Market, Management and Profession. Social Business in the Polder

In a recent policy document of the organized employers in the care and welfare sector in The Netherlands (the MO Group), directors and board members of care and welfare institutions present themselves as "social entrepreneurs", managing their institutions as look-a like commercial companies. They are hardly criticized and there is not any countervailing power of significance. The workers are focusing on their own specialized professional fields and divided as a whole. Many government officials are in favour or do not bother. The relatively small number of intellectual workers in Dutch care and welfare are fragmented and pragmatic. From a democratic point of view this is a worrying situation. From a professional point of view the purpose and functions of professional care and welfare work are at stake. The penetration of market mechanisms and the take-over by commercially orientated managers result from unquestioned adaptation of Anglo-Saxon policy in The Netherlands in the 1990's, following the crisis of the Welfare State in the late 1980's. The polder country is now confronted fully with the pressure and negative effects of unbalanced powers in the institutions, i.e. Managerialism. After years of silence, the two principal authentic critics of Dutch care and welfare, Harry Kunneman and Andries Baart, are no longer voices crying in the wilderness, but are getting a response from a growing number of worried workers and intellectuals. Kunneman and Baart warn against the restriction of professional space and the loss of normative values and standards in the profession. They are right. It is high time to make room for criticism and to start a debate about the future of the social professions in The Netherlands, better: in Europe. Research, discussion and action have to prove how worrying the everyday situation of professional workers is, what goals have to be set and what strategy to be chosen.

Effects of Initial Body Condition, Frame Size and Concentration of Dietary Energy on Carcass Value of Finished Steers

Yearling steers were sorted into four groups based on hip height and fat cover at the start of the finishing period. Each group of sorted steers was fed diets containing 0.59 or 0.64 Mcal NEg per pound of diet. The value of each carcass was determined by use of the Oklahoma State University Boxed Beef Calculator. Sorting to increase hip height decreased the percentage of Choice carcasses and fat cover, increased ribeye area, and had no effect on carcass weight or yield grades 1 and 2. Sorting to decrease initial fat cover decreased carcass weight, carcass fat cover, and percentage of choice carcasses and increased the proportion of yield grades 1 and 2 carcasses. Concentration of energy in the finishing diet had no effect on carcass measurements. Increasing the percentage of yield grades 1 and 2 carcasses did not result in increased economic value of the carcasses when quality grades were lower and when there was a wide spread between Choice and Select carcasses, as occurred in 1996. With less spread between Choice and Select, as in 1997, sorting the cattle to increase yield grades 1 and 2 resulted in increased value, especially for close-trim boxed beef. The results of this study emphasize the importance of knowing how carcasses will grade before selecting a valuebased market for selling cattle.

Investigation of the Potential Effects of Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease Virus on Iowa Cattle

Epizootic hemorrhagic disease virus (EHDV), an arthropod-borne orbivirus, causes significant mortality in white-tailed deer and can also cause disease in cattle. Objectives of this preliminary investigation were 1) to survey cattle at auction markets to determine the prevalence of anti-EHDV antibodies in Iowa cattle, 2) to determine EHDV seroprevalence in herds in which clinical EHD had been diagnosed, and 3) to determine whether EHDV is associated with stillbirths and/or congenital anomalies in calves. There was a 15% seroprevalence in auction market cattle; positive cattle were from southern, central, and western Iowa. Herds in which clinical EHD had been diagnosed had >60% seroprevalence. Viremia was detected in both clinically affected and unaffected cattle during an EHD outbreak. EHDV exposure was not consistently associated with congenital anomalies. Although additional surveillance is warranted, EHDV is unlikely to have a significant effect on the reproductive health of Iowa cattle.

A study of nurses' judgement of and participation in decision-making for nursing home placement for the elderly

This study investigated the effects of patient variables (physical and cognitive disability, significant others' preference and social support) on nurses' nursing home placement decision-making and explored nurses' participation in the decision-making process.^ The study was conducted in a hospital in Texas. A sample of registered nurses on units that refer patients for nursing home placement were asked to review a series of vignettes describing elderly patients that differed in terms of the study variables and indicate the extent to which they agreed with nursing home placement on a five-point Likert scale. The vignettes were judged to have good content validity by a group of five colleagues (expert consultants) and test-retest reliability based on the Pearson correlation coefficient was satisfactory (average of.75) across all vignettes.^ The study tested the following hypotheses: Nurses have more of a propensity to recommend placement when (1) patients have severe physical disabilities; (2) patients have severe cognitive disabilities; (3) it is the significant others' preference; and (4) patients have no social support nor alternative services. Other hypotheses were that (5) a nurse's characteristics and extent of participation will not have a significant effect on their placement decision; and (6) a patient's social support is the most important, single factor, and the combination of factors of severe physical and cognitive disability, significant others' preference, and no social support nor alternative services will be the most important set of predictors of a nurse's placement decision.^ Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the relationships implied in the hypothesis. A series of one-way ANOVA (bivariate analyses) of the main effects supported hypotheses one-five.^ Overall, the n-way ANOVA (multivariate analyses) of the main effects confirmed that social support was the most important single factor controlling for other variables. The 4-way interaction model confirmed that the most predictive combination of patient characteristics were severe physical and cognitive disability, no social support and the significant others did not desire placement. These analyses provided an understanding of the importance of the influence of specific patient variables on nurses' recommendations regarding placement. ^

