Midwives must,obstetricians may: An ethnographic exploration of how policy documents organise intrapartum fetal monitoring practice

BackgroundThe capacity for midwifery to improve maternity care is under-utilised. Midwives have expressed limits on their autonomy to provide quality care in relation to intrapartum fetal heart rate monitoring.AimTo explore how the work of midwives and obstetricians was textually structured by policy documents related to intrapartum fetal heart rate monitoring.MethodsInstitutional Ethnography, a critical qualitative approach was used. Data were collected in an Australian hospital with a central fetal monitoring system. Midwives (n = 34) and obstetricians (n = 16) with experience working with the central fetal monitoring system were interviewed and observed. Policy documents were collected and analysed.FindingsMidwives’ work was strongly structured by policy documents that required escalation of care for any CTG abnormality. Prior to being able to escalate care, midwives were often interrupted by other clinicians uninvited entry into the room in response to the CTG seen at the central monitoring station. While the same collection of documents guided the work of both obstetricians and midwives, they generated the expectation that midwives must perform certain tasks while obstetricians may perform others. Midwifery work was textually invisible.Discussion and conclusionOur findings provide a concrete example of the way policy documents both reflect and generate power imbalances in maternity care. Obstetric ways of knowing and doing are reinforced within these documents and continue to diminish the visibility and autonomy of midwifery. Midwifery organisations are well placed to co-lead policy development and reform in collaboration with maternity consumer and obstetric organisations.     

Weakly Belief‐Free Equilibria in Repeated Games With Private Monitoring

Repeated games with imperfect private monitoring have a wide range of applications, but a complete characterization of all equilibria in this class of games has yet to be obtained. The existing literature has identified a relatively tractable subset of equilibria. The present paper introduces the notion of weakly belief‐free equilibria for repeated games with imperfect private monitoring. This is a tractable class which subsumes, as a special case, a major part of the existing literature (the belief‐free equilibria). It is shown that this class can outperform the equilibria identified by the previous work.     

“利用信息网络传播手段侵犯著作权罪”的罪罚适用及其完善

利用信息网络传播手段侵犯著作权,是网络发展时期侵犯著作权罪的一种新形式。该罪是以"复制发行"为入罪行为,以"情节严重"为入罪门槛。其中,"复制"包括不改变载体方式的复制,也包括改变载体方式的复制;而"发行"的核心是使公众能够获得复制品的内容而不是复制品本身。与此同时,该罪在主观方面并不再适合"以营利为目的"为构成要件,在采取"形式上的强保护与实质上的弱保护"战略下,今后必须取消"以营利为目的"的犯罪要件。"P2P模式"的经营网站在客观上达到了"情节严重",主观上有侵犯著作权的故意的程度下,是可以构成利用信息网络传播手段侵犯著作权罪的间接正犯。     

Analysing networks of networks

We consider data with multiple observations or reports on a network in the case when these networks themselves are connected through some form of network ties. We could take the example of a cognitive social structure where there is another type of tie connecting the actors that provide the reports; or the study of interpersonal spillover effects from one cultural domain to another facilitated by the social ties. Another example is when the individual semantic structures are represented as semantic networks of a group of actors and connected through these actors’ social ties to constitute knowledge of a social group. How to jointly represent the two types of networks is not trivial as the layers and not the nodes of the layers of the reported networks are coupled through a network on the reports. We propose to transform the different multiple networks using line graphs, where actors are affiliated with ties represented as nodes, and represent the totality of the different types of ties as a multilevel network. This affords studying the associations between the social network and the reports as well as the alignment of the reports to a criterion graph. We illustrate how the procedure can be applied to studying the social construction of knowledge in local flood management groups. Here we use multilevel exponential random graph models but the representation also lends itself to stochastic actor-oriented models, multilevel blockmodels, and any model capable of handling multilevel networks.     

Are They Family or Friends? Social Support Instrument Reliability in Studying Older Lesbians

We know little about the support needs and health of older lesbians because participant sexual identity has typically not been identified in aging studies. The Lubben Social Network Scale, Revised (LSNS-R) is found widely reliable for testing perceived social support among elders but has never been tested with an exclusively lesbian population. This pilot tested the instrument with an exclusively lesbian population in the Midwest. Our analysis suggests it may not be reliable with this population, even with minor modifications that were made. Further examination adding a category for “family of choice” is warranted and supported by the originator of the tool.     

