The Role of Environmental Features in Social Engagement Among Residents Living in Assisted Living Facilities

The objective of this study was to describe how physical and social environmental features of assisted living facilities influence social engagement behaviors of older residents. A secondary objective was to identify the environmental features that were important to residents’ social engagement based on their perspectives. Using a qualitative approach, the authors depicted the environmental features and the social engagement patterns of older residents in two assisted living facilities in urban Saint Louis, Missouri. A stratified sample of 10 participants participated in in-depth interviews and 16 participant observations were conducted. Five physical and social features were identified as factors that influenced residents’ social engagement patterns. Environmental features that supported social engagement appeared to differ according to participant activity level. Findings from this study have the potential to inform design guidelines that will enhance social engagement in future assisted living facilities.     

Class struggle and the transformation of the labor process

Conclusion The reorganization of work in the early decades of this century was not the simple product of a group of far-sighted industrial engineers any more than it was the direct result of an omniscient capitalist class. The basic need for this reorganization (as well as the limits of its development) was set by a broad process which can best be termed capital accumulation. But, as I have argued in this paper, the particular forms, timing, and ideological effects of this reorganization in the United States were conditioned by the patterns of interacting organizations including the state and emergent occupational groups as well as the constitutive formal and informal organizations of the capitalist class and the working class. Relegating these patterns to the status of only epiphenomenal effects of an underlying and determinant process of capital accumulation obscures important political consequences which arise from these patterns themselves. To identify only a few: The contemporary system of American industrial relations finds its origins in the forms and timing of the reorganization of work examined in this essay. Although they did not spring into existence in their fully developed forms (and although their patterns did not evidence an uninterrupted unilinear development), many of elements — and the relations between them — of contemporary American labor relations were prefigured during the period studied here. For we find, especially during the crucial period of World War I, the American labor movement in a situation of double jeopardy — heavily dependent on the state to provide the basis legal conditions for organizing, but without a party of its own to struggle politically to maintain these conditions in periods when state managers find it less expedient to continue or extend these arrangements. With a significant part of the organized labor force concentrated in war-related industry, with collective bargaining defined as a set of technical operations in which legal and engineering experts from both sides engage in processes of productivity bargaining, and with the routinization of tasks and erosion of traditional work rules conducted under the aegis of conservative trade unions, we observe, in that period, a pattern of labor relations closely corresponding to that of our own.     

Hidden Agendas in Beratungs-und Veränderungsprozessen

Consulting and organization development claim to boost the client organization’s efficiency — this official goal is frequently foiled by hidden agendas which are not officially communicated. Hidden functions of consulting are to prove to the management’s legitimacy, to explain the failure of change processes, to strengthen the initator’s position in internal power struggles or to relieve the system from conflict. On the consultants’ side there is a tension between professionalism on one side and the necessity to secure follow-up projects and to sell standard products on the other side. The authors present possible interpretations for such hidden agendas and illustrate them with case studies from their practical experience as consultants.     

The Use of Surrogate Species in Risk Assessment: Using Life History Data to Safeguard Against False Negatives

The use of surrogate species is an important tool in predicting the effects of management decisions or the establishment of protective measures for endangered/threatened species. While relying on a handful of model species to predict the fate of scores of distantly related target species has been criticized, a quantitative measure linking life history traits and population predictions has been sorely missing. We derive here a closed‐form expression aimed at determining conditions under which sublethal effects of a toxicant on surrogate species population outcomes will reliably predict outcomes of target (listed) species. We develop a critical threshold in fecundity reduction above which the surrogate species outcomes indicate positive population growth, while the listed species is driven to extinction. Thus we have established a means of determining conditions under which we are prone to making a “Type II” error in assessing ecological risk using surrogate species. Finally, we use the derived expression and life history data to compare outcomes from four different commonly used fish surrogate species (round goby, fathead minnow, smallmouth bass, cutthroat trout) and their target listed species (Chinook and Coho salmon). We illustrate that all four surrogate species fail to predict population outcomes for the listed species in cases of as little as 15% fecundity reduction due to toxicant exposure. Furthermore, surrogate species reliability is a function of toxicant level, so that some species are reliable at some levels but not at others. We discuss the implications of these findings, and outline further analyses that occur as a natural extension of the criteria developed here.