Demographers and Their Journals: Who Remains Uncited After Ten Years?

This research note examines the level of uncitedness and the impact of articles published in the years 1990–92 in 17 demography journals. After ten years 24 percent of the demography articles are still uncited and the average number of citations per article is seven. The ten‐year citation history reveals two novel insights. First, the impact of demography journals does not slow down significantly over time. The average number of citations in the first five years hardly differs from the average in the second five years, which suggests that one should be patient in assessing the full effect of demography articles. Second, the chance of being cited for the first time does not depend on the length of time an article remains uncited. In other words, the stigma of uncitedness does not play a significant role in the allocation of citations.     

A tutorial on support vector regression

In this tutorial we give an overview of the basic ideas underlying Support Vector (SV) machines for function estimation. Furthermore, we include a summary of currently used algorithms for training SV machines, covering both the quadratic (or convex) programming part and advanced methods for dealing with large datasets. Finally, we mention some modifications and extensions that have been applied to the standard SV algorithm, and discuss the aspect of regularization from a SV perspective.     

Forward Commitment Procurement: a practical methodology that helps to manage risk in procuring innovative goods and services

The Forward Commitment Procurement (FCP) is a Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) methodology. It was specifically designed to both provide a practical methodology for procurers to follow and to manage the perceived risk of the customer and supplier in innovation investments. The paper describes FCP and its rationale and explores the actions undertaken in FCP projects and their impact on the barriers typically encountered in PPI projects. It draws on the practical experience on implementing and supporting PPI projects in the health care sector and uses three case examples to illustrate key points.     

New technologies, new work practices and the age structure of the workers

There is empirical evidence that suggests that both technology and new work practices are skill-biased. In this paper, we analyse whether they are also age-biased. Does the introduction of new technology and new work practices reduce the demand for older workers and increase the demand for younger workers? The cross-section estimates suggest that technology is age-biased towards young, low-skilled workers. However, after sweeping away time-invariant unobserved firm effects by using a fixed effect approach, most of the significant relationships disappear. This suggests that the significant cross-section results are driven by unobserved heterogeneity between firms and are not causal effects of technology and new work practices on the demand for workers in different age groups.     

Mobiliser par l’affect : contraintes et ressources de l’encadrement intermédiaire de prestations de services peu qualifiés

Sociological studies have seldom raised questions about the concept of “distance” in managerial work. This article sheds light on the organizational determinants of a particular style of hierarchy, one which mobilizes subordinates by using affects and calls for strong investment in relationships. The relational and affective distance with subordinates proves to be a resource in contexts where management's work is subject to a dense set of constraints. The conditions are exposed under which this “relational work” becomes a burden and leads to standing aloof from subordinates, in particular by disparaging them. This analysis of middle management in the reception service industry in France is extended to other businesses providing relatively unskilled services. It shows how the provision of such services to firms favors the emergence of this style of staff relations.     

Willentliches Vergessen – Voraussetzung für Flexibilität und Veränderungsfähigkeit in einer sich permanent verändernden Welt

Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) - Dieser Beitrag im Journal Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. stellt dar, wie willentliches...     

Beyond growth: new alliances for socio-ecological transformation in Austria

ABSTRACT

Trade unions and environmental movements are often seen as political opponents most prominently discussed in the form of the ‘jobs vs. environment dilemma’. Based on historical examples of the conflict relations between trade unions and environmental groups in the Austrian energy sector, this paper showcases how the relationship between the two groups has changed from enmity to first attempts at alliance building. Drawing from analysis of union documents and problem-centred interviews conducted with Austrian unionists, it shows that newly emerging alliances between unions and environmental movements contain the seeds for a broad societal movement that can help overcome the paradigm of growth and actively engage in the creation of policies that support a social–ecological transformation.     

Risk of Extreme Events in Multiobjective Decision Trees Part 2. Rare Events

Earlier work with decision trees identified nonseparability as an obstacle to minimizing the conditional expected value, a measure of the risk of extreme events, by the well-known method of averaging out and folding back. This second of two companion papers addresses the conditional expected value that is defined as the expected outcome assuming that a random variable is observed only in the upper 100 (1 −α) percent of potential outcomes, where α is a cumulative probability preselected by the decision maker. An approach is proposed to overcome the need to evaluate all policies in order to identify the optimal policy. The approach is based in part on approximating the conditional expected value by using statistics of extremes. An existing convenient approximation of the conditional expected value is shown to be separable into two constituent elements of risk and can thus be optimized, along with other objectives including the unconditional expected value of the outcome, in a multiobjective decision tree. An example of sequential decision making for remediation or environmental contamination is provided. The importance of the results for risk analyis beyond the minimization of conditional expected values is pointed out.