The Community Well-Being Questionnaire: Theoretical Context and Initial Assessment of Its Reliability and Validity

The article presents the theoretical contextand the elements that underlie the developmentof the community well-being questionnaire. Italso discusses the reliability and validity ofthe questionnaire's scales by presentingresults from two studies carried out in urbanareas in the U.K., Ireland and Greece. Thescales assess satisfaction with the builtenvironment, environmental quality and services and facilities. They also measure personal safety, informal interaction,community spirit, income sufficiency, decisionmaking process and place attachment. Analysesshowed that they have high internal and goodtest-retest reliability. They also performwell, when subjected to factorial validity andconstruct validity assessments.     

VERY LOCAL STRUCTURE IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Triadic configurations are fundamental to many social structural processes and provide the basis for a variety of social network theories and methodologies. This paper addresses the question of how much of the patterning of triads is accounted for by lower-order properties pertaining to nodes and dyads. The empirical base is a collection of 82 social networks representing a number of different species (humans, baboons, macaques, bison, cattle, goats, sparrows, caribou, and more) and an assortment of social relations (friendship, negative sentiments, choice of work partners, advice seeking, reported social interactions, victories in agonistic encounters, dominance, and co-observation). Methodology uses low dimensional representations of triad censuses for these social networks, as compared to censuses expected given four lower-order social network properties. Results show that triadic structure is largely accounted for by properties more local than triads: network density, nodal indegree and outdegree distributions, and the dyad census. These findings reinforce the observation that structural configurations that can be realized in empirical social networks are severely constrained by very local network properties, making some configurations extremely improbable.     

Competing Failure Risk Analysis Using Evidence Theory

Safety systems are important components of high-consequence systems that are intended to prevent the unintended operation of the system and thus the potentially significant negative consequences that could result from such an operation. This presentation investigates and illustrates formal procedures for assessing the uncertainty in the probability that a safety system will fail to operate as intended in an accident environment. Probability theory and evidence theory are introduced as possible mathematical structures for the representation of the epistemic uncertainty associated with the performance of safety systems, and a representation of this type is illustrated with a hypothetical safety system involving one weak link and one strong link that is exposed to a high temperature fire environment. Topics considered include (1) the nature of diffuse uncertainty information involving a system and its environment, (2) the conversion of diffuse uncertainty information into the mathematical structures associated with probability theory and evidence theory, and (3) the propagation of these uncertainty structures through a model for a safety system to obtain representations in the context of probability theory and evidence theory of the uncertainty in the probability that the safety system will fail to operate as intended. The results suggest that evidence theory provides a potentially valuable representational tool for the display of the implications of significant epistemic uncertainty in inputs to complex analyses.     

Environmental hazard and migration intentions in a coastal area in Ghana: a case of sea flooding

Recently, there has been significant debate about whether ‘environmental migration’ can constitute a form of adaptation to environmental change, as opposed to forced or flight migration. The Foresight Report on Migration and Environmental Change (2011) suggested environmental factors are one driver of migration, as well as political, social, economic and demographic drivers, and that—under the right conditions—migration can be a form of adaptation to changing climatic conditions. However, this is dependent on migrants having adequate social and financial capital to undertake beneficial types of migration; it further argues that environmental change may result in ‘trapped populations’ whereby people who lack the necessary resources to re-establish livelihoods elsewhere may be left exposed to increasingly severe environmental shocks and stresses in situ. Research on the climate-migration nexus in West Africa has largely focused on out-migration from the semi-arid Sahel with more limited evidence about how sea flooding interacts with migration flows. This paper attempts to help fill this knowledge gap. Using data from a representative survey of households across three coastal communities in Ghana’s Volta River Delta, this paper concludes that exposure to sea flooding may not be a primary cause of out-migration as other community, economic and political factors influence migration intentions and decisions. Thus, it is important for planned adaptation interventions to be strengthened in situ to enable households, particularly farming households, sustain their livelihoods.     

Estimates of the likelihood of extreme returns in international stock markets

This study applies extreme-value theory to daily international stock-market returns to determine (1) whether or not returns follow a heavy-tailed stable distribution, (2) the likelihood of an extreme return, such as a 20% drop in a single day, and (3) whether or not the likelihood of an extreme event has changed since October 1987. Empirical results reject a heavy-tailed stable distribution for returns. Instead, a Student-t distribution or an autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic process is better able to capture the salient features of returns. We find that the likelihood of a large single-day return diff ers widely across markets and, for the G-7 countries, the 1987 stock-market drop appears to be largely an isolated event. A drop of this magnitude, however, is not rare in the case of Hong Kong. Finally, there is only limited evidence that the chance of a large single-day decline is more likely since the October 1987 market drop; however, exceptions include stock markets in Germany, The Netherlands and the UK.     

Disaffected Loyalties in a Changing Contractual Environment

In this paper we examine the effects of the changing employee-employer relationship on loyalty – a construct we developed along Hirschman’s model. The impact on perceptions of loyalty during a downsizing is assessed using a design that manipulates HRM policies toward the use of temporary employees, retraining, employee voice, seniority and community coordination. We introduce ideological orientation as a variable that will have direct and indirect affects. Both MBA students and managers (N = 269) participated in the study. All HRM policies and ideological orientations have direct affects; in addition some indirect effects for ideological orientation emerged. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault's aesthetics

Abstract

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present.