Targeting disadvantage in agriculture

The effectiveness of the main policy instrument targeting support at farmers in disadvantaged areas of the UK from 1976 to 2000 (the Hill Livestock Compensatory Allowance Scheme) is evaluated for Northern Ireland, using recursive linear programming models and input–output analysis. Capital, income and employment effects of the Scheme in its latter years are estimated and assessed against declared policy objectives. It is estimated that average farm cash incomes would have been between 17 and 31 per cent lower in the absence of HLCA payments, while farmer net worth would have fallen by approximately 1 per cent annually. In aggregate, some 1000 jobs were sustained by the Scheme and incomes and profits in the region were boosted by £9 million each year. The main economic effect arising from the introduction of a successor area-based subsidy, will be a redistribution of payments from farms with relatively high stocking rates (predominantly larger units) to those operating more extensively (mostly smaller, part-time farms).     

Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power

This article argues that the key to the explanation as to why sexual harassment is a feature of organizational life lies in the issue of power. Yet there has been little attempt to link sexual harassment with theories or explanatory models of power. This article first takes Lukes's (1986) three‐dimensional model as a framework to explore how harassment may be understood as an exercise of power at different levels then shows how radical feminist and post‐structuralist analyses overlap with and are distinct from Lukes's third dimension of power.     

INFORMATIONAL INTIMACY AND FUTURISTIC FLU: LOVE AND CONFUSION IN THE MATRIX

Cyberpunk's influence upon our understanding of the information revolution is indicated by the fact that its seminal novel, Neuromancer (Gibson 1984), is accredited with the coining of the now widespread non-fictional concept of cyberspace. Beyond providing this resonant concept, however,some of the genre's more recent work known as biopunk is shown to provide fresh insights into the cultural experience of a society increasingly transformed, not only by the extent of technological change in a new informational age, but also its unprecedented pace. This paper reviews cyberpunk to demonstrate the vivid ways in which it uses its fictional licence to catalogue and articulate imaginatively a profoundly ambivalent aspect of contemporary culture in the age of information. We find ourselves interacting more and more closely and rapidly with information, yet at the same time, we feel increasingly run down by the effort demanded of such close and rapid interaction: hence the title-phrases, informational intimacy and futuristic flu. Numerous examples are provided of cyberpunk'szeitgeist-capturing qualities in the face of a profound and rapid information-induced paradigm shift. A mismatch is shown to exist between the conceptual categories we have at our disposal and the qualitatively new scenarios created by the latest information technologies. This paper argues, however, that assuming one maintains a healthy sense of its various deliberate ironies, cyberpunk's fictional exaggerations are seen as potentially instructive elements for a society striving to avoid a bout of techno-influenza.     

Implicit and Self-Attributed Dependency Needs in Homeless Men and Women

Recent metaanalyses indicate that women consistently obtain higher scores than men do on self-report dependency measures, but not on projective dependency tests (R. F. Bornstein, 1995, 1996). To explore this issue in a heretofore unexamined population, we analyzed archival data from 85 homeless participants (40 women and 45 men) enrolled in a vocational rehabilitation program, using the MMPI Dependency (Dy) Scale (L. Navran, 1954) and the Rorschach Oral Dependency (ROD) Scale (J. M. Masling, L. Rabie, & S. H. Blondheim, 1967). Consistent with earlier results, there were no gender differences in projective dependency scores, but contrary to earlier results, there were also no gender differences in self-reports of dependency. These findings suggest that stressful conditions like homelessness may mitigate the impact of gender on self-reported dependency.     

Body Size,Skills, and Income: Evidence From 150,000 Teenage Siblings

We provide new evidence on the long-run labor market penalty of teenage overweight and obesity using unique and large-scale data on 150,000 male siblings from the Swedish military enlistment. Our empirical analysis provides four important results. First, we provide the first evidence of a large adult male labor market penalty for being overweight or obese as a teenager. Second, we replicate this result using data from the United States and the United Kingdom. Third, we note a strikingly strong within-family relationship between body size and cognitive skills/noncognitive skills. Fourth, a large part of the estimated body-size penalty reflects lower skill acquisition among overweight and obese teenagers. Taken together, these results reinforce the importance of policy combating early-life obesity in order to reduce healthcare expenditures as well as poverty and inequalities later in life.     

FAIR DIVISION OF INDIVISIBLE ITEMS

This paper analyzes criteria of fair division of a set of indivisible items among people whose revealed preferences are limited to rankings of the items and for whom no side payments are allowed. The criteria include refinements of Pareto optimality and envy-freeness as well as dominance-freeness, evenness of shares, and two criteria based on equally-spaced surrogate utilities, referred to as maxsum and equimax. Maxsum maximizes a measure of aggregate utility or welfare, whereas equimax lexicographically maximizes persons' utilities from smallest to largest. The paper analyzes conflicts among the criteria along with possibilities and pitfalls of achieving fair division in a variety of circumstances.     

A Small-Scale Study of the Relationship Between Measures of Deprivation and Child-Care Referrals

There now exists an extensive literature on the causes of childabuse. Within the UK, individualistic and inter-personal approacheshave predominated in terms of their influence on social worktheory, research and practice. However, much less emphasis hasbeen given to structuralist explanations. Indeed, of the structuralistwork that currently exists with its emphasis on the relationshipbetween deprivation and child abuse, this relationship has yetto be empirically tested within the UK. This is the focus forthe present article. Drawing upon data relating to all referralsmade to a short-term intake family and child-care team for athree-year period in Northern Ireland (1998–2000), thearticle confirms the strong relationship that exists, at wardlevel, between measures of deprivation and referrals to theteam. In discussing the implications of the findings, it isargued that more use needs to be made of quantitative methodsin social work research in order to identify and understandmore fully the influence of structural factors on issues relatingto family and childcare. The article concludes with a considerationof the implications of the findings for further research andfor social work practice.