CHAOTIC DYNAMICS IN CONTESTS

Under a myopic best‐reply dynamic, efforts in repeated contests may exhibit chaotic behavior. This may help explain, for example, why experimental data often show nonconvergence to one‐shot equilibrium efforts. (JEL C61, C72, D72, D74, D83)     

Participatory Spaces of Mental Health Service User Organizations in the Post-deinstitutional Era: Mapping Roles and Challenges

By applying the concept of participatory spaces, this article maps and analyzes current research on mental health service user organizations (MHSUOs). We have analyzed research literature from 2006 to 2016 to examine how the role of and challenges facing MHSUOs are formulated in the post-deinstitutional era. The current situation is marked by MHSUOs parallel presence in invited, claimed and popular spaces for participation. The post-deinstitutional era is characterized by a shift in focus from gaining access to such participatory spaces, to critically examining the political opportunities available in these. We further argue that the dominance of psychiatry-specific spaces could prevent MHSUOs from fully exploring their potential for participation in broader social issues.     

International coopetition for innovation: Are the benefits worth the challenges?

International coopetition has rarely been studied in relation to innovation. Further exploration of effects of international coopetition, i.e. the pursuit of simultaneous cooperation and competition, on a firm’s innovation performance is especially important as such a relationship is challenging with a high propensity to fail. This observation formed the point of departure for this study, which aims to increase the understanding of the effects of international coopetition on firm innovativeness and how these effects are conditioned on the magnitude of the organizational adjustments a firm introduces. We use an unbalanced panel of 9839 firms that participated in four waves of the Swedish Community Innovation Survey between 2008 and 2014 as our empirical base. We illustrate that firms that cooperate with competitors internationally are more likely to exhibit higher propensity to introduce radical innovations, yet this effect is conditioned upon the magnitude of organizational adjustments. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of the implications of international coopetition and what a firm needs to benefit from it.     

Parental age and offspring mortality: Negative effects of reproductive ageing may be counterbalanced by secular increases in longevity

As parental ages at birth continue to rise, concerns about the effects of fertility postponement on offspring are increasing. Due to reproductive ageing, advanced parental ages have been associated with negative health outcomes for offspring, including decreased longevity. The literature, however, has neglected to examine the potential benefits of being born at a later date. Secular declines in mortality mean that later birth cohorts are living longer. We analyse mortality over ages 30–74 among 1.9 million Swedish men and women born 1938–60, and use a sibling comparison design that accounts for all time-invariant factors shared by the siblings. When incorporating cohort improvements in mortality, we find that those born to older mothers do not suffer any significant mortality disadvantage, and that those born to older fathers have lower mortality. These findings are likely to be explained by secular declines in mortality counterbalancing the negative effects of reproductive ageing.     

Divorce and parity progression following the death of a child: A register-based study from Finland

Most studies that have examined whether a child’s death influences parental relationship stability have used small-scale data sets and their results are inconclusive. A likely reason is that child loss affects not only the risk of parental separation, but also the risk of having another child. Hence parity progression and separation must be treated as two competing events in relation to child loss. The analysis in this paper used Finnish register data from 1971 to 2003, covering over 100,000 married couples whose durations of both first marriage and parenthood could be observed. We ran parity-specific Cox regressions in which process time started from the birth of each additional child. All marriages included women of childbearing age, none of whom had experienced any child death on entering the analysis. We find that child loss only modestly influences the divorce risk, whereas its effect on the risk of parity progression is considerable.     

Bridging and Bonding in the Academic Melting Pot: Cultural Resources and Network Diversity

Understanding how cultural resources shape the formation of social networks is a methodological challenge as well as a theoretical objective, and both are yet to be met. In this study, sociability on college campuses is modeled as a process in which students’ prior cultural experiences and the current social structure of the student body work together, affecting the likelihood of friendships that take place within or across racial boundaries. Structural and cultural perspectives are surveyed to develop hypotheses concerning the determinants of interracial friendship, and these hypotheses are tested against a sample of 3,392 students from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen. The results suggest that religiosity, political activism, high arts participation, and athletic activities undertaken prior to college affect the diversity of social networks formed in the first year, but work in different directions. The effects of these cultural experiences may be explained by the racial organization of cultural activity on campus.     

W(h)ither the academy? An exploration of the role of university social work in shaping the future of social work in Europe

A controversial proposal to pilot the training of child protection social workers through an intensive work-based route in England is being supported and funded by the UK Government. Frontline, the brainchild of a former teacher, locates social work training within local authorities (‘the agency’) rather than university social work departments (‘the academy’) and has stimulated debate amongst social work academics about their role in shaping the direction of the profession. As a contribution to this debate, this paper explores the duality of social work education, which derives its knowledge from both the academic social sciences and the experience of practice within social work agencies. While social work education has traditionally been delivered by the academy, this paper also explores whether the delivery of training in the allied professions of probation and nursing by ‘the agency’ is equally effective. Finally, this paper explores the Helsinki model which achieves a synergy of ‘academy’ and ‘agency’. It suggests that there are alternative models of social work education, practice and research which avoid dichotomies between the ‘academy’ and the ‘agency’ and enable the profession to be shaped by both social work academics and practitioners.     

Using HIT to deliver integrated care for the frail elderly in the UK: current barriers and future challenges

In this paper we briefly describe the results of a 3 year project examining the use of Health Information Technologies (e.g., electronic patient record systems) to deliver integrated care. In particular, we focus on one group of patient (the frail elderly) and efforts to design an e-health supported healthcare pathway (the frail elderly pathway--FEP). The aim of FEP is to bring together clinicians and staff from health and social care and allow them to share patient information. Our findings show that progress in delivering a fully-supported and working FEP has been slow, not least because of the difficulties experienced by healthcare staff in using current IT systems. In addition, there are many strategic and technical issues which remain unresolved (e.g., systems interoperability).