Assessing the Carrying Capacity of the Florida Keys

In 1996, the State of Florida mandated a study of the Florida Keys, the most populated portion of Monroe County, explicitly calling for a carrying capacity analysis to function as a basis for determining building permit allocation in the future. The Florida Keys Carrying Capacity Study, conducted by the State of Florida and the US Army Corps of Engineers, has encountered challenges in trying to convert the vague carrying capacity concept into a functional, quantitative method. Difficulties in responding to external peer review advice suggests that institutional constraints are hindering re-direction of the study.     

Xinjiang and China's Relations with Central Asia, 1991-2001: Across the 'Domestic-Foreign Frontier'?

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is China's largest administrative unit and is populated by predominantly non-Han Chinese peoples. Throughout the 1991-2001 period, Xinjiang has witnessed regular and sometimes violent incidents of Uighur opposition to Chinese control of the region. The re-emergence of ethnic nationalist sentiment in Xinjiang has serious implications not only for China's internal economic and political development but also for its foreign relations with the states of Central Asia. This paper will argue that this process does not follow an internal-external trajectory exclusively, in that both its foreign policy objectives and the international environment in which those objectives are pursued can also influence China's policies in Xinjiang. Conversely, reformulation of Chinese foreign policy objectives toward certain states can also have an impact upon the formulation and implementation of minority policy within Xinjiang. An example of these processes is China's relations with the post-Soviet Central Asian Republics. This paper argues that China's relations with these states over the 1991-2001 period have been influenced by both fragmenting and integrating dynamics, whereby renewed ethno-religious conflicts have developed in parallel with increasing economic and political integration across Central Asia and Xinjiang.     

Population Dynamics and Animal Welfare: Issues Raised by the Culling of Kangaroos in Puckapunyal

The culling of kangaroos at the Puckapunyal Army base (Australia) raises some intriguing ethical issues around animal welfare. After discussing the costs and benefits of the cull, this paper addresses the more general animal welfare issues related to population dynamics. Natural selection favours the maximization of the number of surviving offspring. This need not result in the maximization of the welfare of individuals in the species. The contrast between growth maximization and welfare maximization is first illustrated for a single population and then discussed in terms of competing populations. In the Lotka-Volterra model of competing species and its generalizations, the choice of different birthrates does not affect the population sizes at equilibrium. Welfare could be much higher at lower birthrates without even reducing numbers (at equilibrium).     

Introduction: Gender and Reproductive Technologies in East Asia

This special issue of EASTS examines reproductive technoscience, gender, and the formation of East Asian modernities across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. We begin our introduction with a brief overview of social science scholarship to date on reproductive topics. We then turn to emergent trends: going to and coming from beyond the West, complicating the issues, and intensive localizing and comparative research. Next, we discuss themes that cut across considerations of gender, reproductive technologies, and related issues in East Asia: issues of imperialisms and colonialisms as roots and contexts, postcolonial and nationalist forms of embeddedness, feminist theories of gender and transnationalism, and relations of gender and reproductive technologies to biological citizenship. Last is an introduction to the articles in this special issue.

Measuring the Effect of System Size on the Administrative Occupations of Macro Systems: A Reappraisal

Abstract

Organizational theory and empirical research suggests that the size of a system is an important determinant of its administrative sector. In this perspective, the key occupations that provide coordination and integration are as follows: (a) managers and administrators since they provide decision-making, (2) professional and technical experts because they evaluate information flows critical for decision-making, and (3) clerical workers since they contribute written messages resulting in communication. Recent research demonstrates that this approach may be successfully extended to more macro systems such as counties, cities, states and nations. In applying this theory, we argue that the size/administrative occupation relationships can be more completely understood than in previous studies by focusing on the detailed suboccupations found in each of the three broad occupation categories. Data from the fifty American states in 1970 indicate that the relationship between size and suboccupations may be positive, negative, or statistically non-significant depending on which suboccupation is examined. The paper concludes that administrative occupations are affected by size in a much more complex way than previously reported.     

Training care managers in risk assessment: Outcomes of an in-service training programme

Despite a recognition that social service workers require training in risk assessment, it would appear that there currently exists minimal information regarding appropriate models for risk assessment to underpin care managers' practice and, as a result, minimal discussion to inform considerations regarding appropriate training in this area. To date, not one study has appeared in the literature specifically examining whether in-service training provided to care managers actually results in changes to their work practices. This study provides results from an evaluation of an in-service training programme in risk assessment and demonstrates that the training had minimal impact on trainee behaviours. A number of reasons are offered as to why the training failed to transfer to practice; chief amongst these being insufficient time to learn the content of the training and factors associated with the specific work environment. Importantly, the particular model of risk assessment taught on the training programme was considered by care managers as far too time consuming and complicated to use, given the demands on their time and heavy workloads. It is suggested that if this particular risk assessment model is to be adopted by care managers, social services departments must ensure that such training is of appropriate duration to enable skills to be learnt, and that workplace contingencies are addressed to facilitate rather than hinder the use of training. These findings are considered to have practical significance for the design of similar short duration training programmes within social services.     

Trimmed likelihood estimators for lifetime experiments and their influence functions

We study the behaviour of trimmed likelihood estimators (TLEs) for lifetime models with exponential or lognormal distributions possessing a linear or nonlinear link function. In particular, we investigate the difference between two possible definitions for the TLE, one called original trimmed likelihood estimator (OTLE) and one called modified trimmed likelihood estimator (MTLE) which is the finite sample version of a form for location and linear regression used by Bednarski and Clarke [Trimmed likelihood estimation of location and scale of the normal distribution. Aust J Statist. 1993;35:141–153, Asymptotics for an adaptive trimmed likelihood location estimator. Statistics. 2002;36:1–8] and Bednarski et al. [Adaptive trimmed likelihood estimation in regression. Discuss Math Probab Stat. 2010;30:203–219]. The OTLE is always an MTLE but the MTLE may not be unique even in cases where the OLTE is unique. We compare especially the functional forms of both types of estimators, characterize the difference with the implicit function theorem and indicate situations where they coincide and where they do not coincide. Since the functional form of the MTLE has a simpler form, we use it then for deriving the influence function, again with the help of the implicit function theorem. The derivation of the influence function for the functional form of the OTLE is similar but more complicated.     

A Context‐sensitive Approach to Analysing Talk in Strategy Meetings

The talk of managers in meetings is central to organizational life and crucial to research in strategic management, as well as managerial and organizational cognition, sensemaking and decision‐making. To achieve full understanding, both the text and the context of discussion require systematic analysis, but most approaches treat context as everything that is known and observed beyond the immediate text. This obscures different readings of the text of meetings. To resolve this problem, the discourse historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse analysis is outlined as a framework within which researchers can analyse the text and context of talk in meetings. The primary contribution of this paper is to isolate four ‘levels of context’ as a heuristic framework within which discursive practices, strategies and texts can be located. By making explicit the levels of contextual analysis that are implicit in other methods, and illustrating the DHA using an episode of strategic discussion from a multinational company, this paper shows how researchers can use the approach to analyse the naturally occurring talk of senior managers in meetings, which is arguably the most important but yet under‐explored venue for strategizing.