Scandal as norm entrepreneurship strategy: Corruption and the French investigating magistrates

The sociological and legal scholarship on norm entrepreneurship focuses almost exclusively on the creation and promotion of new norms. Much of norm entrepreneurship is, however, oriented towards the solidification of existing yet under-enforced norms. Such entrepreneurship, which legal officials as well as social and political actors can undertake, often involves creating scandals: publicizing the real or alleged transgressions of high status actors. Scandals entail the exercise of popular justice and their logic is collectivistic. These two characteristics underlie the strategic recourse to scandal that often combines norm entrepreneurship and status-enhancement. This article discusses the use of scandal by the French investigating magistrates in the 1990s. Exploiting the declining prestige of the political elite, the low status French investigating magistrates targeted high status political actors and publicized their corruption investigations. The use of scandal circumvented the political pressures in the judicial process and the niceties of criminal procedure, discredited the political elite as a whole, and forced the latter to adopt various anti-corruption measures. Traditionally subordinate to the executive, the French judiciary mobilized around the corruption scandals against the political elite and, for the first time since the Revolution, acquired relative independence and enhanced status.     

A new approach to corporate planning

A fresh approach to planning can help corporate executives deal with such long-range planning problems as the setting of unrealistic plan targets by division managers and a poor record of long-range plan implementation and control. This article considers such an approach.     

Helping Uganda's street children

With the help of theoretical paradigms of social behavior, we use both qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate a recent government‐initiated program for relocating and resettling orphans and street children in Uganda. We first describe this program, which we have called the Model for Orphan Resettlement and Education (MORE). MORE is an inventive approach in the battle against the problem of orphaned children living on the streets of urban centers in Africa. The government of Uganda has developed this model to effectively educate and re‐socialize children who have been living on the streets of the capital city, Kampala. We then analyze this program, highlighting both the positive and negative aspects, and suggest ways it can be adapted to be more effective and sustainable in meeting the needs of Uganda as well as other sub‐Saharan African countries that face similar problems.     

THE POWER OF THE LITTLE BLUE PILL: INNOVATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS OF LIFESTYLE DRUGS IN AN AGING POPULATION

The launch of Viagra in April 1998 led to a historically unprecedented high usage of erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs. We test whether Viagra's introduction significantly influenced outcomes for its target population such as sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates of older men, as well as its nontarget populations, such as divorces, natality, the distribution of the age spread within couples, female STDs, and sexual assault rates. We find causal evidence that Viagra's introduction increased gonorrhea rates in older men by 15%–28%. We find no significant evidence of any effects on other variables. We take this as evidence that this lifestyle drug causes significant changes in choices only which affect short‐term outcomes, while long‐term planned decisions are unaffected. Overall, we find that the welfare impacts of Viagra with respect to our outcomes of interest are positive and large. (JEL I1, J1, O33)     

Systematic patterning in phonologically‐motivated orthographic variation

Social media features a wide range of non‐standard spellings, many of which appear inspired by phonological variation. However, the nature of the connection between variation across the spoken and written modalities remains poorly understood. Are phonological variables transferred to writing on the level of graphemes, or is the larger system of contextual patterning also transferred? This paper considers orthographic coda deletions corresponding to the phonological variables of (ing) and (t,d). In both cases, orthography mirrors speech: reduction of the ‐ing suffix depends on the word's syntactic category, and reduction of the ‐t,‐d suffix depends on the succeeding phonological context. These spellings are more frequently used in informal conversational contexts, and in areas with high proportions of African Americans, again mirroring the patterning of the associated phonological variables. This suggests a deep connection between variation in the two modalities, necessitating a new account of the production of cross‐modal variation.     

Objective and subjective indicators of community evaluation: A Pennsylvania assessment

The relationships between subjective and objective measures of well-being were assessedusing data from a survey of Pennsylvania residents and county-level statistical measures complied from secondary sources. Following Ross, Bluestone, and Hines (1979), objective social indicators were derived to measure socioeconomic status, family status, health status, and alienation for Pennsylvania countries. These indices were only modestly intercorrelated, suggesting that they measured somewhat different ideas. Subjective well-being was assessed by asking more than 3000 individual respondents to a mail survey to rate the quality of their communities. Responses were dichotomized and logistic regression used to assess the effects of the objective indicators of county well-being to individual community evaluations. The relationships were small, and inconsistent. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Costs of Health Damage from Atmospheric Emissions of Toxic Metals: Part 1—Methods and Results

Significant quantities of toxic metals are emitted to the air by the incineration of waste, as well as by the combustion of coal and oil. To optimize the regulations for their emissions one needs to know the cost of their damage. That requires an impact pathway analysis, with realistic dispersion models, exposure‐response functions, and monetary values. In this article we explain the method and assumptions and present results for arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead, the most important toxic metals in terms of damage cost. We also estimate their contribution to the damage cost of waste incineration and electric power from coal for typical situations in Europe. The damage costs of As, Cd, and Pb are much higher than previous estimates because of a large number of new epidemiological studies, implying more and more serious health effects than what had been known before. New cost‐benefit studies for the abatement of toxic metal emissions are advisable. The discussion of the epidemiological studies and the derivation of exposure‐response functions are presented in two companion articles, one for As and Cd, the other for Hg and Pb.     

Bridging Practice and Theory: A Design Science Approach

Despite ambitious efforts in various fields of research over multiple decades, the goal of making academic research relevant to the practitioner remains elusive: theoretical and academic research interests do not seem to coincide with the interests of managerial practice. This challenge is more fundamental than knowledge transfer, it is one of diverging knowledge interests and means of knowledge production. In this article, we look at this fundamental challenge through the lens of design science, which is an approach aimed primarily at discovery and problem solving as opposed to accumulation of theoretical knowledge. We explore in particular the ways in which problem‐solving research and theory‐oriented academic research can complement one another. In operations management (OM) research, recognizing and building on this complementarity is especially crucial, because problem‐solving–oriented research produces the very artifacts (e.g., technologies) that empirical OM research subsequently evaluates in an attempt to build explanatory theory. It is indeed the practitioner—not the academic scientist—who engages in basic research in OM. This idiosyncrasy prompts the question: how can we enhance the cross‐fertilization between academic research and research practice to make novel theoretical insights and practical relevance complementary? This article proposes a design science approach to bridge practice to theory rather than theory to practice.