Quantitative Storytelling in the Making of a Composite Indicator

The reasons for and against composite indicators are briefly reviewed, as well as the available theories for their construction. After noting the strong normative dimension of these measures—which ultimately aim to ‘tell a story’, e.g. to promote the social discovery of a particular phenomenon, we inquire whether a less partisan use of a composite indicator can be proposed by allowing more latitude in the framing of its construction. We thus explore whether a composite indicator can be built to tell ‘more than one story’ and test this in practical contexts. These include measures used in convergence analysis in the field of cohesion policies and a recent case involving the World Bank’s Doing Business Index. Our experiments are built to imagine different constituencies and stakeholders who agree on the use of evidence and of statistical information while differing on the interpretation of what is relevant and vital.

     

Factor analysis for ranked data with application to a job selection attitude survey

Summary.  Factor analysis is a powerful tool to identify the common characteristics among a set of variables that are measured on a continuous scale. In the context of factor analysis for non-continuous-type data, most applications are restricted to item response data only. We extend the factor model to accommodate ranked data. The Monte Carlo expectation–maximization algorithm is used for parameter estimation at which the E-step is implemented via the Gibbs sampler. An analysis based on both complete and incomplete ranked data (e.g. rank the top q out of k items) is considered. Estimation of the factor scores is also discussed. The method proposed is applied to analyse a set of incomplete ranked data that were obtained from a survey that was carried out in GuangZhou, a major city in mainland China, to investigate the factors affecting people's attitude towards choosing jobs.     

Development and validation of a Citizenship Attributional Style Questionnaire

Attribution theory remains popular in the social sciences and often informs education studies. However, attributional style questionnaires tend to reflect the context-dependent character of the theory and existing measures have been found to have poor psychometric properties. Clearly, both issues need to be carefully considered by researchers prior to them applying any scales that incorporate attributional dimensions. Here we report on the development of a reliable and valid measure that applies an attributional style within the context of citizenship. Two separate studies were conducted to inform the development of the Citizenship Attributional Style Questionnaire (CASQ). The factor loadings of eight positive and eight negative events for the internality and stability dimensions were found to range between .41 and .75. The Cronbach’s alpha reliability of positive and negative events were found to be .79 and .74, respectively. While CASQ is seen to be a reliable and valid measure, the results also indicate broader psychometric properties than many of the instruments currently used in studies with an attributional approach.     

Business Collaboration within the Nazi War Machine: Corporations and the State in the Austrian Semiperiphery

The military strength of German National Socialism was based on the collaboration of large corporations with the Nazi state. Business provided capital, loans, taxes, managerial expertise and production for war industries. I elaborate four ideal‐typical modes of business collaboration. Each mode is illustrated by a case study of a German corporation that acquires an Austrian firm: Krupp (traditional mode); the Reichswerke state conglomerate (coercive); Deutsche Bank (managerial nationalist); and IG Farben (competitive investment mode). The first and the last modes occurred when the state was highly dependent on large businesses for the economic requisites of war. The acquired firms in the Austrian semiperiphery contributed to Nazi war mobilization, as they exploited labor and resources from the peripheral regions of southeastern Europe. Patterns of the state's resource dependency on business led to bargaining interactions between state and business, over time shaping the mix between state and private ownership of war industry.     

Psychological Well‐Being and Career Indecision in Emerging Adulthood: The Moderating Role of Hardiness

This study investigated the moderating role of hardiness in the relationship between psychological well‐being (PWB) and career indecision in 131 never‐employed Italian emerging adults. Cluster analytic methods produced high and low hardiness profiles. A structural equation modeling analysis underscored the importance of hardiness for moderating the negative association between PWB and career indecision. Specifically, findings revealed that being hardy is a crucial relevant personal resource in the presence of lower levels of PWB. The authors discuss the importance of analyzing simultaneously the role of PWB and hardiness in promoting engagement in the career decision‐making process and provide implications for setting up appropriate career counseling interventions with emerging adults. Suggestions for future research are presented, such as the use of longitudinal designs and qualitative methods.     

Opting out of workers’ compensation: Non-subscription in Texas and its effects

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - Texas is the only state that does not mandate that employers carry workers’ compensation (WC) insurance coverage. In place of traditional WC, companies can...     