Response of day-to-day home blood pressure variability by antihypertensive drug class after transient ischemic attack or nondisabling stroke.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Visit-to-visit variability in systolic blood pressure (SBP) is associated with an increased risk of stroke and was reduced in randomized trials by calcium channel blockers and diuretics but not by renin-angiotensin system inhibitors. However, time of day effects could not be determined. Day-to-day variability on home BP readings predicts stroke risk and potentially offers a practical method of monitoring response to variability-directed treatment. METHODS SBP mean, maximum, and variability (coefficient of variation=SD/mean) were determined in 500 consecutive transient ischemic attack or minor stroke patients on 1-month home BP monitoring (3 BPs, 3× daily). Hypertension was treated to a standard protocol. Differences in SBP variability from 3 to 10 days before to 8 to 15 days after starting or increasing calcium channel blockers/diuretics versus renin-angiotensin system inhibitors versus both were compared by general linear models, adjusted for risk factors and baseline BP. RESULTS Among 288 eligible interventions, variability in SBP was reduced after increased treatment with calcium channel blockers/diuretics versus both versus renin-angiotensin system inhibitors (-4.0 versus 6.9 versus 7.8%; P=0.015), primarily because of effects on maximum SBP (-4.6 versus -1.0 versus -1.0%; P=0.001), with no differences in effect on mean SBP. Class differences were greatest for early-morning SBP variability (3.6 versus 17.0 versus 38.3; P=0.002) and maximum (-4.8 versus -2.0 versus -0.7; P=0.001), with no effect on midmorning (P=0.29), evening (P=0.65), or diurnal variability (P=0.92). CONCLUSIONS After transient ischemic attack or minor stroke, calcium channel blockers and diuretics reduced variability and maximum home SBP, primarily because of effects on morning readings. Home BP readings enable monitoring of response to SBP variability-directed treatment in patients with recent cerebrovascular events.

Reversal of gender differences in Educational Attainment – historical analysis of the West German Case

Background information: During the late 1970s and the early 1980s, West Germany witnessed a reversal of gender differences in educational attainment, as females began to outperform males. Purpose: The main objective was to analyse which processes were behind the reversal of gender differences in educational attainment after 1945. The theoretical reflections and empirical evidence presented for the US context by DiPrete and Buchmann (Gender-specific trends in the value of education and the emerging gender gap in college completion, Demography 43: 1–24, 2006) and Buchmann, DiPrete, and McDaniel (Gender inequalities in education, Annual Review of Sociology 34: 319–37, 2008) are considered and applied to the West German context. It is suggested that the reversal of gender differences is a consequence of the change in female educational decisions, which are mainly related to labour market opportunities and not, as sometimes assumed, a consequence of a ‘boy’s crisis’. Sample: Several databases, such as the German General Social Survey, the German Socio-economic Panel and the German Life History Study, are employed for the longitudinal analysis of the educational and occupational careers of birth cohorts born in the twentieth century. Design and methods: Changing patterns of eligibility for university studies are analysed for successive birth cohorts and gender. Binary logistic regressions are employed for the statistical modelling of the individuals’ achievement, educational decision and likelihood for social mobility – reporting average marginal effects (AME). Results: The empirical results suggest that women’s better school achievement being constant across cohorts does not contribute to the explanation of the reversal of gender differences in higher education attainment, but the increase of benefits for higher education explains the changing educational decisions of women regarding their transition to higher education. Conclusions: The outperformance of females compared with males in higher education might have been initialised by several social changes, including the expansion of public employment, the growing demand for highly qualified female workers in welfare and service areas, the increasing returns of women’s increased education and training, and the improved opportunities for combining family and work outside the home. The historical data show that, in terms of (married) women’s increased labour market opportunities and female life-cycle labour force participation, the raising rates of women’s enrolment in higher education were – among other reasons – partly explained by their rising access to service class positions across birth cohorts, and the rise of their educational returns in terms of wages and long-term employment.

Cage-induced stereotypies, perseveration and the effects of environmental enrichment in laboratory mice.

