Gender and Clinical Pharmacy: The Career of an Occupational Ideology*

Cet article étudie le concept selon lequel, dans une profession en mutation, la pharmacie en l'occurrence, les femmes sont les principales personnes à transmettre les valeurs liées à la pharmacie clinique - une idéologic professionnelle prétendument instaurée afin de redonner sa place à la pharmacie dans la hiérarchie des professions. Si on constate la force des convictions des membres de la profession à l'endroit de la pharmacie clinique, on observe également que les femmes ne sont pas les premières à les dèfendre. Ni la socialisation des rapports entre les sexes ni une formation particulière en pharmacie n'ont rendu les femmes mieux disposées que les hommes à l'egard de la pharmacie clinique. Les divergences - et elles sont très importantes - au sein de la profession au sujet de la pharmacie clinique se font sentir selon les différents cadres de travail des pharmaciens et selon l'année d'obtention de leur permis d'exercice. Ce sont plus les lieux de travail que les rapports entre les sexes qui permettent de prévoir les attitudes à l'égard de la pharmacie clinique. Il semble done peu probable que le fait d'équilibrer le nombre d'hommes et de femmes dans un milieu de travail soit de nature à le faire évoluer. Quelle que soit, au départ, la conception des pharmaciennes à l'égard de leur profession, elle influe peu sur leur rapport à la pharmacie clinique. This paper explores the idea that in a changing profession, women are the principal value carriers of clinical pharmacy—an occupational ideology professedly developed to restore pharmacy's precarious standing in the occupational hierarchy. While the investigation uncovers considerable evidence for the vitality of clinical pharmacy beliefs among practitioners, women were not at the forefront of this trend. Neither general gender socialization nor specific pharmacy training has rendered females more sympathetic to clinical pharmacy than males. Differences within the pharmacy community regarding clinical pharmacy—and they are quite considerable— emanate from the varied work settings that practitioners occupy and their year of licensure. Attitudes to clinical pharmacy are better predicted by workplace than by gender. On the basis of our findings, it seems unlikely that balancing the number of men and women in an occupation or work organization will, in and of itself, change it. Whatever distinctive prior orientations to work that female pharmacists may hold, they have little impact upon how they think about clinical pharmacy.     

A Contrast of HRM and TQM Approaches to Performance Management: Some Evidence*

Using a survey, this paper provides information about the current state of performance management (appraisal) from a sample of UK‐based EFQM‐affiliated organizations. It particularly focuses on several critical issues of performance management in the context of TQM including: the effectiveness of TQM programmes; the rationale for performance management; degree of internal consistency between TQM assumptions and performance management systems; and the relationship among performance management, effectiveness of TQM programmes, employee satisfaction and overall organization performance. Although the fundamental precepts advocated by founders of TQM appear to be in conflict with performance management practices, however, the article argues that, rather than being contradictory, both can add value to the operations of the other in the interest of the organization as a whole. More precisely, the paper explains how a successful TQM strategy requires a rethinking and changing the organization's performance management system, otherwise it is highly likely to result in a disaster. To conclude, the survey evidence is used, combined with previous literature, to discuss the implications of these results for designing a contextually appropriate performance management for TQM and in the interest of the future research on TQM and HRM.     

Child maltreatment in Greece: a review of research

Child maltreatment can be traced in Greek mythology, history and literature. Greek society has always used passive or active violence towards its dependent members, including children. In the last 17 years there have been a number of studies describing child maltreatment in contemporary Greece. Most have used small clinical samples; nevertheless, their findings are comparable to those of other countries and their results support the psychopathological causality of child maltreatment. A number of studies on child-rearing practices and on children's socialization have revealed an extensive use of physical punishment related to the child's opposition to parental authority and high parental expectations often linked with the child's school performance. Another small set of studies assessed the effectiveness of social policy and the appropriateness of the child protection system. On the basis of the studies on child maltreatment in Greece, the author proposes firstly the adoption of an operational definition which takes into consideration community attitudes and culture. A second proposal relates to the application of an ecological theoretical model stressing the mutual interaction of different systems and their cumulative effects. Lastly, it is suggested that social policy measures should be introduced in the field of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Linear or Nonlinear? Automatic Structure Discovery for Partially Linear Models