Participatory Art as a Social Practice of Commoning to Reinvent the Right to the City

The right to the city is a concept that helps rethink spatial–social dynamics, which has recently reinvigorated the field of organization studies. Following Lefebvre and considering the failure of both the market and the state, other scholars pinpoint the need to rethink social–spatial and geographical–historical relations. They do so by theorizing the city as a host for urban commons. Collective and non-commodified, these spatial–social experiences need to be constantly reproduced and preserved through commoning practices in the struggle against spatial injustice. A case study shows that a civil society organization (CSO) uses participatory art to (re)produce urban commons at the level of a local community and to redress partially spatial injustice. We theorize participatory art-making as a social practice of commoning, i.e., a process of organizing for the commons—collective art-based activities to serve a community—and of the common—to (re)produce a community while performing them. Such commoning practices are not only about sharing urban resources but also about using and experiencing differently urban spaces. By making participatory artworks in public spaces and co-designing street furniture with residents of poor areas, TDA helps to better cope with the tensions between residents and local authorities and between amateurs and professional artists. By negotiating the long-term implementation of these creative artworks in the public space with public authorities, TDA has fostered the empowerment of inhabitants as they have experienced citizens’ reappropriation of some public spaces in Marseille.     

Benefits and costs associated with mutual-help community-based recovery homes: The Oxford House model

We used data from a randomized controlled study of Oxford House (OH), a self-run, self-supporting recovery home, to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the program. Following substance abuse treatment, individuals that were assigned to an OH condition (n = 68) were compared to individuals assigned to a usual care condition (n = 61). Economic cost measures were derived from length of stay at an Oxford House residence, and derived from self-reported measures of inpatient and outpatient treatment utilization. Economic benefit measures were derived from self-reported information on monthly income, days participating in illegal activities, binary responses of alcohol and drug use, and incarceration. Results suggest that OH compared quite favorably to usual care: the net benefit of an OH stay was estimated to be roughly $29,000 per person on average. Bootstrapped standard errors suggested that the net benefit was statistically significant. Costs were incrementally higher under OH, but the benefits in terms of reduced illegal activity, incarceration and substance use substantially outweighed the costs. The positive net benefit for Oxford House is primarily driven by a large difference in illegal activity between OH and usual care participants. Using sensitivity analyses, under more conservative assumptions we still arrived at a net benefit favorable to OH of $17,830 per person.     

Specialisation and training for fire-fighters driving heavy rescue vehicles: consequences for the development of operators?

This work was undertaken in France at the request of a local fire and rescue school in order to conduct an analysis of driving two types of heavy rescue vehicle with a view to improving training. This study took place in a context of specialisation: the drivers of these vehicles will henceforth only perform this type of task. Consequently, specific training has been designed in advance. Our study concerns the improvement of this training, taking account of the particularities of driving these vehicles in emergency situations typical to the profession of fire-fighters. The results stress first that driving of rescue vehicles in emergency situations is a multidimensional collective activity. Driving strategies identified share certain common objectives: "optimising trajectories", warn other road users, anticipate their behaviour and leave room for manoeuvre to counter and react to any unexpected behaviour. They include risks management for the potential victims of the incident and the risk of accidents during the journey. These initial results help identify certain recommendations for the training courses dealing with driving vehicles in emergency situations. They also provide a warning concerning the possible consequences of driver specialisation.     

Invisible computer for collaborative design: evaluation of a multimodal sketch-based environment

In the areas of design, especially in architectural design, collaboration has become an important challenge. The specialization of skills increase, work teams are more and more extensive and the geographic distance between them increases too. The economic and ecological stakes related to remote collaboration are an evidence. This context involves the need to support most efficiently possible remote working meetings. We present the Distributed Collaborative Digital Studio (DSDC), a tool designed to recreate, in distant situations, the context of copresence meetings. This shared environment is created in the "invisible computer" approach [11]. The idea is that the tool should disappear from user's consciousness. Indeed, creative design activities require some fluidity in their process. Therefore, any involuntary interruption created by the system can potentially brake creativity. In this perspective, we investigate specifically the "invisibility" of our environment. To do this, we propose a framework for the operationalization of the concept and a methodology to test the system invisibility. This methodology was applied through a case study consisting of a corpus of 12 hours of remote collaborative design sessions with the DSDC. We highlight the learning effects while using our system, conclude on its effectiveness and discuss our methodology.