When kept in barren and restrictive cages, animals frequently develop stereotypic behaviour patterns that are characterized by high repetition rates, conspicuous invariance and an apparent lack of function. Although millions of animals are affected, the underlying causes and mechanisms are still unclear. Growing evidence suggests that cage-induced stereotypies may reflect pathological dysfunction within basal ganglia circuitry expressed by perseverative behaviour. In order to assess whether variation in stereotypy performance and variation in perseverative behaviour may have a common cause in ICR CD-1 mice, we assessed the effects of environmental enrichment on both phenomena. We raised 48 female ICR CD-1 mice in standard or enriched cages from three weeks to either 6 or 11 months of age and measured stereotypy level in the home cage and perseveration on an extinction task. We further examined whether enriched rearing conditions (early enrichment) protect mice from the developing stereotypies later in life and whether stereotypies developed in barren cages would persist in an enriched environment (late enrichment) by transferring standard mice to enriched cages and vice versa for 14 weeks after completion of the extinction task. We found no evidence for a causal relation between stereotypy and perseveration in mice. However, transfer to enriched cages reduced stereotypy levels significantly both at 6 and 11 months of age indicating that stereotypies had not become established yet. Finally, we found that removing enrichments at both ages did not induce higher stereotypy levels, thereby confirming earlier reports of a neuroprotective effect of early enrichment.

Effects of elevation and land use on the biomass of trees, shrubs and herbs at Mount Kilimanjaro

The protection and sustainable management of forest carbon stocks, particularly in the tropics, is a key factor in the mitigation of global change effects. However, our knowledge of how land use and elevation affect carbon stocks in tropical ecosystems is very limited. We compared aboveground biomass of trees, shrubs and herbs for eleven natural and human-influenced habitat types occurring over a wide elevation gradient (866–4550 m) at the world's highest solitary mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro. Thanks to the enormous elevation gradient, we covered important natural habitat types, e.g., savanna woodlands, montane rainforest and afro-alpine vegetation, as well as important land-use types such as maize fields, grasslands, traditional home gardens, coffee plantations and selectively logged forest. To assess tree and shrub biomass with pantropical allometric equations, we measured tree height, diameter at breast height and wood density and to assess herbaceous biomass, we sampled destructively. Among natural habitats, tree biomass was highest at intermediate elevation in the montane zone (340 Mg ha−1), shrub biomass declined linearly from 7 Mg ha−1 at 900 m to zero above 4000 m, and, inverse to tree biomass, herbaceous biomass was lower at mid-elevations (1 Mg ha−1) than in savannas (900 m, 3 Mg ha−1) or alpine vegetation (above 4000 m, 6 Mg ha−1). While the various land-use types dramatically decreased woody biomass at all elevations, though to various degrees, herbaceous biomass was typically increased. Our study highlights tropical montane forest biomass as important aboveground carbon stock and quantifies the extent of the strong aboveground biomass reductions by the major land-use types, common to East Africa. Further, it shows that elevation and land use differently affect different vegetation strata, and thus the matrix for other organisms.

Scarring Effects of Early Unemployment among Young Workers with Vocational Credentials in Switzerland

Background Using a unique, longitudinal survey that follows school-to-work transitions of pupils who participated in PISA 2000, this paper investigates adverse consequences, so-called scarring effects, of early unemployment among young adults who acquired vocational credentials in Switzerland. Methods As social, individual and contextual factors influence both early unemployment and later employment outcomes, taking into account endogeneity is of utmost importance when investigating scarring effects. In this regard we make use of nearest-neighbour propensity score matching and set up statistical control groups. Results Our results suggest that young adults who hold vocational credentials are more likely to be neither in employment nor in education, and to earn less and be more dissatisfied with their career progress later in work life than they would be, had they not experienced early unemployment. Conclusions We conclude that unemployment scarring also affects young adults with vocational credentials in a liberal labour market setting that otherwise allows for smooth school-to-work transitions. This finding runs counter to expectations that standardised vocational degrees, a liberal and flexible labour market structure, and predominantly short unemployment spells protect young skilled workers from scarring in case they happen to experience early career instability.

Firm-level strategic orientation and performance: a synthesis and extension of the knowledge base on entrepreneurial, market and learning orientation

Should a firm stay focused or should it rather adopt a broader strategic perspective? This dissertation summarizes and extends the existing knowledge base on entrepreneurial, market, and learning orientation. Building on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical evidence from prior studies, as well as on survey and archival data collected in two economic contexts, performance effects from individual orientations, their dimensions and combinations are explored. Results reveal that the three strategic orientations are highly interrelated and that their relationship to firm performance is more complex than previously assumed.

