RURALIZING THE CITY: THE GREAT MIGRATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL REHABILITATION IN BALTIMORE,MARYLAND

This article examines the discursive and material presence of the “rural” in the “urban,” relating it to the historical and contemporary production of African American culture and identity. By using the case of the Great Migration, it discusses how African Americans negotiated and shaped their urban surroundings and formed individual and collective identities by drawing on their rural, southern histories. It then suggests the relevance of these broad historical processes to contemporary analyses and interventions in the urban environment of Baltimore, Maryland. This article challenges assumptions that obscure the agency of urban residents in the formation of identity and the establishment of community. It demonstrates ways in which the historical movement from rural South to urban North was accompanied by a range of cultural resources that have been adapted, discarded, or reconstructed.     

Cybernetic appropriateness review: Does it change physician hospital utilization patterns?

All hospital care can be characterized as either appropriate (i.e., efficatious and necessary) or inappropriate (i.e., services without benefit or services that could be provided in a less costly setting). A demonstration project combining an appropriateness determination methodology with a cybernetic control system was implemented in a study area that included six hospitals and approximately 400 practicing physicians. Project results to date indicate substantial improvements in the ratio of appropriate to inappropriate care for both hospitals and individual physicians. Evaluation research design problems and areas of future research are also discussed.     

人文都市里的社会生态学

人文都市是概括和推进当代城市嵌合体中环境质量与社会质量的大标题。作为覆盖广泛、相互联系的社会生态体系,城市、郊区以及城市远郊的繁华地区凸显出不少负面特征。因此,人文都市发现了一个战略,可以对抗这些城市病并向城市系统逐步灌输更多积极的、可持续的特征。由于人文都市这个项目主要是在社会力量的推动下出现的,因此我们可以更清楚具体地表达科学在解决人文都市项目的问题以及评估其成就中的作用。人文都市可归纳为1）保护与保存城市与郊区的生态服务,2）提升居民的身体素质、心理健康与安全水平,3）保护能源、物质、水资源与时间以提高效率,4）以包容性促进公平以及社会和环境的公正性、合理性,5）保留社区感与场所感。我们将科学视为社会项目的促成因素,指出了推动科学的社会价值以及科学知识和科学隐喻在联系人文都市与社会项目中所扮演的角色。我们进一步指出社会生态研究在实现人文都市目标方面所扮演的角色,运用了环保历史、河涌的功能与复原、环境公平性、巴尔的摩生态系统和长期生态研究项目等行动案例。作为一个社会项目,人文都市得益于科学的投入：1）揭示城市体系中隐含的生态进程,2）创造知识,将普通人和一般机构与生物物理环境联系起来,3）为公民对话做出贡献,4）将科学价值观引入优化与平衡人文都市的目标当中。     

Improving inference for social research and social policy: The Bayesian paradigm

This paper reviews briefly some data interpretation difficulties associated with many social research projects, difficulties which damage efforts to synthesize the results from different studies or to use such results in the formulation of social policy. It is argued that these difficulties are traceable in large part to three causes: (1) the circuitous and nonintuitive logic of inference used customarily in social statistical analysis; (2) the lack of agreement (usually latent and implicit) about the substantive and technical premises adopted in the research argument; and (3) the frequent weakness (low diagnosticity) of social research data for distinguishing among alternative models of a phenomenon. The Bayesian paradigm of statistical inference, especially a broadly conceived version of that paradigm, offers a number of advantages for overcoming these difficulties. A principal advantage is that the Bayesian inference approach lends itself especially well to the systematic cumulation of evidence from a series of related studies. Another advantage of the Bayesian perspective is that it deals well with contingency and with uncertain knowledge. In view of these and other advantages, the Bayesian inference paradigm is proposed as a highly promising vehicle through which social researchers and policy makers may work and communicate more effectively, not only with each other, but also among themselves.     

Latent structures of vertical control in intergovernmental relations

Much of the work on interorganizational (IO) relations focuses on intracommunity bases of resource exchange, or what a number of writers have referred to as the “horizontal axes” of community organization and resource control. Building on earlier work in the field, the present paper extends this conceptual framework to include “vertical” dimensions of resource control as they pertain to the work relations of governmental units at the local and extralocal level. In this context, vertical control is viewed as a power-dependence relation between county-based public service agencies and their “parent” units at the state and federal level. Variations in these control relations are used to identify alaternate structures of vertical control within a set of public service programs spanning several units of government. The analysis reveals three basic types of vertical control structure each of which is shown to foster a distinct pattern of exchange relations among these units.