Squashed dreams and rare breeds: ableism and the arbiters of life and death

The week beginning 29 June 2015 is not just historic for the closure of the Independent Living Fund in the United Kingdom, but for me was the week they decided that my life is not worth investing in; they being NHS England, NICE and, with them, the Department of Health. They chose not to support the enzyme replacement therapy that has been not only keeping me alive, but giving me a quality of life – enabling me to return to finish my Disability Studies PhD exploring how Christian leaders explain disability, where ethics have become the main topic, and to rebuild my career – or so I thought.     

External knowledge search,absorptive capacity and radical innovation in high-technology firms

Open innovation and absorptive capacity are two concepts based on the idea that companies can leverage the knowledge generated externally to improve their innovation performance. The aim of this paper is to analyse the joint effect of open innovation and absorptive capacity on a firm's radical innovation. Open innovation is expressed in terms of external search breadth and depth strategies and absorptive capacity is described by distinguishing between potential and realized absorptive capacity. In order to test our hypotheses, we carried out empirical research in firms operating in high-technology industries. The results indicate that internal routines and processes for absorbing external knowledge help explain radical innovation as they show a significant effect of potential and realized absorptive capacity. Also, there is a moderating effect of absorptive capacity on open innovation. Specifically, potential absorptive capacity exerts a positive effect on the relationship between external search breadth and depth and radical innovation. Realized absorptive capacity moderates the influence of external search breadth. These findings confirm the complementary nature of absorptive capacity and open innovation search strategies on radical innovation.     

Cyclical Evolution of the Global Right

An understanding of the current right‐wing national and transnational social movements can benefit from comparing them to the global and national conditions operating during their last appearance in the first half of the twentieth century and by carefully comparing twentieth‐century fascism with the neofascist and right‐wing populist movements that have been emerging in the twenty‐first century. This allows us to assess the similarities and differences, and to gain insights about what could be the consequences of the reemergence of populist nationalism and fascist movements. Our study uses the comparative evolutionary world‐systems perspective to study the Global Right from 1800 to the present. We see fascism as a form of capitalism that emerges when the capitalist project is in crisis. World historical waves of right‐wing populism and fascism are caused by the cycles of globalization and deglobalization, the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers, long business cycles (the Kondratieff wave), and interactions with both Centrist Liberalism and the Global Left. We consider how crises of the global capitalist system have produced right‐wing backlashes in the past, and how a future terminal crisis of capitalism could lead to a reemergence of a new form of authoritarian global governance or a reorganized global democracy in the future.     

Comprehensive neighbourhood mapping: developing a powerful tool for child protection

This paper proposes ‘comprehensive neighbourhood mapping’ as a schema for gathering and interpreting information within a given geographical area which is informed by imaginative thinking about the safety of children and young people from sexual crime. It would build upon current forms of profiling by local authorities, health authorities and central Government. CNM would actively involve local people, in partnership with agencies, in ‘mapping’ danger points and support points. Eight components are discussed, including environmental issues, locations of sex offenders, sites where teenagers meet and share information, supportive individuals and organizations. Some issues for pilot projects are discussed, including the need to set up planning and implementation groups and to integrate CNM into wider child protection and community safety strategies. CNM is grounded in an ecological perspective which sees partnership approaches as essential and believes an overarching view of neighbourhood needs, based on detailed local information and understanding of how different forms of harm interconnect, is crucial in developing child protection strategies. At times of acute official anxiety about community ‘lynch‐mob’ reactions to known paedophiles, CNM aims to build communities which instead are informed and thoughtful about child protection. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Acculturative stress in the adjustment of immigrant families

This study reviews the issue of acculturative stress in immigrant families. Acculturative stress includes behaviors experienced by immigrants that are a direct consequence of the process of acculturation and adaptation to a new society. A number of stressors impacting on the acculturation of immigrant families is discussed. These stressors include lack of English language skills, employment and economic status, educational background, family life, and sociopolitical and immigration status.     

Child Characteristics,Parenting Stress,and Parental Involvement: Fathers Versus Mothers

This study examined variations in the relationships among child characteristics, parenting stress, and parental involvement. Participants were 100 two‐parent families with preschool‐aged children. Self‐report and interview data were collected to measure parental involvement, as well as perceptions of child temperament and parental stress. Analyses revealed significant, yet somewhat different, associations between child temperament and parental stress for mothers and fathers. More significant associations were found between perceptions of child temperament and involvement for fathers than for mothers. The associations between child temperament and parental stress and involvement differed on the basis of child and parent gender. Results are discussed in terms of future research on father involvement, as well as programs designed to encourage fathers to assume more active parental roles.     

Media Publicity and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

Media publicity is an important resource for contemporary voluntary associations, but very little is actually known about the resources and organizational characteristics that are most important for getting media attention. To address this question, we collected and analyzed data on the organizational attributes and news publicity of 739 nonprofit organizations in New York City. We find that an organization's income, paid staff, membership size, and library resources are significantly related to getting media publicity, whereas the number of chapter affiliations is inversely related to publicity. Association type is also a significant factor that influences an organization's ability to get publicity. We discuss the implications that these findings have for current debates about advocacy and civic engagement in the nonprofit sector.     

Empirical likelihood confidence intervals for the mean of a population containing many zero values

If a population contains many zero values and the sample size is not very large, the traditional normal approximation‐based confidence intervals for the population mean may have poor coverage probabilities. This problem is substantially reduced by constructing parametric likelihood ratio intervals when an appropriate mixture model can be found. In the context of survey sampling, however, there is a general preference for making minimal assumptions about the population under study. The authors have therefore investigated the coverage properties of nonparametric empirical likelihood confidence intervals for the population mean. They show that under a variety of hypothetical populations, these intervals often outperformed parametric likelihood intervals by having more balanced coverage rates and larger lower bounds. The authors illustrate their methodology using data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey for the year 2000.