Free agency,owner incentives,and the national football league players association

In an effort to raise salaries in professional football, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) has demanded that NFL owners set aside 55 percent of gross revenues to fund a union wage scale. An alternative means of raising salaries, as evidenced by the relatively higher earnings in major league baseball and professional basketball, is through a free agent system wherein players are free to sell themselves in the open market. This paper examines the NFLPA’s claim that free agency will not work in the NFL because owners lack the financial incentive to win that would induce them to bid on free agents.     

Mixtures of Toxic Agents and Attributable Risk Calculations

Calculations of attributable risks have attracted increasing interest recently. However, these efforts have been limited to mostly one agent, radiation, and no interactions with effects of other toxic agents have been taken into account. This paper outlines a generic approach to the calculation of attributable risks for an exposure to several toxic agents and interaction effects associated with them. In this calculation, the partition of interaction terms between the agents responsible is of particular importance. At present, there are no rules on how to assign equitable shares, so one methodology will be proposed and others discussed briefly. For one example of an assignment, the standard errors of the attributable risks are determined in terms of the uncertainties of the input parameters, thus setting the stage for a comparison of the different shares of responsibility.     

The Political Economy of Social Science Funding

This article examines recent economic and political trends constraining the production of social science knowledge. Particular attention is given to the Reagan Administration's attempt to contract public sector programs and curtail financial support for social science research. Trends in the private economy, especially within the publishing industry, that affect the production of social science knowledge are also discussed. Over the past few years, the market for social science knowledge has seriously eroded. The erosion of this market is examined within the larger framework of a shift in public policy from legitimation to capital accumulation, a shift that has accompanied right-wing ascendancy in American politics. This shift has created political and economic incentives encouraging the social science community to align more closely with conservatives.     

The Structural Context of City Adoption of War on Poverty and National Flood Insurance Programs*

A theoretical formulation is presented that represents an abstract and parsimonious conception of public policy adoption at the subnational level. The formulation consists of two components: the principle that social phenomena exist in contexts with which they are compatible, and several distinguishing attributes of subnational collectivities and public policies. Taken together, these statements lead to the conclusion: if there is a match between attributes of a policy and those of a collectivity, then the probability increases that the policy will be adopted by the collectivity. General hypotheses derived from the formulation appear generally consistent with findings of previous research. Specific hypotheses derived from the formulation regarding city adoption of War on Poverty and National Flood Insurance programs are tested with cross–sectional data for a sample of U.S. cities. Results of an ordinary least-squares regression analysis reveal support for derived hypotheses. It is concluded that the explanatory and predictive powers of the theoretical formulation are high.     

Determinants of union election outcomes in the non-hospital health care industry

Our research examines union election activity in the non-hospital health care industry over a 12-year period and shows that unions in this industry consistently win a greater percentage of their elections than their counterparts in either the hospital segment of the industry or other industries. Furthermore, the results indicate that several factors, primarily organizational characteristics, significantly affect the union victory rate.     

“It was a plot got up to convict me”: The case of Henrietta Cook versus the state of Kansas, 1876

In the late spring of 1876, a Kansas farm woman, Henrietta Cook, was brought to trial and found guilty of deliberately and maliciously poisoning her husband with strychnine. A close reading of the evidence today would suggest that the jury could just as easily have found Mrs. Cook innocent of the crime. But they did not. Out of the cultural and ideological materials at hand the jury actively fashioned a truth that allowed them to deal with the heinous crime of marital murder. Drawing on Foucault, the article shows how and why one form of discourse or truth came to triumph at the trial. In the lonely frontier settlement of Osborne, Kansas, people made a clear distinction between nature, which they were trying to overcome, and civilization, which they were trying to impose. The trial demonstrated what happened when nature, in the form of the woman, Henrietta Cook, challenged not only the fragile definition of community that had been constructed, but also the vocabularly of order, rationality, and progress that gave people hope. A voice with another message could not be heard.I would like to thank Gisela Hinkle, Sally A. McNall, Mary Candace Moore, and Shulamit Reinharz, as well as the three anonymous reviewers ofQualitative Sociology, for their insightful remarks and helpful suggestions.