Trading favors—Examining the temporal dynamics of reciprocity in congressional collaborations using relational event models

The norm of reciprocity shapes social interactions over time and should therefore be analyzed using longitudinal designs. This paper examines the temporal dynamics of reciprocity in the setting of legislative cosponsorship in the 113th U.S. Congress (2013–2015). Rather than aggregating cosponsoring events into network snapshots, cosponsoring events are ordered in time and reflect an event sequence of members supporting bills at distinct points in time. The norm of reciprocity is tested to see if it affects (a) new collaboration clusters emerging over time or (b) the time-to-cosponsoring. Findings suggest that receiving cosponsoring support recently, leads to future collaborations. However, this finding holds only for Republican members of Congress. Furthermore, reciprocity demands do not expedite cosponsorship support and members do not react faster to favors they received, calling mitigating effects of reciprocity on collective action into question.     

Neither global nor local: Heterogeneous connectivity in spatial network structures of world migration

For a long time, geographic regions were considered the dominant spatial arbiter of international migration of people. However, since the late 1970s, many scholars have argued that movements reach beyond contiguous regions to connect distant, dispersed, and previously disconnected countries across the globe. The precise structure of world migration, however, remains an open question. We apply network analysis that incorporates spatial information to international migration-stock data to examine what multilateral structures of world migration have emerged from the interplay of regional concentration (local cohesion) and global interconnectedness (global cohesion) for the period 1960–2000. In the world migration network (WMN), nodes represent countries located in geographic space, and edges represent migrants from an origin country who live in a destination country during each decade. We characterize the large-scale structure and evolution of the WMN by algorithmically detecting international migration communities (i.e., sets of countries that are densely connected via migration) using a generalized modularity function for spatial, temporal, and directed networks. Our findings for the whole network suggest that movements in the WMN deviate significantly from the regional boundaries of the world and that international migration communities have become globally interconnected over time. However, we observe a strong variability in the distribution of strengths, neighborhood overlaps, and lengths of migration edges in the WMN. This manifests as three types of communities: global, local, and glocal. We find that long-distance movements in global communities bridge multiple non-contiguous countries, whereas local (and, to a lesser extent, glocal) communities remain trapped in contiguous geographic regions (or neighboring regions) for almost the whole period, contributing to a spatially fragmented WMN. Our findings demonstrate that world migration is neither regionally concentrated nor globally interconnected, but instead exhibits a heterogeneous connectivity pattern that channels unequal migration opportunities across the world.     

A concept for measuring network proximity of regions in R&D networks

This paper proposes a new measure for assessing the network proximity between aggregated units, based on disaggregated information on the network distance of actors. Specific focus is on R&D network structures between regions. We introduce a weighted version of the proximity measure, related to the idea that direct and indirect linkages carry different types of knowledge. First-order proximity arising from direct cross-regional linkages is distinguished from higher-order network proximity, resulting from indirect linkages in the R&D network. We use an macroeconomic application in which we analyse the productivity effects of R&D network spillovers across regions to illustrate the usefulness of a proximity measure for aggregated units.     

The evolution of the board interlock network following Sarbanes-Oxley

We examine the impact of the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) on the evolution of the board interlock network for Fortune 300 firms during the 1998–2006 period using a stochastic actor-oriented model. Placing particular emphasis on director accountability and board independence, SOX created considerable disparity in demand and supply in the labor market for corporate directors. We examine whether the regulatory change may have led firms to draw more on socially embedded processes of board interlock partner selection such as reciprocity, transitivity, and multiplexity after SOX. We find that after the passage of SOX, a firm’s tendency to reciprocate board interlock ties has been reinforced. Similarly, firms appear to have relied more on their existing alliance partners to fill their board seats in the post-SOX period.     

Beauty and social capital: Being attractive shapes social networks

It is a fact of life that being beautiful is advantageous (Hamermesh, 2011). Whether we consider incomes or the marriage market, the more attractive one is, the better one does. Drawing on psychological research that explains why beauty pays, we hypothesize that more attractive people will exploit social network opportunities differently than less attractive people and, consequently, their networks will comprise more beneficial features. As predicted, results of an experiment showed that more attractive people were more likely to select for themselves more profitable broker positions in networks relative to other positions and relative to less attractive people. Relying on network data supplied by young professionals, in a follow-up study we found that the networks of more attractive people were relatively less dense, as the findings of Study 1 would imply. We discuss the implications for our work as well as highlight the need for further research into an understudied, but potentially influential brokerage contingency factor—physical appeal.