Making globalization work for Chinese higher education by building bridges between internationalization and multiculturalism

The rapid expansion of higher education in China is bringing together two phenomena, internationalization and multiculturalism. This study explores the question of what Chinese universities are doing to bridge the gap between these two. Three types of higher education institutions attended by minority students are selected: a university under the governance of an ethnic autonomous region, located in Inner Mongolia; a university under the Central Ministry of Education in Beijing, and a university under the Ethnic Affairs Bureau, specifically designated for nationalities, in Hubei Province. A content analysis of selected relevant documents and interviews with university academic/administrative staff, Han and ethnic minority students were carried out. Chinese universities seem more than willing to internationalize for status advancement. However, multiculturalism in the sense of recognition of ethnic minority cultures, is not viewed as bringing higher status. The implications for bridging internationalization and multiculturalism are raised.     

Social-cognitive determinants of physical activity attendance in older adults

The present study evaluated whether, and to what extent, the constructs implicated in the theory of planned behavior could predict behavioral intention to exercise and exercise-class attendance of older adults (age 65-90 years) already enrolled in a physical activity program. The study also evaluated whether including self-efficacy judgments might improve the predictive capacity of the model. Participants (N = 1,095) were randomly sampled Italian volunteers from exercise classes for older adults. First, they completed questionnaires assessing the above-mentioned constructs. Then, class attendance was recorded during the following 3 months. Results indicated a substantial correspondence between the model and the data. Perceived behavioral control and self-efficacy were the strongest predictors of behavioral intention, whereas attitudes and subjective norms only partially contributed to its prediction. The inclusion of self-efficacy improved the predictive capacity of the overall model. Finally, results showed a weak relation between behavioral intention and attendance rate in physical activity sessions.     

David Schmeidler’s contributions to decision theory

Theory and Decision -     

The importance of cross‐disciplinary scientific engagement in the development of quantitative procedures for aggregate safety assessments

Recent guidance on safety monitoring during drug development, issued by regulatory authorities in the United States and European Union, indicate a shift in focus towards aggregate safety monitoring and scientific evaluation of integrated safety data. The call for program‐level reviews of accumulating safety data, including from ongoing studies, provides an opportunity to leverage the scientific expertise and medical judgment of safety management teams with (a) a multidisciplinary approach, (b) quantitative frameworks to measure level of evidence, and (c) assessments that are product‐specific and driven by medical judgment. A multidisciplinary team, regularly reviewing aggregate safety data throughout the development program, is vital not only for early signal detection but also for generating a better understanding of the accumulating data and context needed for decreasing false alarms.     

A network analysis of student mobility patterns from high school to master’s

Human migration involves the movement of people from one place to another. An example of undirected migration is Italian student mobility where students move from the South to the Center-North. This kind of mobility has become of general interest, and this work explores student mobility from Sicily towards universities outside the island. The data used in this paper regards six cohorts of students, from 2008/09 to 2013/14. In particular, our goal is to study the 3-step migration path: the area of origin (Sicilian provinces), the regional university for the bachelor’s degree, and the regional university for the master’s. Our analysis is conducted by building a multipartite network with four sets of nodes: students; Sicilian provinces; bachelor region of studies; and the master region of studies. By projecting the students’ set onto the others, we obtain a tripartite network where the number of students represents the link weight. Results show that the big Sicilian cities—Palermo, Catania, and Messina—have different preferential paths compared to small Sicilian cities. Furthermore, the results reveal preferential paths of 3-step mobility that only, in part, reflect a south-north orientation in the transition from the region of study for the bachelor degree to that for the master’s.

     

Semi‐conditional cash transfers in the form of family allowances for children and adolescents in the informal economy in Argentina

In 2009, Argentina introduced a new transfer programme for children and adolescents younger than age 18 (Universal Child Allowance) that extended coverage under the contributory programme for family allowances to include families in the informal economy and families of unemployed persons. This article describes this innovative programme, compares it with similar programmes in Latin America and analyses its impact on coverage and its possible effects on the welfare of the population. The results indicate that the extension of access to this type of benefit has reduced considerably the coverage gap for the poor and indigent and supports efforts to consolidate the operations of different and poorly coordinated transfer programmes.     

Making Boards Effective: An Empirical Examination of Board Task Performance

Despite the increasing attention of management scholars to boards of directors, there is still scant evidence on the antecedents of board task performance. The lack of significant results seems to be due to some theoretical and methodological choices followed by scholars, i.e. the almost exclusive reliance on agency theory and the use of demographic data. Following the call for dismantling the fortresses dominating past studies, this paper contributes to opening the 'black box' of boards of directors, developing a conceptual model that considers the impact of board members' diversity, commitment and critical debate on board task effectiveness in performing its service and control tasks. We collected primary data through a questionnaire survey, and we tested the model controlling for board, firm and industry characteristics. Our findings suggest that (i) the predictors we identified, and particularly the board members' commitment, are far more important than board demographics to predict board task performance; (ii) firm and industry contexts exert a significant influence on board task performance; (iii) predictors have a different impact on specific sets of tasks. Thus, our findings support the idea that several board characteristics and contingencies at both industry and firm level must be acknowledged in board design.     

The mathematics of sex and marriage,revisited

We analyze the problem of modeling marriages in a two‐sex model of population dynamics. We first deal with the problem of incomplete and inconsistent census data and then use a simulator to compare the performance of a variety of marriage functions in modeling births and couples during the ten‐year period between consecutive U.S. censuses. Unlike most empirical methods for comparing marriage functions based on goodness of fit, the differences in the projections of the various functions in our method are of the same magnitude (or even smaller) than the errors between the projected and real data. We observe that for the population of the United States, the harmonic mean function frequently found and used in the literature is a quite poor performer when compared with many other functions in the family we use.     

Piketty comes to South Africa

One of the most valuable features of Capital and Ideology is its concern to take history seriously and consider how the emergence of different political and economic regimes relate to discourses about fairness and justice across time. This paper pushes this agenda further by acknowledging that the experience of a few developed nations should not be taken as the template for the generalized study of inequality dynamics across time and space. In this paper, we interrogate Piketty's analysis and policy proposals against specificities that are central to understanding the production and reproduction of inequalities within South Africa. We reflect on the South African case, the structure of inequality and its changes since 1994. We review a battery of policy interventions that have been implemented to address inequality in the last 25 years. We emphasize that the long shadow cast by centuries of colonialism and various forms of apartheid strongly affirm Piketty's emphasis on understanding history. But this is both affirmation and critique given the foundational, imbedded impact that this specific legacy has had on post‐apartheid society and its policies. Piketty is aware that the levels of inequality in South Africa are so high that this is “unknown territory.” We map out some of this territory to reveal how these extreme initial wealth and racial inequities inform the reproduction of inequalities in all dimensions and undermine well intentioned policies. We claim that understanding extractive histories, imbedded wealth inequalities, and complex social and political institutions allows us to understand and confront some of the reasons why even in light of progressive policies, many of which are in line with the proposals from Piketty, government interventions have thus far failed to reduce inequality.