Cognitive skills and leadership performance: The nine critical skills

Over the years, a growing body of evidence indicates that certain cognitive skills are a critical determinant of leader performance. In the present effort we show that application of these skills is typically founded in case-based knowledge. Subsequently, we identify nine key skills people in leadership positions employ when working with case-based knowledge to address leadership problems: 1) problem definition, 2) cause/goal analysis, 3) constraint analysis, 4) planning, 5) forecasting, 6) creative thinking, 7) idea evaluation, 8) wisdom, and 9) sensemaking/visioning. Individual and situational contingencies shaping effective application of these thinking skills is discussed. In addition, the implications of findings bearing on leader thinking skills for leader assessment and leader development are considered.     

The fourth age and the concept of a ‘social imaginary’: A theoretical excursus

This paper explores the idea of the ‘fourth age’ as a form of social imaginary. During the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the cultural framing of old age and its modern institutionalisation within society began to lose some of its former chronological coherence. The ‘pre-modern’ distinction made between the status of ‘the elder’ and the state of ‘senility’ has re-emerged in the ‘late modern’ distinction between the ‘third’ and the ‘fourth’ age. The centuries-old distaste for and fear of old age as ‘senility’ has been compounded by the growing medicalization of later life, the emergence and expansion of competing narratives associated with the third age, and the progressive ‘densification’ of the disabilities within the older institutionalised population. The result can be seen as the emergence of a ‘late modern’ social imaginary deemed as the fourth age. This paper outlines the theoretical evolution of the concept of a social imaginary and demonstrates its relevance to aging studies and its applicability to the fourth age.     

The social context of Welsh-medium bilingual education in anglicised areas

Principal component analysis of indicators from the 1991 Census was used to characterise the social context of school age Welsh speakers in South East Wales. The area had been largely anglicised by the Census of 1971, but the growth of Welsh-medium education was responsible for net gains in numbers of younger Welsh/English bilinguals. Doubts as to whether young people will remain active bilinguals after leaving school have been raised. The inter-relationships between figures for Welsh speaking in the Census and other social indicators were examined. Being categorised as a young Welsh speaker was found to cut across an economic advantage/disadvantage dimension, and so was a matter of life style rather than a by-product of parental choices unrelated to language resurgence. Probing life styles by means of interviews where Welsh-medium and English-medium schools could be matched on the economic advantage/disadvantage dimension showed that deciding for Welsh-medium education was embedded in authentic local life styles. Although networks of people at more local spatial scales were involved in Welsh-medium education, they were linked to wider scale networks establishing domains for Welsh language use in the public sector and local government.     

Ageing abjection and embodiment in the fourth age

This paper explores the role of abjection in understanding and interpreting the dichotomy between the ‘third’ and the ‘fourth’ age. We use Kristeva's term abjection to refer to a realm of decay, disease and impurity that embodies the capacity to disgust. While there is a longstanding tradition of representing the aged body as an object of disgust, recent cultural, economic and political changes have undermined the solidity and stability of age and its bodily signifiers. A new potential to transgress the abjection of a long life and an aged appearance has been matched however by an intensification of ‘real’ old age with even less capacity to transgress the abjection that is associated with frailty and the loss of agency and symbolized by the fourth age. Appeals to a universal ontology of human vulnerability and/or the redeeming influence of intimate care are considered as possible sources of protection from such abjection.     

Preventing hepatitis C virus transmission among young people in the justice system

Young people involved with the criminal justice system have been identified as a group at high risk of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. This study was designed to explore the feasibility of assessing an individualised structured HCV prevention intervention among young people recruited from post release agencies and youth drug and alcohol services in Victoria, Australia.     

Changes in service provision in rural areas. Part 2: Changes in post office provision in mid Wales: A GIS-based evaluation

This paper develops themes set out in Part 1 of this paper relating to the importance of public service provision in rural areas, particularly for potentially vulnerable members of the community such as the elderly, unemployed and single parents. Changes in a key service sector, post office services, in rural mid Wales over a 15-year period are assessed and analysed in relation to the developing sociodemographic profile of the underlying population. A Geographic Information System (GIS) approach is adopted to chart changing levels of post office provision in the study area, and the subsequent impacts on accessibility to those post offices. The policy significance of developing measures of accessibility to services with a view to incorporating these GIS-generated measures into traditional area-based indicators of disadvantage is highlighted.     

Charity or Entitlement? Generational Habitus and the Welfare State among Older People in North‐east England

Current UK policies aimed at reducing pensioner poverty involve targeting those in greatest need by supplementing their incomes with means-tested welfare benefits. It is believed that such policies provide more resources for those in greatest need. However, non-uptake of state welfare benefits by many older UK citizens exacerbates the widening income gap between the richest and poorest pensioners. We examine the underlying beliefs and discourses among those currently in retirement who lived through a time when welfare programmes had more of a putative abstract universalism than is now the case. Based on the narratives of people aged over 60 in North-east England, we show how the collective forces of structure and individual practice in relation to welfare accumulate over a lifetime and influence the ways in which people interact with the welfare system in later life. We find that the reasons for the apparent lack of agency among older people in relation to claiming benefit entitlements are linked to the particular social, economic and political circumstances which have prevailed at various points prior to and since the inception of the UK welfare state. We argue that the failure of some older citizens to operate as citizen consumers can be conceptualized in terms of a generational welfare 'habitus', the consequences of which are likely to exacerbate inequalities in later life.     

The Rise of the Information State: the Development of Central State Surveillance of the Citizen in England, 1500–2000

This essay examines existing sociological explanations of the development of the central surveillance of citizens in the light of the English experience, and finds them wanting. Sociologists see the state using surveillance for the benefit of capitalist elites, to reimpose social control over the "society of strangers" created by industrialisation. But surveillance pre-dated industrialisation, and the development of information gathering by state elites had more to do with their own need to preserve their position both within the English polity, and international geo-politics.