A New Game In Town: Competitive higher education

Research universities in the USA are complex, expensive organizations that perform multiple interrelated tasks and serve numerous constituencies. The value structure that has evolved for these universities is one that creates very high barriers to entry for new players and numerous impediments to rapid change. Consequently, real competitive pressures on universities have been minimal. However, new types of for-profit and non-profit organizations are beginning to provide competition in targeted segments of higher education. The arrival of Internet-mediated distance learning will greatly increase both market penetration by these new organizations and competition between traditional institutions of higher learning. Because this new competition targets only selected activities of the research university, it risks to destabilize their organization and structure. Ways in which this destabilization might occur are analysed and possible responses are discussed.     

Ownership and Control in Closely‐held Family‐owned Firms: An Exploration of Strategic and Operational Control

Much of the existing research into the divorce of ownership and control either focuses on the propensity for the separation of decision functions or upon scrutinizing conceptions, gauges or the practicalities of organizational control in large corporations. Although far from equivocal, such research appears broadly to concur that where ownership is dispersed, de facto control is likely to be exerted by management and that where ownership is closely‐held, de facto as well as legal control is exerted by owners. This study examines this assumption through exploring the nature of control in a closely‐held family firm. In this regard, the focus of this study is not on consequences of divorced ownership and control but rather on exploring the contingencies where ownership and control diverge. This research reveals a case wherein a closely‐held family firm is strategically and operationally controlled by its managers. Case research leads to the development of a range of insights regarding the owner/family and the management characteristics that contribute to this scenario. The paper concludes with a series of implications and conclusions.     

Does She Boil Eggs? Towards a Feminist Model of Disability

The Social Model of Disability is increasingly recognised as the theoretical and ideological underpinning for the collectivisation and politicisation of disabled people. This paper examines the Social Model from the perspective of disabled women. It then considers the position of disabled women in relation to both the women's movement and the disability movement. It argues that the former is oriented towards non-disabled women and the latter towards disabled men, with a consequent further marginalisation and disempowering of disabled women. Drawing on the history of black feminism, the author (who is a white non-disabled woman, and who teaches anti-discriminatory social work practice based on an integrated theoretical model) concludes by offering to disabled women a reframing of the analysis in which to explore their simultaneous experiencing of their gender and disability.     

Separability tests for high-dimensional,low-sample size multivariate repeated measures data

Longitudinal imaging studies have moved to the forefront of medical research due to their ability to characterize spatio-temporal features of biological structures across the lifespan. Valid inference in longitudinal imaging requires enough flexibility of the covariance model to allow reasonable fidelity to the true pattern. On the other hand, the existence of computable estimates demands a parsimonious parameterization of the covariance structure. Separable (Kronecker product) covariance models provide one such parameterization in which the spatial and temporal covariances are modeled separately. However, evaluating the validity of this parameterization in high dimensions remains a challenge. Here we provide a scientifically informed approach to assessing the adequacy of separable (Kronecker product) covariance models when the number of observations is large relative to the number of independent sampling units (sample size). We address both the general case, in which unstructured matrices are considered for each covariance model, and the structured case, which assumes a particular structure for each model. For the structured case, we focus on the situation where the within-subject correlation is believed to decrease exponentially in time and space as is common in longitudinal imaging studies. However, the provided framework equally applies to all covariance patterns used within the more general multivariate repeated measures context. Our approach provides useful guidance for high dimension, low-sample size data that preclude using standard likelihood-based tests. Longitudinal medical imaging data of caudate morphology in schizophrenia illustrate the approaches appeal.     

Internet Gamblers: A Latent Class Analysis of Their Behaviours and Health Experiences

In order to learn about the behaviours and health experiences of people who gamble on the Internet, we conducted an international online survey with respondents recruited via gambling and gambling-related websites. The mean (SD) age of the 4,125 respondents completing the survey was 35.5 (11.8) years, with 79.1% being male and 68.8% UK residents. Respondents provided demographic details and completed validated psychometric screening instruments for problem gambling, mood disturbances, as well as alcohol and substance misuse, and history of deliberate self harm. We applied latent class analysis to respondents’ patterns of regular online gambling activities, and identified subgroups of individuals who used the Internet to gamble in different ways (L ² = 44.27, bootstrap P = 0.07). We termed the characteristic profiles as ‘non-to-minimal gamblers’; ‘sports bettors’; ‘casino & sports gamblers’; ‘lottery players’; and ‘multi-activity gamblers’. Furthermore, these subgroups of respondents differed on other demographic and psychological dimensions, with significant inter-cluster differences in proportion of individuals scoring above threshold for problem gambling, mood disorders and substance misuse, and history of deliberate self harm (all Χ ²s > 23.4, all P-values <0.001). The ‘casino & sports’ and ‘multi-activity-gamblers’ clusters had the highest prevalence of mental disorder. Internet gamblers appear to be heterogeneous but composed of several subgroups, differing markedly on both demographic and clinical characteristics.     

Stroke in Developing Countries: Epidemiology,Impact and Policy Implications

The burden of stroke and other non‐communicable diseases has risen sharply in developing countries in recent years. This article provides a detailed review of this trend and its underlying causes, and discusses the social and economic effects of stroke and the scope for interventions to reduce incidence and mitigate impacts. It demonstrates that policy‐makers have been slow to recognise the growing scale of the challenge, and argues for large‐scale public health campaigns focused on primary and secondary prevention.     

Ruination: partition and the expectation of violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish photography)

This essay takes as its occasion a series of photographs on the Irish border region by Allan deSouza. The photographs are the motive for a set of interconnecting reflections on the conditions of violence and on its relation to state formation; on violence and the forms of history; and on the place of melancholy as a relation not only to the past, which inevitably it is, but as no less a kind of opening to a future. These concerns link three works by Walter Benjamin: ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21); The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924–25); and the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940). The link runs between the insistence of violence in the historical foundations of the state; the function of historicism in enabling that disavowal through a rarely acknowledged mythic/symbolic aesthetic that is encrypted in it; and the counter-discourse of historical materialism that Benjamin holds in tension with melancholy. Ireland is a state marked by the virtual and the actual violence of partition. Subject to all the injunctions and institutions of modernity, to its emerging forms of state and policing as well as to its techniques and technologies of military reduction, Ireland remains a location in which the failure of projects of modernity is only too easily exemplified. Ireland's is a history in ruins, a history of ruins. Ruins are the signs of a history of incompletion and ‘ruination’ that is normally read by conventional historians as the fatality of a culture resistant to modernity and driven to return time and again to its own atavisms. Benjamin's insight is to read in ruins and in violence not merely the consequences of a past malevolently active in the present, but openings onto an alternative configuration to that suggested by historicism and modernity.