Managing Risk as a Duality of Harm and Benefit: A Study of Organizational Risk Objects in the Global Insurance Industry

This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm–benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis. We study the risk‐transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating and diversifying. Through variation in these practices, not all organizations seek balance and we in turn uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co‐constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm–benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade‐offs between harm–benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other. Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality.     

Global Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Public Organization Review -     

Absent bodies and present memories: marking out the everyday and the future in Eastern Sri Lanka

Drawing from ethnographic work carried out between 2005 and 2007, this article considers the ways in which a women’s network has developed strategies to find meaning around the absences of loved ones, killed or ‘disappeared’ during the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka. For most of these women, the fate of their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers is not known and the lack of answers means that they are unable to fully grieve and find closure. In order to survive, they must find ways to deal with the absent bodies and present memories of those who may never be located and accounted for. These strategies include tree-planting ceremonies carried out as a way of not only remembering and mourning loved ones but also asking questions about how one makes sense of loss and what it means to carry the burden of unanswered absences through everyday life and into the future.     

Youth Allowances: Incentive & Reform

Australia's income support arrangements have come under increasing scrutiny lately reflecting a growing concern about high levels of youth unemployment and about low levels of full-time education participation. This paper aims to explore the relationship between education participation and financial incentives and to assess as a possible direction for future reform, the concept of a single and universal youth allowance. The paper begins by outlining the major forms of income support available to young people and illustrates some of the complexities in the youth income support structure. The evidence on the importance of financial factors conflicts, particularly between economists and non-economists. This is in part explained by the different conceptual frameworks used. Other possible reasons are canvassed as to why studies have so far not thrown much light on the role of financial factors in the education participation decision. The paper also outlines specific directions of distortion contained in current payment relativities. Several difficulties with the proposal for a single youth allowance as a means of increasing education participation are discussed and alternatives briefly outlined. The concluding section of the paper summarises the issues relevant to the future debate on youth income support and identifies areas for further research.     

Factors Affecting Children’s Adjustment to the Death of a Parent: The Social Work Professional’s Viewpoint

This study investigated factors affecting the adjustment of parentally bereaved children by reviewing existing literature and comparing it to observations made by professional social workers. Interviewees had between 1 1/2 and 22 years of experience in counseling bereaved children. The specific factors examined were age and sex of the bereaved child, circumstances of the death, and adjustment of remaining caregiver. Participants (n = 5) responded to an interview instrument specifically designed for this study which contained seven in-depth, open-ended questions. Participants’ replies were mostly in accordance with the literature, but also generated some new perspectives that had not been previously considered for this study and had not appeared in the literature. This study has implications for practice with parentally bereaved children and their surviving caregivers.Rebecca M. Hope, LCSW, Outpatient Clinician, New River Valley Community Services, 700 University City Boulevard, Blacksburg, VA 24060.Diane M. Hodge, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Social Work, Radford University, P.O. Box 6958, Radford, VA 24141; e-mail: dmhodge@radford.eduAddress correspondence to Rebecca M. Hope, LCSW, Outpatient Clinician, New River Valley Community Services, 700 University City Boulevard, Blacksburg, VA 24060; e-mail: rmhope@verizon.net     

The Development of Affect Specificity in Infants' Use of Emotion Cues

This study examined the emergence of affect specificity in infancy. In this study, infants received verbal and facial signals of 2 different, negatively valenced emotions (fear and sadness) as well as neutral affect via a television monitor to determine if they could make qualitative distinctions among emotions of the same valence. Twenty 12‐ to 14‐month‐olds and 20 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds were examined. Results suggested that younger infants showed no evidence of referential specificity, as they responded similarly to both the target and distracter toys, and showed no evidence of affect specificity, showing no difference in play between affect conditions. Older infants, in contrast, showed evidence both of referential and affect specificity. With respect to affect specificity, 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds touched the target toy less in the fear condition than in the sad condition and showed a larger proportion of negative facial expressions in the sad condition versus the fear condition. These findings suggest a developmental emergence after 15 months of age for affect specificity in relating emotional messages to objects.     

Meeting the change challenge: managing growth in the nonprofit and public human services sectors

The current economic climate has been particularly hard on non-profit and public human services organizations, frequently resulting in managing organizational decline. The authors believe that the dominant concern should be with fostering organizational growth. To this end, they suggest that nonprofit board members and executives, as well as public sector leaders, need to concern themselves with the concurrent management of two agendas: Running the Shop and Meeting the Change Challenge. This can be done effectively through the use of strategic issue management, which is a set of techniques that represents a blend of traditional strategic management and change management approaches.     

An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Disasters and Stress: The Promise of an Ecological Framework

This integrative literature review examines the sources of the persistent debate over the influence of disasters on individual mental health that characterizes the disaster research literature. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper highlights how the connections between individuals and the systems in which they are embedded influence people's varied responses to disaster. Consistent with the emerging emphasis in the social sciences on contextualizing individual behavior, this paper examines how family, community, social structural, cultural, and environmental factors affect the development of stress in disaster populations. It concludes with recommendations for policy, practice, and research related to disaster recovery.