Improving Risk Management: From Lame Excuses to Principled Practice

The three classic pillars of risk analysis are risk assessment (how big is the risk and how sure can we be?), risk management (what shall we do about it?), and risk communication (what shall we say about it, to whom, when, and how?). We propose two complements as important parts of these three bases: risk attribution (who or what addressable conditions actually caused an accident or loss?) and learning from experience about risk reduction (what works, and how well?). Failures in complex systems usually evoke blame, often with insufficient attention to root causes of failure, including some aspects of the situation, design decisions, or social norms and culture. Focusing on blame, however, can inhibit effective learning, instead eliciting excuses to deflect attention and perceived culpability. Productive understanding of what went wrong, and how to do better, thus requires moving past recrimination and excuses. This article identifies common blame‐shifting “lame excuses” for poor risk management. These generally contribute little to effective improvements and may leave real risks and preventable causes unaddressed. We propose principles from risk and decision sciences and organizational design to improve results. These start with organizational leadership. More specifically, they include: deliberate testing and learning—especially from near‐misses and accident precursors; careful causal analysis of accidents; risk quantification; candid expression of uncertainties about costs and benefits of risk‐reduction options; optimization of tradeoffs between gathering additional information and immediate action; promotion of safety culture; and mindful allocation of people, responsibilities, and resources to reduce risks. We propose that these principles provide sound foundations for improving successful risk management.     

In Search of the Optimum Harvey Wallbanger Recipe via Mixture Experiment Techniques

A Harvey Wallbanger is an alcoholic drink composed of three ingredients: orange juice, vodka, and Galliano. One of the authors (Sahrmann), a connoisseur of the libation, was perplexed upon discovering that different bartender handbooks listed different recipes for the drink. Determined to shed some light on this irksome problem, he issued invitations for an evening workshop session (party) to former and current attendees of an experimental-design training course taught within his company. A mixture experiment was designed and data collected using the class participants. This article describes the experimental design and the analysis of the data. The results of the experiment indicate that reducing the proportion of vodka produces better-flavored drinks. The results of the experiment were not entirely conclusive, however, so recommendations are made for future experimentation.     

Bad Days Don't End When the School Bell Rings: The Lingering Effects of Negative School Events on Children's Mood, Self-esteem, and Perceptions of Parent–Child Interaction

Each day for five days, 79 fifth‐grade children reported on events that occurred at school and they and their parents described their interactions with each other each evening. Consistent with previous research, it was found that on days when children reported more academic or peer problems during the day at school, they later described more aversive interactions with their parents. As hypothesized, increases in anxiety and drops in children's state self‐esteem partially mediated this link. However, parents did not report any differences in their interactions with the target child on days when the child experienced problems at school. This study suggests that negative events experienced by children while at school lead to short‐term changes in mood and self‐esteem, which influence their perceptions of subsequent interactions at home with parents.     

Barriers to Training for Disabled Social Work Students

Disabled people wishing to enter Higher Education are confronted with a number of barriers, yet relatively little research has been carried out to identify the level and nature of such obstacles. The short study reported here was designed to examine policy and practice within a number of social work training institutions in Scotland. Interviews were held with disabled students and ex-students, course tutors and practice teachers. Barriers to training are identified in five main areas: first, the disabling physical environment; secondly, problems of typification (whereby global assumptions of impairment are made about individuals); thirdly, failure of equal opportunities policies; fourthly, the practice of treating all students in the same way, resulting in discrimination against a few; and, finally, self-censorship on the part of students. It is argued that the reluctance of some students to 'declare' an impairment is a rational response to the disabling policies pursued, albeit inadvertently, by institutions. The implications of these findings for policy and practice are discussed.     

Stranger to Desire: Entering the Erotic Field

Founded in infancy but continuing throughout adult life, subsymbolic body patterns form a crucial, unconscious element in the infrastructure of our intimate and erotic lives. Viewing the psychoanalytic relationship, at its foundation, as a somatic dyad, this essay explores the life of the body as well as that of the mind in a psychoanalytic exploration. Drawing from the clinical literature of body-centered psychotherapy and the work of Wilhelm Reich, this article presents a detailed case discussion to illustrate the use of body-centered interventions within a psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy.     

Student homicidal violence in schools: an international problem

School homicides have been become a worldwide phenomenon. In the decade following the Columbine shooting there have been at least forty similar events in other countries. This article addresses the international scope of this problem and some of the complex conceptual issues that make student homicidal violence difficult to define and study. Meaningful research on risk and protective factors that can inform evidence-based preventive models is summarized.     

Using movement: how Beijing's post-1989 artists capitalized on a city in flux

The 1990s are often described as a time of political retreat by artists and intellectuals in China, immediately following the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and their bloody crackdown. The 1990s were also, however, a time of dramatic spatial and social flux in the country, characterized by radical urbanization, widespread demolition of the built environment and mass rural to urban migration.

This paper considers the political activities of Chinese artists during the 1990s and early 2000s, yet does so with a focus on their spatial engagements, arguing that these constituted a new, necessary and highly productive mode of political work at this time. Describing a number of relatively self-made artists’ colonies that appeared in Beijing in the early 1990s, and tracing these through to their semi-institutionalization (as ‘creative industries precincts’) by the Chinese Communist Party in the mid-2000s, it demonstrates alternative means by which China's artists continued to intervene in the negotiation of a Chinese modernity, once the possibilities for discursive engagement had been largely foreclosed.

Drawing on archival research, personal interviews and literature in art history as well as cultural, urban and policy studies, this analysis thus tells a spatial history of this period often historicized as the development of ‘Contemporary Chinese Art’. Importantly, this paper also seeks to offer new political imaginaries, pressing against expectations that Chinese artists be revolutionary or openly oppositional, and illustrating modes of political intervention that instead work creatively and discreetly with the movements of institutional and physical change.     

作为冲突来源的自治:关于高加索冲突的理论探讨(下)

自治的实践:1987—2000年发生在格鲁吉亚的冲突在对亚美尼亚、阿塞拜疆和格鲁吉亚的短暂调查中,由于这3个国家政治、经济发展的差异,使上述9个案例的可比性受到了挑战。一般性的政府政策、中央层面的混乱以及任何单个国家的外交关系都可能影响到它对少数民族的政策。尽管对全部9个案例的详尽研究超出了