'ASK YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT...': DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER PRESCRIPTION DRUG ADVERTISING AND THE HIV/AIDS MEDICAL MARKETPLACE

This essay combines economic, historical and textual analysis to map the role of consumer-directed pharmaceutical advertising in the construction of the HIV/AIDS medical marketplace. In an apparent break from previous mainstream media representations that focused on HIV/AIDS as a ‘death sentence’, recent pharmaceutical advertising emphasizes the manageability of the syndrome by telling patients/consumers how they can live with HIV/AIDS. Historicizing the rise of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, the essay examines how this mode of consumerism might facilitate ‘political activism at the point of consumption’ (Nava, 1999).     

Of Art and Drudgery: Homekeeping,Martha Stewart,and Techné

Stewart’s voice is an exceptionally influential viewpoint in how we imagine and construct the twenty-first century North American home. In an era where more women than men attend college and where women make up a (slim) majority of the workforce, Stewart’s popularity is baffling to many. Locating Stewart within North American traditions of domestic advice, the author investigates how Stewart frames domestic arts as techné, arguing that Stewart’s profitability and popularity are so robust and wide-reaching because she rescues domestic arts from denigration, refiguring homekeeping as a techné of worth and importance. This article provides a framework for understanding the meaningful ways domesticity and design function as an ethics of daily life, problematizing the gendered dichotomy between production and consumption.     

Moment Inequalities and Their Application

This paper provides conditions under which the inequality constraints generated by either single agent optimizing behavior or the best response condition of multiple agent problems can be used as a basis for estimation and inference. An application illustrates how the use of these inequality constraints can simplify the analysis of complex behavioral models.     

Adult protective services clients confirmed for self-neglect: characteristics and service use

Self-neglect is a complex and inadequately understood phenomenon that accounts for the majority of Adult Protective Services cases. This retrospective, record-based study of the characteristics of 210 older adults who were reported to Adult Protective Services and confirmed for self-neglect revealed that common health problems included nutritional frailty, arthritis, and incontinence. Comparisons based upon length of service showed differences in worker-rated social environment risk, client capacity, and activities of daily living performance. Comparisons of findings with those of other studies of self-neglect underscore the need for systematic research on this population.     

Functional Assessment and Intervention for Organizational Behavior Change: Improving the Timeliness of Staff Meetings at a Human Services Organization

We implemented functional behavioral assessment (FBA) at a human services organization to reduce the tardiness of scheduled staff meetings. Following baseline, FBA focused on antecedent and consequence conditions that affected staff arriving on time to scheduled meetings. These data were subsequently presented at a staff meeting in which staff planned an intervention to improve the timeliness of meetings. The intervention, composed of premeeting reminders, positive reinforcement for arriving on time, and meeting termination criteria (to facilitate meeting-to-meeting transitions), was implemented in a multiple baseline design across 3 types of meetings. As a result of the intervention, the number of minutes late that meetings started decreased. We discuss FBA within organizational behavior management that targets performance improvement objectives.     

Ageing Lesbians: Marginalising Discourses and Social Exclusion in the Aged Care Industry

The provision of services for ageing lesbians in Victoria, Australia, appears, at an initial reading, to be equitable and inclusive. Government polities suggest recognition and respect for diversity, with a focus on equitable provision of all social services. The reality, however, turns out to be both problematic and exclusionary. The researchers explored how dominant discourses around aged care facilities fail to take into account the identities and needs of ageing lesbians. The advertising brochures of aged care facilities were subjected to a critical and feminist discourse analysis, which was then compared with the perceived needs of a group of ageing lesbians from the same region as the aged care facilities. The data revealed marginalizing of non-heterosexual identities through the absence of representation in the brochures and their exclusion in the construction of aged care space. Further, a review of aged care policies that underpin the provision of services found that lesbian needs and identities were not included or mentioned in the special need groups. This limits the potential of the aged care industry to provide services that are culturally sensitive, safe, and inclusive.     

Discovering parental drug dependence: silence and disclosure1

Children of drug dependent parents form a large and growing population at elevated risk of adverse developmental and social outcomes. In this study 36 children and young people described growing up in such families. Parents tried to shield children from exposure, however the majority of young people demonstrated a detailed awareness of their parents' problem with drugs whilst living with the parentally imposed fiction that drugs were not at the heart of their family dynamic. Children and young people are locked into a silence they find difficult to unburden to anyone. The policy imperative is recognition of the impact on children of living daily with parental drug dependence and means of ameliorating their living circumstances in ways that do not label them further.     

Applying Process Knowledge for Yield Variation Reduction: A Longitudinal Field Study*

The widespread recognition of the detrimental effects of high yield variation in advanced manufacturing technology settings, both in terms of cost and management of production processes, underscores the need to develop effective strategies for reducing yield variation. In this article, we report the findings of a longitudinal field study in an electromechanical motor assembly plant where we examined how the application of process knowledge by production work teams can reduce yield variation. We propose and provide an operationalizion of a strategy to identify the sequence of particular types of actions—actions to control the mean followed by actions to control the variance—that work teams should pursue over time to apply process knowledge for reducing yield variation. The results of our empirical analysis show that yield variation was significantly reduced on three of the four production lines at the manufacturing plant that served as our research site. Differences in strategies for applying process knowledge help explain the different results on each of the production lines.