The story of Community preference for food security

"Préférence communautaire" is an in-built notion of the CAP since its inception with the Treaty of Rome (1957). Its’ simple objective laid down at the Stresa Conference in 1958 is to prefer community produce over imports wherever possible, while at the same time promoting agricultural exports and FDI (“vocation exportatrice de l’Europe”). Does this contrast or correlate with the notion of “food sovereignty” which originated in 1996 as a notion of small farmer self-sufficiency (Via Campesina), and which now has found its way into the official EC discourse? Recent CAP reforms indeed seem to continue banking on border protection and on the occasional export subsidy. Nonetheless, coming together with claims to mitigate climate change, “food sovereignty” à la CAP fails to acknowledge efficiency losses at home and negative spillover effects on the right to food of food exporting developing countries. This chapter asks whether new non-tariff and domestic support measures are just new wine in the old cask of fortress Europe, together with the FDI promotion instruments of the FED and others. Might the increasing dynamics and new challenges of agricultural trade and investment lead to lower market and production shares for European farms? It concludes that in the medium term the WTO Green Box has the only legal and effective tools to promote EU agriculture and food.

An Exploration Based Cognitive Bias Test for Mice: Effects of Handling Method and Stereotypic Behaviour

Behavioural tests to assess affective states are widely used in human research and have recently been extended to animals. These tests assume that affective state influences cognitive processing, and that animals in a negative affective state interpret ambiguous information as expecting a negative outcome (displaying a negative cognitive bias). Most of these tests however, require long discrimination training. The aim of the study was to validate an exploration based cognitive bias test, using two different handling methods, as previous studies have shown that standard tail handling of mice increases physiological and behavioural measures of anxiety compared to cupped handling. Therefore, we hypothesised that tail handled mice would display a negative cognitive bias. We handled 28 female CD-1 mice for 16 weeks using either tail handling or cupped handling. The mice were then trained in an eight arm radial maze, where two adjacent arms predicted a positive outcome (darkness and food), while the two opposite arms predicted a negative outcome (no food, white noise and light). After six days of training, the mice were also given access to the four previously unavailable intermediate ambiguous arms of the radial maze and tested for cognitive bias. We were unable to validate this test, as mice from both handling groups displayed a similar pattern of exploration. Furthermore, we examined whether maze exploration is affected by the expression of stereotypic behaviour in the home cage. Mice with higher levels of stereotypic behaviour spent more time in positive arms and avoided ambiguous arms, displaying a negative cognitive bias. While this test needs further validation, our results indicate that it may allow the assessment of affective state in mice with minimal training— a major confound in current cognitive bias paradigms.

Preventive Intervention as Means of Clarifying Direction of Effects in Socialization: Anxious-Withdrawn Preschoolers Case

An indicated preventive intervention research program integrating attachment, attributional, and behaviorist perspectives was conducted to test the hypothesis that parent-child relationship disturbances directly effect the child's adjustment to the preschool. Anxious-withdrawn preschool children and their mothers were divided equally into treatment and control groups, and assessed on maternal self-report of parenting stress, behavioral ratings of mother-child interaction, and teacher ratings of the children in the preschool classroom. Results showed significant changes in the treatment group: mothers in the treatment group moderated their level of control to a more appropriate, less intrusive level, while children in the treatment group showed an increase in cooperation and enthusiasm during a problem solving task with mother. Teacher-rated social competence and anxious-withdrawn behavior indicated improvement, although only the former was significant. The demonstration of effects of this home intervention for the mother on the child's behavior in the preschool confirm the transactional model underlying this study and demonstrate the utility of a parent-child interaction training component for the prevention of behavioral-emotional problems in young children.

Profile Effects in Early Bilingual Language and Literacy

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish-English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of "profile effects," where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the "distributed characteristic" of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one language but not the other and vice versa.

Identifying Individual and Group Effects in the Presence of Sorting: A Neighborhood Effects Application

Researchers have long recognized that the non-random sorting of individuals into groups generates correlation between individual and group attributes that is likely to bias naive estimates of both individual and group effects. This paper proposes a non-parametric strategy for identifying these effects in a model that allows for both individual and group unobservables, applying this strategy to the estimation of neighborhood effects on labor market outcomes. The first part of this strategy is guided by a robust feature of the equilibrium in the canonical vertical sorting model of Epple and Platt (1998), that there is a monotonic relationship between neighborhood housing prices and neighborhood quality. This implies that under certain conditions a non- parametric function of neighborhood housing prices serves as a suitable control function for the neighborhood unobservable in the labor market outcome regression. The second part of the proposed strategy uses aggregation to develop suitable instruments for both exogenous and endogenous group attributes. Instrumenting for each individual's observed neighborhood attributes with the average neighborhood attributes of a set of observationally identical individuals eliminates the portion of the variation in neighborhood attributes due to sorting on unobserved individual attributes. The neighborhood effects application is based on confidential microdata from the 1990 Decennial Census for the Boston MSA. The results imply that the direct effects of geographic proximity to jobs, neighborhood poverty rates, and average neighborhood education are substantially larger than the conditional correlations identified using OLS, although the net effect of neighborhood quality on labor market outcomes remains small. These findings are robust across a wide variety of specifications and robustness checks.