Varieties of Ignorance

This paper considers three types and levels of ignorance about the professions: expert, amateur, and professional. The empirical data comprise my own book about the professions, the Wikipedia article on that subject, and the 105 papers that cited my book in 2008. In these three I separate ignorance of facts, of literatures, and of skills, characterizing each type of ignorance by its mix of the three. Amateur ignorance is mostly of skills, and professional ignorance mostly ignorance of collateral literatures. Expert ignorance reflects the use of theory as a mnemonic device and so is particularly insidious.     

‘Closing the Gap’ in Indigenous life expectancies: what if we succeed?

In 2007–2008 the Council of Australian Governments agreed to six ambitious targets for addressing longstanding disparities between Indigenous and other Australians in health, education and employment outcomes. The ‘National Integrated Strategy for Closing the Gap on Indigenous Disadvantage’ (colloquially ‘Closing the Gap’) includes the goal of eliminating life expectancy gaps within a generation. This policy says nothing about what changes in the demographic structure of the population might be expected should there be even partial success towards this ambitious target. Information is required to analyse age and sex shifts for their effects on service demand and provision. In this study we apply cohort component projections modelling to the Northern Territory, the Australian jurisdiction with the largest Indigenous component in its population and the largest life expectancy gaps, to assess the demographic effects of closing the gap within a generation. Three scenarios are modelled: (1) No changes to Indigenous life expectancies from those estimated in 2010; (2) Complete success in closing the gap within a generation; and (3) A continuation of current forecasts about how Indigenous life expectancies will change into the future. Although closing the gap would only produce a small increase in the size of the next generation’s Indigenous population, over and above that projected with lower life expectancy scenarios, it would result in substantial changes in age compositions, with associated shifts in various demographic indices. These are pertinent to the planning and funding of core services into the future.     

24 Hours in a Day: A Listening Update to the Time Studies

Time is an important communication variable that has been impacted by new technology and changed the way people communicate. This study of communication time use by college students provides an update to earlier studies by factoring in computer and telephone use—media that have forced a multitasking approach to communication. Undergraduate students (N = 680) at a large Eastern university reported that they spend most of their time (48%) communicating with their friends, followed by time in school, at work, and with families. Students spend 24% of their time listening, 20% speaking, 13% using the Internet, 9% writing, and 8% reading.     

SYMBOLIC POLITICS IN THE INFORMATION AGE: THE 1996 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS IN CYBERSPACE

This paper traces the use of the World Wide Web as a medium of political communication during the 1996 American presidential campaigns. Beginning with the Republican campaigns' use of the medium during the primary election season, a typology of uses of the web is outlined. While all campaigns felt it necessary to participate in the World Wide Web, different candidates used the medium differently. Furthermore, no campaign made full use of the much-publicized interactive capacity of the web; they used it more as a new means of transmitting traditional mass-media literature (video, graphics, etc.) and as a way of providing access to large volumes of campaign information (voting records, speeches, position papers, etc.).     

In the shadow of fortress Europe? Impacts of European migration governance on Slovenia,Croatia and Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This article analyses European integration's effects on migration and border security governance in Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia in the context of ‘governed interdependence’. We show how transgovernmental networks comprising national and EU actors, plus a range of other participants, blur the distinction between the domestic and international to enable interactions between domestic and international policy elites that transmit EU priorities into national policy. Governments are shown to be ‘willing pupils’ and ‘policy takers’, adapting to EU policy as a pre-condition for membership. This strengthened rather than weakened central state actors, particularly interior ministries. Thus, in a quintessentially ‘national’ policy area, there has been a re-scaling and re-constitution of migration and border security policy. To support this analysis, social network analysis is used to outline the composition of governance networks and analyse interactions and power relations therein.     

‘Je suis socialiste et quinziste’: rugby,wine and socialism in the Aude since 1976

In the Languedoc, the intersections between rugby, wine and socialism give telling insights into the value and significance of regional identity. At the end of the 1970s, the Languedoc's wine industry and rugby were facing up to the challenges of modernisation; the responses which emerged drew upon the principles of regional identity drawn from the ‘banal nationalism’ of wine-drinking, left-voting rugby players in local administrations and at the head of powerful trade unions. The cross-over between board-room and locker-room helped to accent regional responses to change and modernization, ensuring that regional heritage remained potent and ready to be communicated.     

The role,power and influence of company chairs

This paper develops an analytical framework to depict the heterogeneity that characterises the role of board chair and demonstrate the potential variability in how chairs operate boards and exercise power and influence on strategy, control and resource related tasks at board level. Theories of power and influence, as applied to top management teams and boards of directors, are explicated within the context of contemporary governance practices that are establishing the role of the board chair as distinct to that of the chief executive officer. Specifically, the paper maps sources of power and varying contemporary chair practices, including chair nomenclature (i.e. executive vs. non-executive chairs), chair origin (insider vs. outsider) and chair time (full-time vs. part-time). A number of theoretical chair-power models emerge from this analysis and are subject to empirical analysis using data collected from 160 chairs of 500 FTSE-listed companies. Theoretically and empirically, the paper complements structural approaches to studying boards with attention to behaviour on boards. By linking board structure, board process and the exercise of influence, the study reveals both differences amongst chairs in how they run the board, but also that chairs’ differ in the influence they exert on board-related tasks. Full-time executive chairs exert their greatest influence in strategy and resource dependence tasks whereas part-time, non-executive chairs seem to exert more influence over monitoring and control tasks.     

Sequence Comparison Via Alignment and Gibbs Sampling: A Formal Analysis of the Emergence of the Modern Sociological Article

Various substantive literatures in sociology seek small regularities in sequences: turning points in the life course, catalytic moments in organizational change, sharp turns in occupational trajectories, and the like. Commonly these are turning points, but they may also be simple local patterns. This paper reports a method for discovering such regularities even when they are quite faint, applying that method to rhetorical regularities in sociological articles. The paper begins by analyzing the overall sequence structure of such articles and then gives a basic introduction to Gibbs sampling, one member of the broader class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. It then reports an algorithm employing Gibbs sampling to find local sequence regularities and applies that algorithm to demonstrate the subsequence regularities present in sociological articles. Substantively, the paper shows that the rhetorical structure of sociological articles changed from one pattern to another in the period 1895–1965 and that certain faint but standard rhetorical subsequences became characteristic of articles in the later period. Methodologically, it introduces a broad class of methods that provide effective approaches to a number of previously intractable statistical questions.     

Labor market flexibility: An index approach to cross-country comparisons

Recently, researchers have used measures of economic freedom (Gwartney and Lawson, 2002) to quantify the relationship between various institutional factors and measures of economic performance. Using a subset of these data, we develop a labor market flexibility index. This measure should be useful to researchers who study labor market performance among countries.