Partially linear models provide a useful class of tools for modeling complex data by naturally incorporating a combination of linear and nonlinear effects within one framework. One key question in partially linear models is the choice of model structure, that is, how to decide which covariates are linear and which are nonlinear. This is a fundamental, yet largely unsolved problem for partially linear models. In practice, one often assumes that the model structure is given or known and then makes estimation and inference based on that structure. Alternatively, there are two methods in common use for tackling the problem: hypotheses testing and visual screening based on the marginal fits. Both methods are quite useful in practice but have their drawbacks. First, it is difficult to construct a powerful procedure for testing multiple hypotheses of linear against nonlinear fits. Second, the screening procedure based on the scatterplots of individual covariate fits may provide an educated guess on the regression function form, but the procedure is ad hoc and lacks theoretical justifications. In this article, we propose a new approach to structure selection for partially linear models, called the LAND (Linear And Nonlinear Discoverer). The procedure is developed in an elegant mathematical framework and possesses desired theoretical and computational properties. Under certain regularity conditions, we show that the LAND estimator is able to identify the underlying true model structure correctly and at the same time estimate the multivariate regression function consistently. The convergence rate of the new estimator is established as well. We further propose an iterative algorithm to implement the procedure and illustrate its performance by simulated and real examples. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Hard or Soft Classification? Large-margin Unified Machines

Margin-based classifiers have been popular in both machine learning and statistics for classification problems. Among numerous classifiers, some are hard classifiers while some are soft ones. Soft classifiers explicitly estimate the class conditional probabilities and then perform classification based on estimated probabilities. In contrast, hard classifiers directly target on the classification decision boundary without producing the probability estimation. These two types of classifiers are based on different philosophies and each has its own merits. In this paper, we propose a novel family of large-margin classifiers, namely large-margin unified machines (LUMs), which covers a broad range of margin-based classifiers including both hard and soft ones. By offering a natural bridge from soft to hard classification, the LUM provides a unified algorithm to fit various classifiers and hence a convenient platform to compare hard and soft classification. Both theoretical consistency and numerical performance of LUMs are explored. Our numerical study sheds some light on the choice between hard and soft classifiers in various classification problems.     

Surface Estimation, Variable Selection, and the Nonparametric Oracle Property

Variable selection for multivariate nonparametric regression is an important, yet challenging, problem due, in part, to the infinite dimensionality of the function space. An ideal selection procedure should be automatic, stable, easy to use, and have desirable asymptotic properties. In particular, we define a selection procedure to be nonparametric oracle (np-oracle) if it consistently selects the correct subset of predictors and at the same time estimates the smooth surface at the optimal nonparametric rate, as the sample size goes to infinity. In this paper, we propose a model selection procedure for nonparametric models, and explore the conditions under which the new method enjoys the aforementioned properties. Developed in the framework of smoothing spline ANOVA, our estimator is obtained via solving a regularization problem with a novel adaptive penalty on the sum of functional component norms. Theoretical properties of the new estimator are established. Additionally, numerous simulated and real examples further demonstrate that the new approach substantially outperforms other existing methods in the finite sample setting.     

The interactive effects of political skill and future time perspective on career and community networking behavior

Scholars have suggested that skill (Ferris et al., 2007) and motivation (Forret and Dougherty, 2001) need to be considered in predicting the direction and intensity of networking behaviors. Congruently, the present study argues that skill and motivation operate interactively and assesses the interactive impact of political skill (i.e., the ability to interact effectively with others) and future time perspective on differentially predicting community-based and career-based networking behavior. Results from a sample of managers from a national retail chain (n = 291) indicated that politically skilled individuals who possessed a deep future time perspective were more involved in career-related networking than politically skilled individuals who perceived a shallow future time perspective. Additionally, politically skilled respondents with shallow organizational time perspectives engaged in higher levels of community-based networking than did their counterparts with deeper organizational time perspectives. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of political skill, social networks, and socioemotional selectivity theory.