Siting Praxeology. The Methodological Significance of “Public” in Theories of Social Practices

The concept of “site” is at the center of current debates in theories of social practices as well as in cultural anthropology. It is unclear, however, how to assess the associated methodological assumption that overriding social structures or cultural formations can manifest themselves in sites. The article draws on the conception of social practices and introduces the notion of “publicness” in order to explicate how and why sociality and social structures can be accessed through “siting”. Sites as well as social practices, it is claimed, have to be conceptualized as essentially public and thus principally observable phenomena. This assumption of publicness implicit to both site ontology and theories of social practices is unfolded on the basis of a praxeological reformulation of the paradigm of joint attention elaborated in developmental psychology. To avoid presentist misinterpretations, we then conceptualize sociality as chains of practices across time and space, drawing on the works of Theodore Schatzki, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Giddens and Bruno Latour. The public carriers of practices (artifacts, symbols, media, bodies) and the translocal structures they establish acquire particular significance in these approaches. In a further step, we present some methodological consequences of the “publicness assumption” and support our arguments by referring to Pierre Bourdieu's study on Distinction.     

Balance of care—a user's view of a new approach to joint strategic planning

Planning for care of the Elderly has to face the problems of an increasing elderly population; a wide range of alternative ways of caring for them (at widely differing costs); the fact that services are provided by several different organisations all facing difficult financial constraints; a range of professional opinion about the desirability or otherwise of alternative patterns of care and use of resources; a lack of data on how care is at present distributed; the lack of a structure for organising such data as are available; and the lack of an appropriate computer-based model for manipulating the large number of data elements necessary to describe and help to evaluate alternative plans for the future. The Balance of Care approach to the Joint Strategic Planning of Health and Social Services provision for the Elderly, is being used in pilot applications in two Areas in the UK. Its contribution to the solution of the problems outlined above is described by authors from the two Areas. The approach and the underlying model can be extended to strategic planning for other client groups requiring non-acute care.     

SERVICES OUTSOURCING AND INNOVATION: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits, and innovation using plant‐level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing, but the magnitude is smaller. We also find that international services outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability, as predicted by theory, whereas this is not true for domestic sourcing. The results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis. (JEL F19, O31)     

Estimation for High‐Dimensional Linear Mixed‐Effects Models Using ℓ1‐Penalization

Abstract. We propose an ?₁‐penalized estimation procedure for high‐dimensional linear mixed‐effects models. The models are useful whenever there is a grouping structure among high‐dimensional observations, that is, for clustered data. We prove a consistency and an oracle optimality result and we develop an algorithm with provable numerical convergence. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of the method on simulated and a real high‐dimensional data set.