Central Bank Transparency as a Dialogical Accomplishment

This paper is a case study of the Czech central bank's communication with the public following the bank's decision to devalue the Czech currency. The aim is to contribute to knowledge of how central banks discharge their obligations to be transparent in communicating controversial decisions and actions. It is argued that transparency cannot be considered an individual act of the bank, but a joint dialogical accomplishment, which includes, among others, media and the public. The analysis of the interactions shows that the concepts of “dialogical networks” and “practical historians” are useful tools for elucidating how controversies in media develop over time.     

Editorial: Speaking in Tongues—Diversity in Mixed Methods Research

Pre‐testing is a standard tool to increase appropriateness and to capture the audience, yet rarely is this technique employed for population surveys. This study aimed to examine parental views on the content and methodology of a population child health survey. Forty‐eight Australian families of children aged 0–12 years were interviewed about the content and proposed data collection methods of the draft Victorian Population Survey of Child Health and Wellbeing. Concerns with instructions and items of several commonly used child health measures were identified. Parents preferred face‐to‐face methods rather than telephone interviews due to survey legitimacy; however, 72% of parents indicated that they would participate in a telephone survey. This study provided new findings about respondent views on child health measures and the conditions under which CATI versus face‐to‐face methods for child health data collection methods would be acceptable.     

Motivating child welfare case managers: An application and extension of feedback information theory

No empirical studies in the child welfare literature have examined how job characteristics impact work motivation. The present study addresses this conspicuous research gap by surveying 419 county-based child welfare case managers across the state of New York. As predicted by feedback information theory, work motivation was enhanced by instrumental feedback and reduced when job complexity was introduced as a moderator. Consistent with the challenge–hindrance stress model, job control positively influenced job complexity's affects on the instrumental feedback–work motivation relationship. Findings advance the child welfare literature by demonstrating that the motivational effects of instrumental feedback are both conditional and dynamic.     

Survival of related individuals: An extension of some fundamental results of heterogeneity analysis

Many ideas in the analysis of heterogeneous mortality are based on the relationship between individual and observed hazard rates. This connection is established with the help of conditional averaging procedure: The observed risk of death at age x is calculated among those who survive this age. The analogy of this result for bivariate survival model with correlated individual hazards is derived. In the case of correlated frailty model the parametric specification of the mean, variance and correlation coefficient of the bivariate frailty distribution among survivors is obtained. The relationship between local association measure and the characteristics of the bivariate frailty distribution among survivors is established.     

Welfare risks in early adulthood: A longitudinal analysis of social assistance transitions in Norway

Lorentzen T, Dahl E, Harsløf I. Welfare risks in early adulthood: a longitudinal analysis of social assistance transitions in Norway This study assessed the significance of critical life events and socio‐economic background in relation to the likelihood of young Norwegians receiving social assistance, asking how each of these factors contributes both independently and interactively. The data set was derived from a nationwide, longitudinal register and includes the entire 18‐year‐old cohort in 1993. A discrete‐time proportional hazard rate analysis controlling for unobserved heterogeneity was applied. The results indicate that both socio‐economic background and indicators of critical life events have strong independent effects on the likelihood of receiving social assistance. Significant interaction effects between socio‐economic background and certain indicators of critical life events were detected. However, contrary to our expectations, under certain circumstances, coming from a group with low socio‐economic status does not seem to ameliorate the effect of being exposed to critical life events.     

Correction to: Vertical and Horizontal Inequality in Ecuador: The Lack of Sustainability

Social Indicators Research - The article Vertical and Horizontal Inequality in Ecuador: The Lack of Sustainability, written Ivan Gachet, Diego F. Grijalva, Paúl A. Ponce and Damián...     

Critical objective function values in linear sum assignment problems

The linear sum assignment problem has been well studied in combinatorial optimization. Because of the integrality property, it is a linear programming problem with a variety of efficient algorithms to solve it. In the given research, we present a reformulation of the linear sum assignment problem and a Lagrangian relaxation algorithm for its reformulation. An important characteristic of the new Lagrangian relaxation method is that the optimal Lagrangian multiplier yields a critical bottleneck value. Lagrangian relaxation has only one Lagrangian multiplier, which can only take on a limited number of values, making the search for the optimal multiplier easy. The interpretation of the optimal Lagrangian parameter is that its value is equal to the price that must be paid for all objects in the problem to be assigned.     

Who knows what? Reconfiguring the governance and the capabilities of the supply chain between physical and digital processes in the fashion industry

Abstract

On the basis of an exploratory multiple-case qualitative longitudinal study in the fashion industry, this article describes how digital technologies enabled choices among different types of supply chain governance. In doing so, this study responds to calls for governance-oriented longitudinal explorations and suggests an alternative path of governance choices in which the digital technologies become the platform that allows a dynamic discourse between outsourcer and outsourcee. Our results show that, when firms decide to leverage their performances through the adoption of information technology, they need to define their knowledge transfer capacities in order to adopt the appropriate type of governance model. With this article, we contribute to the global value chain literature adding to the knowledge transfer dimension.