An Ecological Approach to Understanding Youth Violence: The Mediating Role of Substance Use

The authors tested an ecological model that posits mediating variables (substance use and mental health) in the association between ecological factors (family closeness, school closeness, and peer closeness) and youth violence in a sample of 4,783 adolescents. Model including substance use present significantly less total effect between ecological factors and youth violence than do models without substance use. Additional probing of significant mediation effect using the Sobel test was performed and suggested that substance use did function as a mediator in the hypothesized path. Considerations of adolescent violence should recognize the possible role of ecological factors and how their influence may vary by substance use.     

Accounting for the formation of scientific fields in organization studies

There are few qualitative organizational accounts that explore the constitution of scientific fields in management. We developed a methodology for understanding the academic modes of scientific knowledge production in management research from the perspective of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and actor-network theory (ANT). SSK and ANT offer a way to account for how scientific fields in organization studies are enacted. Key to this process are splitting and inversion of statements; credibility and network formation; and the concepts of credit, trajectory, and position. Specific statements making key knowledge claims (e.g., handbooks, special editions) are situated in academic practices that obscure those rhetorical strategies that enable the production of a network of knowledge that can act, organizationally, as a more or less unified sub-field. We take as a starting point a collection of texts, dated 2011, which sought to systematize the main currents of a disciplinary sub-field during the last decade, focusing on how statements are transformed into scientific certainty and how the question of credibility is established. The sub-field is that of organizational learning (OL). The particular language of OL relies on approaches that make its epistemic assumptions intelligible within a network. It is a language that tends to reify and naturalize specific practices that become accredited as organization learning. The material/textual artifacts that sustain these practices, instead of being reified, can be reframed as enacting a scientific field whose resignification acts upon the network that enabled its existence.     

Effects of Motivation on Charitable Giving Practices: The Case of Korean American Immigrants

This study empirically evaluates the effects of motivation for philanthropic giving on distinct charitable practices of immigrants, namely ethnic donation versus mainstream donation. The study pays special attention to three major types of motives: rational motives, normative motives, and civic duty. Based on the Korean-American Philanthropic Survey, the study constructs a bivariate probit regression model to assess the relationship between motivation and charitable practices. South Korean immigrants’ ethnic donation and their mainstream donation were explained by different types of motives: Normative motives represented the primary explanatory factor for ethnic donation, and civic duty motives represented the key factor for mainstream donation. However, rational motives were related to neither form of donation. There was a negative relationship between mainstream donation and ethnic donation.

     

Commercial territory design planning with realignment and disjoint assignment requirements

A territory design problem motivated by a bottled beverage distribution company is addressed. The problem consists of finding a partition of the entire set of city blocks into a given number of territories subject to several planning criteria. Each unit has three measurable activities associated to it, namely, number of customers, product demand, and workload. The plan must satisfy planning criteria such as territory compactness, territory balancing with respect to each of the block activity measures, and territory connectivity, meaning that there must exist a path between any pair of units in a territory totally contained in it. In addition, there are some disjoint assignment requirements establishing that some specified units must be assigned to different territories, and a similarity with existing plan requirement. An optimal design is one that minimizes a measure of territory dispersion and similarity with existing design. A mixed-integer linear programming model is presented. This model is unique in the commercial territory design literature as it incorporates the disjoint assignment requirements and similarity with existing plan. Previous methods developed for related commercial districting problems are not applicable. A solution procedure based on an iterative cut generation strategy within a branch-and-bound framework is proposed. The procedure aims at solving large-scale instances by incorporating several algorithmic strategies that helped reduce the problem size. These strategies are evaluated and tested on some real-world instances of 5000 and 10,000 basic units. The empirical results show the effectiveness of the proposed method and strategies in finding near optimal solutions to these very large instances at a reasonably small computational effort.     

Objective career success among paramedics: interaction effects of location and race

The purpose of the present study is to examine objective career success for paramedics. Specifically, it examined the effects of race (Minority versus White) and location of work (rural versus non-rural) on the objective career success of paramedics, as measured by salary. Multiple regression analyses were conducted on 10 years of data from nationally representative samples of paramedics. Results showed that the human capital variables of hours worked, experience, and education predicted objective career success. In addition, rural paramedics earned significantly less than do their counterparts in non-rural areas. Although far fewer in number than White paramedics, Minority paramedics appeared to earn more than White paramedics. The study concludes with suggestions for human resource development (HRD) practitioners and for further research.     

Building an economic field with supranational supports? Lessons from wine production in Romania

In empirical studies of the real estate market, Pierre Bourdieu shows that the structuring of the ‘economic field’ is closely linked to that of the ‘bureaucratic field’. Through its regulatory activity, government plays a part in the legitimation of particular forms of economic activity as well as in the construction of the resulting hierarchies. This analytical framework is generally applied at the level of the State. Our point is to extend the scope of that analysis. An extension of the bureaucratic field can be characterized if one takes the view that international and supranational administrations play an active role in the organization of economic activities. In order to assess the relevance of this interpretative standpoint, light is shed on the case of the Romanian wine-making economy. The aim is to study a sectoral policy over which the European Commission has recently taken control and to measure its effects within a new Member State. This perspective is even more informative because Romanian wine production is being restructured: new operators have made their presence felt over the last decade, while the national government has lacked the means to make a determined effort to place these operators within a hierarchy. The Commission offers support to various agents who speak on behalf of Romanian ‘wine-making interests’ and influences the directions taken by conflicts between these interests. At the same time, it maintains a structural contradiction which prevents the formation of an economic field in the full sense of the term: the points at issue are defined in such a way as to conflict with the shape of any stable coalition between the dominant agents. The demonstration is supported by qualitative data collected during field studies carried out in 2010 and 2011.     

Life Experiences and Vulnerabilities of Homeless Women: A Comparison of Women Unaccompanied Versus Accompanied by Minor Children,and Correlates With Children’s Emotional Distress

The histories and service needs of 2 groups of homeless women, those unaccompanied by minor children (n = 46) and those accompanied by minor children (n = 22), were compared, on the basis of their responses to a biennial survey of homeless people in a midsize city in the southeast United States. Mothers of children aged 2-10 also completed a measure of stress symptoms for their children (n = 20). Irrespective offamily status group, problems such as substance abuse, history ofmental illness, health problems, chronicity of homelessness, and crime victimization tended to cluster together. The findings also suggest that declining and/or inadequate levels ofpublic benefits, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and Medicaid-funded health care in particular, have adversely affected the 2 groups, particularly families with children. The young children in this sample experienced elevated levels ofstress, and significant associations were found between children’s stress levels and certain riskfactors oftheir mothers. Implications for service delivery are discussed.