Regulating food safety: the power of alignment and drive towards convergence

Food safety is a complex policy domain: it involves a variety of stakeholders, touches upon a variety of issues and disciplines, and has an important international dimension. While countries are free to set their own standards, their policy autonomy in the process of regulating food safety is restricted by a number of factors. The EU and each member state are confronted with two aspects of compliance: the power of alignment with Codex standards, and the drive towards convergence with standards developed by trading partners. The importance attributed to the WTO and its reference organization, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, sheds light on the institutional constraints inherent in the international framework governing food safety while revealing the indirect power of alignment with international standards. Equally important, on the other hand, are the standards adhered to or required by key trade partners. This is often a stronger factor pointing towards convergence in the mid to long term. These constraints are inherent components of the present-day European regulatory framework governing food safety.     

Reducing Risk on Machinery: A Field Evaluation Pilot Study of Risk Assessment

A pilot evaluation of the ANSI B11-TR3 Machinery Risk Assessment/Risk Reduction (RA/RR) Guideline was conducted. The TR3 guideline was introduced into five companies on one machinery system in each company with a second machine system serving as a control. A pre-post investigation was performed with safety conditions measured pre and post in both treatment and control and with risk reduction score measured only in the treatment machine system. NIOSH provided a commercially available risk assessment software to facilitate the process. Evaluation measures included avoided injuries, reduced exposure to machinery hazards, pretest and posttest knowledge demonstration, assessment of group processes following training, correct implementation of the guidelines, and degree to which risk reduction recommendations were implemented. The qualitative results of this pilot effort appear to be the best indicators for the way ahead in industrial machine risk assessment. All companies indicated that they derived value in participating in this study and in conducting risk assessments. Quantitative study results suggest that: (1) as measured by the knowledge of the participants before and after the TR3 training, the guidelines can be effective at enhancing employee knowledge of safe machine operations and (2) although the injury reduction trends appear successful, the small sample size in the study size should be considered in interpreting these early results.     

The associations between work stress and mental health: A comparison of organizationally employed and self-employed workers

This study examined the associations between work stressors and mental health in organizationally employed and self-employed workers, and with the numbers of general practitioner (GP) services used by these two employment groups. The participants were selected from those already taking part in the PATH Through Life Project, in Australia. A total of 2275 men and women aged from 40 to 44 years participated in a community survey and were in the labour force at the time of the interview. Those who participated entered responses into a hand-held computer under the supervision of an interviewer. A total of 14.2% of the group identified themselves as self-employed. Respondents also provided details of their occupation and the extent to which they experienced work stressors. Some 72.6% of these participants gave consent for information on their use of GP services over a 12-month period to be obtained from national insurance records. We found that self-employed men and women reported more decision authority than the organizationally employed, while self-employed women also had more manageable job demands. Self-employment offered men no health benefit. However, women who were self-employed reported worse physical health than their organizationally employed counterparts. While work stress factors were most likely to be associated with the use of GP services by self-employed men, the use of those services by women was more strongly associated with their experiences of stress in organizational employment. Overall, self-employment was found to be associated with relatively few mental health benefits.     

Joined-Up Government for Welfare Administration Reform in Norway

One of the largest public sector reforms in Norway is the welfare administrative reform of 2005. The aims are to get passive beneficiaries back into work and to make the administration more user-friendly, holistic and efficient. The aims are to be achieved by increasing the administration’s capacity to address “wicked issues” by cutting across existing policy fields and administrative levels. This joined-up-government approach poses three main challenges: 1) to get a merged central government agency to work, 2) to establish constructive cooperation between the central and local authorities and 3) to coordinate front-line services with user-oriented employment and welfare offices. The article shows that increasing the capacity of government to cut across existing policy fields and handle transboundary wicked issues are still struggling to be implemented. Cooperation between sectors is however easier to achieve than cooperation between levels. The joined-up-government-approach also tends to make accountability relations more ambiguous.     

Bayesian Point Estimation Using the Predictive Distribution

There is considerable question about how a Bayesian might provide a point estimate for a parameter when no loss function is specified. The mean, median, and mode of the posterior distribution have all been suggested. This article considers a natural Bayesian estimator based on the predictive distribution of future observations. It is shown that for the set of parameters that admit an unbiased estimate, this predictive estimate coincides with the posterior mean of the parameter. It is argued that this result provides some justification for use of the posterior mean as a Bayesian point estimate when there is no loss structure.     

Perceived Power and Physical Violence in Marital Conflict

Relations among perceived marital power, the demand/withdraw interaction pattern, and self-reports of the use of verbal aggression and physical violence were examined in a sample of 42 married couples. Couples completed several self-report questionnaires and discussed two areas of marital dissatisfaction, one identified by the wife and one identified by the husband. These interactions were rated for the use of the demand/withdraw interaction pattern. Regression analyses revealed that lower levels of perceived power by the husbands and higher levels of perceived power by the wives were associated with the use of verbal aggression and violence by husbands and wives, the husband demand/wife withdraw interaction pattern was associated with husband's use of verbal aggression, and the wife demand/husband withdraw pattern was associated with husband's verbal aggression and violence and with wife's violence.     

Social–ethnic school composition and disengagement: An inquiry into the perceived control explanation

In many Western countries, increasing levels of immigration have raised concerns over the outcomes of social–ethnic segregation in schools. This study relates social–ethnic school composition to students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive disengagement. While previous research mostly remains atheoretical, this current study investigates the applicability of the perceived control explanation, with the expectation that attending low socioeconomic status (SES) schools and schools with a higher proportion of ethnic minority pupils lowers students’ perceived control and hence produces disengagement. Multilevel analyses on data from the Flemish Educational Assessment, consisting of 11,759 students in 83 Flemish secondary schools, show that students in lower SES schools are more likely to disengage behaviorally and emotionally from school. This association is, as expected, mediated by feelings of perceived control. Higher ethnic minority concentration, however, yields lower disengagement, especially for ethnic minority students. The implications are discussed.     

Self‐Report and Observational Assessment of Couples' Conflict: The Concordance Between the Communication Patterns Questionnaire and the KPI Observation System

The purpose of the study is to provide a cross‐cultural replication of the correspondence between the Communication Patterns Questionnaire (CPQ) Constructive Communication Subscale and an observational measure of constructive communication. Eighty‐one couples in two German cities completed the CPQ, a self‐report measure of couples' conflictual communication, and participated in a 15‐minute, videotaped interaction in which they discussed a current problem. A microanalytic coding system, the Kategoriensystem fuer Partnerschaftliche Interaktion (KPI), was used to classify each unit of behavior in the videotaped interactions. Correlations were computed between subscales on the CPQ and summary categories on the KPI. The correlations were generally supportive of the CPQ as a measure of couples' communication. In particular, the Constructive Communication Subscale of the CPQ and a summary measure of constructiveness on the KPI were correlated at .51.