Organisation als Freiraum und Zwang

Organisations are marked by contradictions: change and continuity, health and sickness, men and women, creativity and linearity, past and future and freedom and restriction are only a few poles in which these contradictions are made visible. Organisations try to give answers to these contradictions and give space for both: freedom and restriction. Here, systems and individuals are related in mutual challenge and in permanent negotiation. It is therefore important for management and employee to reflect on the preconditions for the chance of freedom and restriction. The organisation has to provide the possibility to legitimize the ‘Management of Paradox’ in order to generate answers which are necessary to guide change and contradiction.     

The nature, extent and determinants of violence against psychiatric personnel

Violence against psychiatric staff seems to be on the increase. Such abuse can lead to mental health consequences for the staff and a reluctance to be closely involved with patients. Few Swedish investigations have examined violence against mental nurses and psychiatrists, or undertaken comparative studies between them. In this study we examined the extent, nature and determinants (i.e. risk factors) of violence against psychiatric nurses (n = 731) and psychiatrists (n = 320) working in the eight health care districts of Stockholm. These caregivers were assessed cross-sectionally by means of a questionnaire covering various areas (e.g. violence and work environment). The majority of the participants (85%) reported having been exposed to violence during their careers, with 57% being victimized in the past 12 months. Physical violence was common, and factors such as negative attitudes to work and diminished sense of autonomy were associated with an increased vulnerability to violence. Nurses and psychiatrists did not differ in violence variables. In spite of the weaknesses of the design (cross-sectional self-selecting sample), this study corroborates previous findings and identifies personal factors associated with violence that have received little attention in the literature (e.g. lack of respect for the organization of care).     

Floating ideas—An experiment in enhancing hypergames with maps

Within the OR community, an increasing emphasis is being placed on developing approaches to tackle complex, ‘messy’ decision problems. The work described in this paper arose out of the premise that it would be desirable to integrate ideas from a number of different approaches of this type. Specifically, the paper describes one experimental attempt to link methods for modelling conflict situations (the analysis of options and hypergames) with the cognitive mapping approach to eliciting subjective data. Taking a personally-owned decision problem, mapping was used to enrich the game-based approaches by providing a way of documenting the argumentation underlying the models used. Though difficult to generalise from, the experiment not only suggested that such an extension is likely to be an improvement, but also highlighted some deficiencies in the existing versions of the game-based approaches themselves.     

ON BOOTSTRAP HYPOTHESIS TESTING

We describe methods for constructing bootstrap hypothesis tests, illustrating our approach using analysis of variance. The importance of pivotalness is discussed. Pivotal statistics usually result in improved accuracy of level. We note that hypothesis tests and confidence intervals call for different methods of resampling, so as to ensure that accurate critical point estimates are obtained in the former case even when data fail to comply with the null hypothesis. Our main points are illustrated by a simulation study and application to three real data sets.     

India's Falling Sex Ratios

The proportion of females in India's population, low compared to other countries, reached its lowest level this century in the 1991 census. India's low sex ratios—defined here as the number of females relative to the number of males—have been scrutinized for well over a century. The persistent decline in the twentieth century has been the subject of renewed investigation and critical comment over the past two decades. While many explanations for the decline have been offered, almost without exception these have not addressed the causes of the nearly continuous fall observed since 1901. Several possible long-term changes are investigated in this note. The author argues that India's declining sex ratio is primarily an artifact of the dynamics of India's population growth.     

Planning and social change

During his ten years experience of corporate planning in industry the author became increasingly concerned about the relationship between planning and social change. This article, based on a talk given to the Social and Ecological Study Group of the Society for Long Range Planning, explores an approach to environmental appraisal which might make businesses and government agencies more responsive to the needs of a changing society and their products and services correspondingly more socially desirable. The author is currently leading a multidisciplinary team on a study of urban deprivation in Birmingham.     

THE RATE OF CONVERGENCE IN THE NORMAL APPROXIMATION FOR THE WILCOXON R-ESTIMATOR

We exploit the fact that the Wilcoxon score R-estimator of the slope in a linear regression model minimises Gini's mean difference of the residuals to obtain a Berry-Esseen rate of convergence result for the Wilcoxon R-estimator.