Challenge of leading in Javanese culture

Scholars in the field of management and culture have developed paradigms regarding the importance of managing people across culture. While most scholars agree that culture plays a vital role in an organization, it has been recognized that research on the sub-cultures within a national culture that impact on an organization, is very limited. One example is the impact of Javanese culture in Indonesian organizations' environments. Indonesia is widely known as a multicultural country, with a population made up of people from approximately 364 ethnicities. Of these ethnicities, the Javanese have come to be recognized over time as the most culturally and politically dominant in Indonesia. The exploration of Javanese culture and its development over time are the central concerns of this article. The values central to Javanese culture are identified and the relationship between these values and Western perspectives of management practices such as communication, change management, and conflict management are discussed.     

Methods for Small Area Population Forecasts: State-of-the-Art and Research Needs

Population Research and Policy Review - Small area population forecasts are widely used by government and business for a variety of planning, research and policy purposes, and often influence major...     

Ranking football players

The Actim index is the official player rating system of the Barclays Premiership, which was introduced for the 2004–2005 football season. It was devised by Ian McHale and Phil Scarf for the Press Association in partnership with the Premier League and Football Data Co. Here they describe the development of the index and take a look at player performance this season.     

Advantages of a wholly Bayesian approach to assessing efficacy in early drug development: a case study

This paper illustrates how the design and statistical analysis of the primary endpoint of a proof‐of‐concept study can be formulated within a Bayesian framework and is motivated by and illustrated with a Pfizer case study in chronic kidney disease. It is shown how decision criteria for success can be formulated, and how the study design can be assessed in relation to these, both using the traditional approach of probability of success conditional on the true treatment difference and also using Bayesian assurance and pre‐posterior probabilities. The case study illustrates how an informative prior on placebo response can have a dramatic effect in reducing sample size, saving time and resource, and we argue that in some cases, it can be considered unethical not to include relevant literature data in this way. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Green Protectionism and Organic Food Exporting from New Zealand: Crisis Experiments in the Breakdown of Fordist Trade and Agricultural Policies

Abstract The exporting of organic produce from New Zealand is a response to the ongoing breakdown of Fordist regulatory measures for agriculture in destination markets. The unambiguous neoliberal revolution in New Zealand has survived only through the expansion of food exports, especially by large corporate entities and producer marketing boards. It has also rendered the country's exporters of food products particularly sensitive to the trade and agricultural policies of the United States, Japan, and the European Union. Some commentators consider New Zealand's experiment in agricultural deregulation indicative of a wider coherence in global food trade, a new stability institutionalized in the Uruguay Round of the GATT and regulated under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. The case of organic and low-input food exporting from New Zealand shows that no such ‘new times’ exist. Rather, these new types of food exporting are crisis experiments induced by green protectionism—the use of health and food safety issues as an impediment to trade. In turn, green protectionism is a direct result of the continuing breakdown of Fordist agricultural regulation in key nations: the global trade in food products remains in crisis.     

Preventive planning for disasters

The authors have analysed the available data on disaster occurence and conclude that disasters are on the increase, especially in underdeveloped countries. They argue that a new approach to disaster is needed, one which emphasizes the continuing man-environment relationship. Within this approach, planning to prevent disaster should concentrate on long-term precautionary planning integrated into development planning utilizing, as far as possible, local awareness of the disaster problem. This long-term approach to disaster planning is a more effective way of offsetting disaster than a heavy emphasis on each individual disaster event and the relief measures which accompany it.     

The use of sociograms to explore collaboration in child protection conferences

The Strengthening Families child protection conference model attempts to empower parents' participation in conferences and to enhance collaboration between conference participants. This paper, which is part of a broader study looking at the implementation of the Strengthening Families model across a county council in England, UK, explored the use of ‘power’ and ‘mutual interaction’ in both traditional and Strengthening Families child protection conferences. Data was collected using sociograms which were recorded during observations of the two types of conferences. Sociograms were analysed in order to identify patterns in terms of ‘power’ and ‘communication’ together with the use of the ‘group cohesion index’ which enabled us to draw conclusions about the degree of interaction between conference participants.Findings indicated a difference between the use of power in traditional and Strengthening Families conferences. In traditional conferences the power was mostly static (held by the chair), and in the Strengthening Families conferences power was shifted from the leader of the collaboration (chair) to the people who administer the collaboration (conference participants). Also, in the Strengthening Families model more interaction between conference participants and better group coherence were evident; however, in both types of conference communication was limited between the professionals. Sociograms proved a useful method for exploring group dynamics in the context of child protection conferences. It is suggested that a broader understanding of the underpinning principles of the Strengthening Families model is needed to successfully empower parents' participation in conferences and to enhance collaboration between conference participants.