects of Top Managers’ Trust Beliefs in their Firms’ Major Suppliers

As with any relationships, those between buying firms and their major suppliers are likely to experience situations of conflict. When facing such situations, top managers tend to approach conflict either cooperatively or competitively. However, when and why top managers tend towards cooperation or competition is far from clear. This study proposes a novel link between the theory of cooperation and competition and the discounting principle of attribution theory to argue that it is top managers’ trust beliefs in their firms’ major suppliers that influences their intended approach to conflict. Using survey data from 140 C‐level managers and business owners, the authors develop and test a model that differentiates between two attributional dimensions of trust (competence and goodwill) and the specific relational conditions that influence how these attributions operate. The results indicate that top managers’ trust in their suppliers’ competence and goodwill is, in fact, decisive in determining how they intend to approach conflict. Further, the authors demonstrate that a top manager's trust belief in the supplier's goodwill is of particular relevance in driving the top manager to cooperate in the face of conflict. However, this link seems to be contingent on the specific conditions of the buyer–supplier relationship in question.     

Probabilistic Projections of the Total Fertility Rate for All Countries

We describe a Bayesian projection model to produce country-specific projections of the total fertility rate (TFR) for all countries. The model decomposes the evolution of TFR into three phases: pre-transition high fertility, the fertility transition, and post-transition low fertility. The model for the fertility decline builds on the United Nations Population Division’s current deterministic projection methodology, which assumes that fertility will eventually fall below replacement level. It models the decline in TFR as the sum of two logistic functions that depend on the current TFR level, and a random term. A Bayesian hierarchical model is used to project future TFR based on both the country’s TFR history and the pattern of all countries. It is estimated from United Nations estimates of past TFR in all countries using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The post-transition low fertility phase is modeled using an autoregressive model, in which long-term TFR projections converge toward and oscillate around replacement level. The method is evaluated using out-of-sample projections for the period since 1980 and the period since 1995, and is found to be well calibrated.     

Similarity in friendship networks: Selection or influence? The effect of constraining contexts and non-visible individual attributes

Most research on similarity in friendship networks focuses on clearly visible individual attributes (i.e. attitudes and behaviors) in contexts where choices whom to befriend are relatively unconstrained. These studies often reveal that social selection rather than social influence is the dominant cause of similarity among friends. We argue that in a setting where social collaboration is crucial and friendship choices are more constrained, influence might be the main reason for similarity found among friends. In addition, we examined whether social categorization and peer control amplifies the social influence process among friends. Using a stochastic actor-based model for network dynamics, we analyzed a three-wave dataset of first year Royal Netherlands Naval College officer students on friendship formation and military discipline. The data supports our first hypothesis that students adjust their own military discipline to that of their friends. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find support for the idea that individuals adjust their discipline more to friends who are of the same military specialty, and neither more to friends who exert peer control. We elaborate on these findings in the discussion.     

The Impact of Multiple Commitments on Intentions to Resign: an Empirical Assessment

A number of authors have recently drawn attention to the need to explore, conceptually and empirically, the relationships between different types of employee commitment and work outcomes. Management, continually grappling with the challenge of organizational effectiveness, is often interested in outcomes such as the individual job-performance levels of employees and absenteeism as well as the number of resignations from the organization. One of these, turnover as measured by intentions to resign, and its relationship with multiple commitments in the organization, is the focus of this study. The first objective was to compare the impact of four constituent-specific commitments (commitment to the organization, job, profession and supervisor), termed 'employee commitment', on intentions to resign. Second, the 'key mediating construct' proposition of organizational commitment suggested by Hunt and Morgan (1994) was empirically evaluated. The empirical results show that the impact of commitment to the profession on intentions to resign is the most influential. In addition, the data suggest that neither the 'one of many' model nor the 'key mediating construct' theory of employee commitment can be described as superior in explaining intentions to resign.