What can we learn from the history of technology?

This article focuses on exploring what technology scholars and students of management of technology stand to benefit most by foraging through the history of technology. In order to show how historical sensitivity could sharpen scholarship, three strategies for complicating the simple are drawn from the historian's toolkit. Implications for research in technology and innovation management are discussed.     

Human Resource Management–Performance Research: Is Everyone Really on the Same Page on Employee Involvement?

Differences in the treatment of involvement in the human resource management (HRM)–performance research stream have been underplayed, as commentaries concentrate on showing that HRM produces a performance premium, and more recently on exploring the mechanisms explaining this. This paper first identifies the two initial concerns of the research stream – the value of employee involvement and the holistic treatment of HRM – and the way these are joined to present a unified view of the area. It then reviews the studies, confirming that involvement has been underplayed or neglected completely, and is only prioritized in a minority. A divide is identified between HRM as an orientation towards fostering employee involvement – seen as a managerial philosophy – and as a technology – a set of practices constituting high‐performance work systems. The paper then argues that acknowledgement of this divide matters, and concludes by drawing out some implications for how we should progress the research stream.     

An R Package for Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall

Value at risk and expected shortfall are the two most popular measures of financial risk. But the available R packages for their computation are limited. Here, we introduce an R contributed package written by the authors. It computes the two measures for over 100 parametric distributions, including all commonly known distributions. We expect that the R package could be useful to researchers and to the financial community.     

The social construction of the medical malpractice crisis: A case study of Massachusetts physicians

This study used observations from the 1985 Massachusetts malpractice insurance rate hearings, semistructured interviews conducted in 1985–1986, a survey of Massachusetts physicians in February 1988, and newspaper reports from theBoston Globe. Physicians and the Massachusetts Medical Society have promoted the medical malpractice crisis as an economic one. The after-expense income of most physicians, however, has remained relatively constant. The more serious threat to physicians appears to be the reduction of their autonomy. It is concluded that the medical malpractice crisis has been socially constructed in economic rather than autonomy terms because, traditionally, economics has been a more acceptable basis for labor unrest in the United States. Constructing malpractice as an economic crisis presents a more viable argument for stemming social change adverse to the medical profession.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 57th annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, May 1987, Boston, Massachusetts.     

Language usage and fertility in the Mexican-origin population of the United States

This article examines the effects of English proficiency and female education on cumulative and recent fertility within the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. To ascertain whether the cultural or the human capital aspects of linguistic variables have the greater salience for fertility behavior, fertility patterns of bilingual women are compared with those of monolingual women speaking English or Spanish. Using the 1980 U.S. Census 5 percent Public Use Microdata Sample for ever-married Mexican-origin women aged 15-44, we find that for almost all age cohorts, the effects of English proficiency are negative and increase with rising education. The strength of the interaction is greater in younger age groups. Greater English proficiency is also associated with a more negative impact of education for native- than foreign-born women. Overall, the influence of "opportunity cost," as opposed to cultural factors, is more important in shaping the fertility behavior of these women.     

A flexible multi‐domain test with adaptive weights and its application to clinical trials

The design of a clinical trial is often complicated by the multi‐systemic nature of the disease; a single endpoint often cannot capture the spectrum of potential therapeutic benefits. Multi‐domain outcomes which take into account patient heterogeneity of disease presentation through measurements of multiple symptom/functional domains are an attractive alternative to a single endpoint. A multi‐domain test with adaptive weights is proposed to synthesize the evidence of treatment efficacy over numerous disease domains. The test is a weighted sum of domain‐specific test statistics with weights selected adaptively via a data‐driven algorithm. The null distribution of the test statistic is constructed empirically through resampling and does not require estimation of the covariance structure of domain‐specific test statistics. Simulations show that the proposed test controls the type I error rate, and has increased power over other methods such as the O'Brien and Wei‐Lachin tests in scenarios reflective of clinical trial settings. Data from a clinical trial in a rare lysosomal storage disorder were used to illustrate the properties of the proposed test. As a strategy of combining marginal test statistics, the proposed test is flexible and readily applicable to a variety of clinical trial scenarios.     

What matters most? Different stakeholder perspectives on estimands for an invented case study in COPD

In drug development, we ask ourselves which population, endpoint and treatment comparison should be investigated. In this context, we also debate what matters most to the different stakeholders that are involved in clinical drug development, for example, patients, physicians, regulators and payers. With the publication of draft ICH E9 addendum on estimands in 2017, we now have a common framework and language to discuss such questions in an informed and transparent way. This has led to the estimand discussion being a key element in study development, including design, analysis and interpretation of a treatment effect. At an invited session at the 2018 PSI annual conference, PSI hosted a role‐play debate where the aim of the session was to mimic a regulatory and payer scientific advice discussion for a COPD drug. Including role‐play views from an industry sponsor, a patient, a regulator and a payer. This paper presents the invented COPD case‐study design and considerations relating to appropriate estimands are discussed by each of the stakeholders from their differing viewpoints with the additional inclusion of a technical (academic) perspective. The rationale for each perspective on approaches for handling intercurrent events is presented, with a key emphasis on the application of while‐on‐treatment and treatment policy estimands in this context. It is increasingly recognised that the treatment effect estimated by the treatment policy approach may not always be of primary clinical interest and may not appropriately communicate to patients the efficacy they can expect if they take the treatment as directed.     

The Who Concept of Sexual Health Applied to An Urban Poor Community in Mumbai,India

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to describe a scale that operationalizes the World Health Organization concept of sexual health and to assess factors associated with scale variation. Methods: Qualitative in-depth interviews (N = 39), sexual health interviews (N = 21), and survey data (N = 1,128) for this article are drawn from an Indo-U.S. project to reduce the incidence of HIV and sexually transmitted infections among poor urban married women (aged 18–49 years old) in Mumbai, India. Results: Lower sexual health status was significantly associated with gender inequity, marital violence, poorer marital relationships and physical health, and lower empowerment and social support. Conclusions: This work demonstrates the need to view sexual health in the broader context of community and family.