Will You Still Need Me,Will You Still Feed Me?—Paying for Care in Old Age

A major issue for social policy in the twenty-first century will be providing good-quality support and care for older people. However, recent debate about this has been driven more by ideology than by evidence. This paper examines the socio-economic, demographic and policy changes that are influencing the debate, and outlines findings from current research on attitudes towards financial planning for care in old age. This shows that the majority of people feel that the state should provide or pay for care for older people, either through a means-tested system or one which provides some basic level of protection which people can choose to enhance through their own means. However, only a minority would be willing to pay themselves for this, either directly through increased taxation or indirectly through reduced prospects of inheritance of housing capital. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings.     

Pregnancy, work and women's well-being: A review

Pregnancy is potentially a stressful period for working women for ergonomic, psychological and organizational reasons, yet the well-being of women is seldom the focus of research on working during pregnancy. This paper reviews the literature on women's experience of being pregnant at work. It concludes that, while working conditions are usually not well suited to pregnant women, the majority of women encounter only minor difficulties and regard working in a positive way. However, for a minority of women working during pregnancy adversely affects their well-being. These are likely to be women working during pregnancy adversely affects their well-being. These are likely to be women who are most at risk from work-related stress at other times. The literature suggests that working during pregnancy has still to be accepted and accommodated by employers and colleagues.     

Working with managers to improve services: changes in the role of research in social care

The setting of specific objectives for children's services and the identification of key outcome indicators, together with the development of a core information specification for children's services with its practical application in the implementation of the Integrated Children's System, all mean that substantially more data are now available to child welfare agencies. Not so long ago in the UK it was the role of research teams to collect and analyse such data. Now that so much of it is already available to agencies, are researchers who work in this area of applied social policy research becoming redundant? Using data from the cohorts of looked after children being studied at the Centre for Child and Family Research, Loughborough University, the paper demonstrates how researchers can work in consultation with the managers of child welfare agencies to make better sense of the data at their disposal. It considers three issues: what additional variables need to be explored to help agencies better understand their performance; how groups of children could be identified who follow predictable pathways through social care; and how qualitative information is necessary to gain a true picture of what is happening. All of these examples demonstrate a fundamental role for researchers in working with social services personnel to identify how services can be improved.     

Agent or Steward: The Target CEO in a Hostile Takeover: Can a Condemned Agent be Redeemed?

This article examines the differences, tensions and overlaps between agency and stewardship theories of corporate governance. The context is a hostile bid for Blue Circle Industries, a FTSE 100 company, and the focus is upon its Chief Executive Officer’s actions in response. CEOs occupy a position of pivotal importance during such takeover bids, and it is salient to examine their resultant motivations and payoffs. While agency theory suggests that CEOs may act in self-interested ways, diverging from the interests of shareholders, ongoing stewardship theory sees CEOs as fundamentally honest and caring about their company and shareholders’ interests. The hostile bid is an opportunity for the target CEO to fight at any cost, or to act in the best interests of stakeholders.In examining the target CEO’s actions, this article suggests there is more complexity than these two theories acknowledge and the relationship between them is not one of simple opposition. The article identifies a framework for making sense of CEO/stakeholder relationships, and highlights the importance to boards of understanding how CEOs manage differential stakeholder pressures over time.     

Interblock information in multidimensional block designs

In many experimental situations, d-way heterogeneity among experimental units may be controlled through use of multiple blocking criteria. In some cases it is reasonable to regard some or all of the block effects as random. Then the model is mixed and observations within blocks are correlated. Very general estimators of treatment effects and their dispersion matrix with recovery of interblock information are provided. They apply to designs with d > 1 blocking criteria that may be crossed, nested, or a combination thereof. These general results may be specialized to provide analyses of new classes of MBD's or used directly for numerical analyses of designs in the general class, perhaps through use as the basis for very general computer programs. Estimation of variance components is discussed, and an example is provided to illustrate adaptation of the general results.     

Personal and social drinking motives, family drinking history, and problems associated with drinking in two university samples.

Two drinking motives scales, Negative Personal (NP) motives and Positive Social (PS) motives, derived from Mulford and Miller's Definitions of Alcohol Scales, and a Negative Family Models (NFM) scales designed to reflect family modeling of drinking-related problems were evaluated for internal consistency and association with college students' scores on a drinking-related Social Complications (SOCCOMP) scale. In both initial (n = 553) and cross-validation (n = 293) samples, all four scales demonstrated high internal consistency. Multiple regressions of NP, PS, and NFM scales, together with measures of quantity and frequency of drinking on SOCCOMP for both samples, yielded highly significant multiple R's, confirming the additive association of these measures with problem drinking outcomes. An unanticipated finding of positive associations between PS drinking motive and SOCCOMP is reported.     

Stratification in American Science*

Although differential ranking in science is not readily visible to lay observers, American science is, in fact, sharply graded. Rewards and facilities for research are concentrated among relatively few investigators and organizations. This distinctive pattern of stratification, at odds with the egalitarian ethos of science, is not solely attributable to the distribution of talent in the scientific community. There is however a high correlation between assessed contributions to science and investigators' scientific standing. The present pattern of stratification is the outcome of processes of allocation of men and resources among various sectors of science which include selective recruitment and socialization of young investigators, differential access to publication and research facilities, and differential recognition of scientists' contributions through citations to their work and honorific awards. In a time when the legitimacy of reward systems in many social institutions is routinely challenged, scientists are apt to accept their own as just and correct.     

Micro and Macro Level Implications for a Sociology of Virtue: the Case of Draft Protesters to the Vietnam War*

On the basis of data from draft protesters to the Vietnam War it is suggested that an actively pursued and morally enhancing identity is the “pay off” of some deviant acts. These qualities of such deviance, called virtuous deviance, play havoc with labelling theory's passivity and character-degrading assumptions. The study of such acts may be called a sociology of virtue. A distinction between two kinds of protesters (refusers and resisters), which reflects different commitments to risk, suggests guiding hypotheses for that study: From the point of view of the actor, virtue may be self-constructed and autonomously implemented. Yet, escalations of commitment to virtue may require interpersonal corroboration and support. From the point of view of the normative order, such acts firm up moral boundaries, defining what it means to be moral.