Disability,politics and poverty in a majority world context

This paper argues that the spread of free market economics throughout the world has generated unprecedented inequalities within and between nation states. This has led to the systematic exclusion of people with perceived impairments from the mainstream of economic and community life in almost all societies, the generation of an international disabled people’s movement, and their demand for legal frameworks with which to address the multiple deprivations encountered by people viewed as ‘disabled’. It is argued that the poverty and exclusion encountered by disabled people and other oppressed groups in all societies will not be eliminated without fundamental structural change at the international level.     

From pension funds to piggy banks: (Perverse) consequences of the Stability and Growth Pact since the crisis

As part of their strategy for economic and monetary union, European governments committed themselves to fiscal discipline – particularly by placing limits on annual deficits and on public debt. Subsequently, and as they sought to respond to the “current crisis”, they embraced the view that only if public finances were kept under control would sustainable recovery be possible. Rules of fiscal governance were strengthened. To help them meet these rules, the governments of many member States of the European Union made changes to their pension systems or to funds they had established specifically to pay the costs of population ageing. The intention was not to cut retirement benefits or to improve the efficiency of the relevant pension schemes and institutions. Rather, it was to free up resources immediately. Funded pension schemes and pension funds were treated like “piggy banks” that were raided when times became hard. Moreover, the policies pursued succeeded in meeting their objectives only because the system of national accounts according to which outcomes are judged does not recognize the way in which most of the fiscal gains are matched by future fiscal liabilities.     

Detection of multiple undocumented change-points using adaptive Lasso

The problem of detecting multiple undocumented change-points in a historical temperature sequence with simple linear trend is formulated by a linear model. We apply adaptive least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) to estimate the number and locations of change-points. Model selection criteria are used to choose the Lasso smoothing parameter. As adaptive Lasso may overestimate the number of change-points, we perform post-selection on change-points detected by adaptive Lasso using multivariate t simultaneous confidence intervals. Our method is demonstrated on the annual temperature data (year: 1902–2000) from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.     

Piece rates and workplace injury: Does survey evidence support Adam Smith?

While piece rates are routinely associated with higher productivity and wages, they can also generate unanticipated effects. Using cross-country European data, we provide among the first general survey evidence of a strong link between piece rates and workplace injury. Despite controls for workplace hazards, job characteristics and worker effort, piece rates workers suffer a 5 percentage point greater likelihood of injury. This remains despite attempts to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity. As piece rate wage premium estimates rarely control for injury likelihood, this raises the specter that part of that premium reflects a compensating wage differential for risk of injury.     

Testing Multiple Forecasters

We consider a cross‐calibration test of predictions by multiple potential experts in a stochastic environment. This test checks whether each expert is calibrated conditional on the predictions made by other experts. We show that this test is good in the sense that a true expert—one informed of the true distribution of the process—is guaranteed to pass the test no matter what the other potential experts do, and false experts will fail the test on all but a small (category I) set of true distributions. Furthermore, even when there is no true expert present, a test similar to cross‐calibration cannot be simultaneously manipulated by multiple false experts, but at the cost of failing some true experts.     

An Andragogical Application to the Training of Social Workers

This paper presents a critical consumer model for teaching social work research. Critical consumption is defined as the ability to understand, evaluate, utilize, and apply the results of social work research. The authors describe the use of this approach in their classroom and summarize a battery of “critical questions” they have used successfully to teach the skills of critical consumption. Although this model was developed in an undergraduate context, it has considerable relevance for teaching social work research at other educational levels as well.     

Social Welfare: Values,Means, Ends,Donald S. Howard. New York: Random House, 1969. 512 Pages. $8.50 Hardbound

Because of a general decline in applications to schools of social work in recent years, student recruitment has grown in importance. This article, based on questionnaires sent to schools and on the authors' experience, explores recruitment issues for both BSW and MSW programs and proposes a model recruitment effort.     

ABORIGINALITY AT LARGE: VARIETIES OF RESISTANCE IN MALISEET LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

Maliseet is one of many Canadian aboriginal languages that are projected to become extinct within the next twenty years. This article examines the events surrounding Maliseet language instruction that contributed to enactments of resistive strategies that corresponded to varieties of power relations—a process I call aboriginality. The local acts of resistance are situated in the Canadian nation-state ideology of “two founding cultures.” I argue the local acts of resistance challenge local asymmetrical power relations while also addressing nation-state ideologies of dominance and coercion. Initially, the focus of resistance was confined to local domains, but over a period of three years, resistive strategies changed to confront global dominance and coercion. I argue the implications of such shifts in strategies and scales of resistance reflect an “aboriginal social imaginary,” which holds promise for the survival of aboriginal languages as well as meaningful participation in the “modern social imaginary” called modernity.     

Creating “Community”? Preparing for Bushfire in Rural Victoria

The term “community” has a long and contested lineage in social analysis and debate. This lineage, however, is not generally recognized in policy and public debates on community and bushfire in Australia. “Community” is thought to be central to bushfire preparedness in Australia, especially in rural areas, but what “community” actually means in this context is vague at best. There is an ever‐present tension between the use of “community” as a reference to locality, a “sense of community” as experienced by residents, and the use of “community” as a rhetorical tool by governments and state agencies. We argue that a rigorous analysis of the concept of “community” is critical to an understanding of the processes involved in preparing for the challenges associated with disaster, in this case bushfires. These broader issues are supported by research (a series of surveys, interviews, and focus groups) carried out with residents living in (predominantly rural) bushfire‐prone areas in the state of Victoria, Australia. Ultimately, we assert that social participation and social networks are likely to be the crucial aspects of community that play a central role in effective bushfire preparedness.