Sustainability when capital management has stochastic consequences

Sustainability is usually defined as a requirement of each generation to manage its stocks of man-made and natural capital such that the utility that it ensures itself can be shared by all future generations. Here we extend this definition to the case where capital management does not have deterministic consequences. A characterization is offered where the sustainability of one generation's behavior can be determined by comparing its utility with the utility of the succeeding generation, provided that the latter behaves in a sustainable manner. The properties of the definition are investigated and illustrated. Received: 26 April 1994/Accepted: 15 April 2002     

Groups discipline resource use under scarcity

Theory and Decision - Scarcity sharpens the conflict between short term gains and long term sustainability. Psychological research documents that decision makers focus on immediate needs under...     

Resource Distribution in Multiple Attacks with Imperfect Detection of the Attack Outcome

This article extends the previous research of consecutive attacks strategy by assuming that an attacker observes the outcome of each attack imperfectly. With given probabilities it may wrongly identify a destroyed target as undestroyed, and wrongly identify an undestroyed target as destroyed. The outcome of each attack is determined by a contest success function that depends on the amount of resources allocated by the defender and the attacker to each attack. The article suggests a probabilistic model of the multiple attacks and analyzes how the target destruction probability and the attacker's relative resource expenditure are impacted by the two probabilities of incorrect observation, the attacker's and defender's resource ratio, the contest intensity, the number of attacks, and the resource distribution across attacks. We analyze how the attacker chooses the number of attacks, the attack stopping rule, and the optimal resource distribution across attacks to maximize its utility.     

Mechanical tasting: sensory science and the flavorization of food production

The paper narrates the history of “texturometers”, devices that imitate the human biting mechanism and are used by food scientists in experiments on food texture. Two interrelated processes, characteristic of the emergence of industrialized food production in the twentieth century, are examined through this history of mechanical tasting. First, the paper surveys the pervasive project of transforming the phenomenological qualities of flavor and food texture into robust “objective” and “standardized” data. In constructing and using biomimetic texturometers, food sensory scientists attempted to translate texture qualities such as tenderness, crispness, crunch and chewiness into codified properties by producing formal definitions and graphical representations – an example of how the pursuit of objectivity and standardized knowledge coevolved with the rise of mass production and the emergence of sensory sciences. Secondly, the texturometers are related to an overall “flavorization”; that is, a historical process by which the complexes of sensory impressions became increasingly important for the production and consumption of food in late-modern industrialized societies.     

Intensive management reduces butterfly diversity over time in urban green spaces

Urban Ecosystems - Loss and fragmentation of semi-natural grasslands have had negative consequences for grassland biodiversity, such as butterflies. Urban parks and other urban green spaces have so...     

Women's entrepreneurship,neoliberalism and economic justice in the postfeminist era: A discourse analysis of policy change in Sweden

Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘postfeminist’ subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.     

A Study of a Network Meeting: Exploring the Interplay between Inner and Outer Dialogues in Significant and Meaningful Moments

The present study is part of a series of qualitative studies focusing on dialogic practice in southern Norway. In this article, we present a qualitative study of a network meeting focusing on the interplay between the participants' inner and outer dialogues. The network meeting is between an adolescent boy, his mother and two network therapists, the same adolescent case discussed previously in this journal by Bøe et al. ( 2013 ). The aim of this study is to explore how the interplay between inner and outer dialogues contributes to significant and meaningful moments for the interlocutors. A multiperspective methodology is used that combines video recordings of a network meeting and participant interviews with text analysis. Our research found the interplay has an important role in understanding the emergence of significant and meaningful moments in therapy. A one‐sided focus on participants' utterances or inner dialogues was insufficient to explain their significance and meaning to the interlocutors. A dialogical approach provides a theoretical frame and concepts that are useful in investigations of therapeutic conversations.     

Multisystemic therapy project in Sweden: what factors affect the tendency of social workers to refer subjects to the research project?

This article examines some of the factors that may have affected the tendency for social workers to refer adolescents to a randomised controlled study of multisystemic therapy (MST). If we are to improve integration between researchers and the clinical setting in the future, it is important to consider those factors that affect implementation of research projects and evidence-based treatment methods. Evidence-based methods that lack the support of clinicians will have problems surviving in clinical practice. In the present study, we found that social workers' treatment ideology was associated with referral rate. Social workers who sympathised with the ideology on which MST is based referred patients to the project to a greater extent. Moreover, we found that the perception of a good work climate and good social support correlated positively with the referral rate from the unit. The results suggest that when implementing evidence-based methods, or research projects on treatment methods, researchers should consider whether the method is consistent with the current treatment ideology within the unit. Working conditions in the unit should also be considered.     

Relational problems and psychiatric symptoms in couple therapy

This article describes couples attending family counselling in Sweden. The study group is compared with clinical groups and non-clinical groups. Self-rating instruments were com-pleted by 317 women and 312 men to evaluate the following: marital satisfaction (DAS), expressed emotion (QAFM), family climate (FC), psychiatric symptoms (SCL-90) and sense of coherence (SOC). This group had several problems: marital relationships, disrupted family functioning, dyadic interactions characterised by criticism and open arguments, and multiple psychological symptoms. The women were espe-cially discontent in the relationship, and they exhibited higher symptom strain and lower sense of coherence than the men did. Compared with non-clinical populations, this group was severely distressed and was similar to in-patient families in child psychiatric clinics. The low sense of coherence of the individuals in the group under study means that their sense of having a meaningful life and their ability to comprehend and manage problems were severely compromised. Adequate and comprehensive treatment within the framework of social pro-grammes should be made available to these couples and others in a similar situation.     

On Unimodal Regression in the Exponential Family

In this article, we discuss statistical methods for curve-estimation under the assumption of unimodality for variables with distributions belonging to the two-parameter exponential family with known or constant dispersion parameter. An important special case is a one-parameter distribution. We suggest a nonparametric method based on monotonicity properties. The method is applied to Swedish data on laboratory verified diagnoses of influenza and data on inflation from an episode of hyperinflation in Bulgaria.