The eligibility question – the real source of depersonalisation?

There have been a number of high-profile strategies over recent decades to raise social care above what is widely regarded as an unacceptable service in the United Kingdom. Quite apart from all too frequent high-profile scandals, it is seen as a service that is depersonalising and stigmatising. None of the strategies to bring about change, most of them introduced to great fanfares, have delivered the changes they promised. This article sets out a view that the reason why they have all failed is that none of them have identified or therefore tackled the underlying problem, which is the relationship between needs and resources. Underfunding has long been a serious concern for campaigning organisations. The article does not detract from that contention. However, it sets out how strategies to manage the gap between needs and resources, more than the funding gap per se, are themselves the root cause of depersonalised and chronically impoverished services. The unlikely source of these strategies can be traced to the unintended consequences of an Act of Parliament that had the best of intentions.     

MEANINGFUL REGRESSION AND ASSOCIATION MODELS FOR CLUSTERED ORDINAL DATA

Many proposed methods for analyzing clustered ordinal data focus on the regression model and consider the association structure within a cluster as a nuisance. However, the association structure is often of equal interest—for example, temporal association in longitudinal studies and association between responses to similar questions in a survey. We discuss the use, appropriateness, and interpretability of various latent variable and Markov models for the association structure and propose a new structure that exploits the ordinality of the response. The models are illustrated with a study concerning opinions regarding government spending and an analysis of stability and change in teenage marijuana use over time, where we reveal different behavioral patterns for boys and girls through a comprehensive investigation of individual response profiles.     

From design to operations: a process management life-cycle performance measurement system for Public-Private Partnerships

Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) have become a critical vehicle for delivering infrastructure worldwide. Yet, the use of such a procurement strategy has received considerable criticism, as they have been prone to experiencing time/cost overruns and during their operation poorly managed. A key issue contributing to the poor performance of PPPs is the paucity of an effective and comprehensive performance measurement system. There has been a tendency for the performance of PPPs to be measured based on their ex-post criteria of time, cost and quality. Such criteria do not accommodate the complexities and lifecycle of an asset. In addressing this problem, the methodology of sequential triangulation is used to develop and examine the effectiveness of a ‘Process Management Life Cycle Performance Measurement System’. The research provides public authorities and private-sector entities embarking on PPPs with a robust mechanism to effectively measure, control and manage their projects’ life cycle performances, ensuring the assets are ‘future proofed’.     

DIY culture and extended milieux: LETS, veggie boxes and festivals

The wave of DIY culture and environmental innovation sweeping through the UK is not restricted to isolated sites of high profile protest, such as the Newbury bypass. Based on fieldwork in the South West of England, consisting of in-depth interviews, participant observation, focus groups and a postal survey, we argue that networks such as those around festivals, LETS and organic food box schemes contribute to green milieux, which encourage ecological and cultural innovation of everyday life. We suggest that this creative social and ecological margin may be viewed as extended milieux combining global and local aspects. Local social relations and identities are reconfigured in new reflexive ways that utilize, criticise and even contribute to globalization, while developing new senses of locality and community.     

Impact of methods for reducing respondent burden on personal network structural measures

We examine methods for reducing respondent burden in evaluating alter–alter ties on a set of network structural measures. The data consist of two sets, each containing 45 alters from respondent free lists: the first contains 447 personal networks, and the second 554. Respondents evaluated the communication between 990 alter pairs. The methods were (1) dropping alters from the end of the free-list, (2) randomly dropping alters, (3) randomly dropping links, and (4) predicting ties based on transitivity. For some measures network structure is captured with samples of less than 20 alters; other measures are less consistent. Researchers should be aware of the need to sample a minimum number of alters to capture structural variation.