Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Civil society remains a contested concept, but one that is widely embedded in global development processes. Transnationalism within civil society scholarship is often described dichotomously, either through hierarchical dependency relations or as a more amorphous networked global civil society. These two contrasting spatial imaginaries produce very particular ideas about how transnational relations contribute to civil society. Drawing on empirical material from research with civil society organizations in Barbados and Grenada, in this article I contend that civil society groups use forms of transnational social capital in their work. This does not, however, resonate with the horizontal relations associated with grassroots globalization or vertical chains of dependence. These social relations are imbued with power and agency and are entangled in situated historical, geographical and personal contexts. I conclude that the diverse transnational social relations that are part of civil society activity offer hope and possibilities for continued civil society action in these unexpected spatial arrangements

A system dynamics-based simulation study for managing clinical governance and pathways in a hospital

This paper examines the development of clinical pathways in a hospital in Australia based on empirical clinical data of patient episodes. A system dynamics (SD)-based decision support system (DSS) is developed and analyzed for this purpose. System dynamics was used as the simulation modeling tool because of its rigorous approach in capturing interrelationships among variables and in handling dynamic aspects of the system behavior in managing healthcare. The study highlights the scenarios that will help hospital administrators to redistribute caseloads amongst admitting clinicians with a focus on multiple Diagnostic Related Groups (DRG’s) as the means to improve the patient turnaround and hospital throughput without compromising quality patient care. DRG’s are the best known classification system used in a casemix funding model. The classification system groups inpatient stays into clinically meaningful categories of similar levels of complexity that consume similar amounts of resources. Policy explorations reveal various combinations of the dominant policies that hospital management can adopt. The analyses act as a scratch pad for the executives as they understand what can be feasibly achieved by the implementation of clinical pathways given a number of constraints. With the use of visual interfaces, executives can manipulate the DSS to test various scenarios. Experimental evidence based on focus groups demonstrated that the DSS can enhance group learning processes and improve decision making. The simulation model findings support recent studies of CP implementation on various DRG’s published in the medical literature. These studies showed substantial reductions in length of stay, costs and resource utilization

Illinois Technograph v. 100, iss. 4 Feb. 1985

published or submitted for publicatio

The Ownership School vs. the Management School of State Enterprise Reform: Evidence from China

There are two schools of thoughts on the important issue of reforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We call them the ownership school and the management school. The ownership school argues that the key to the reform is to diversify SOEs' ownership, including privatization, in order to eliminate government control of SOEs. The management school emphasizes the need to improve government's management of SOEs by, for example, granting SOE employees autonomy and profit incentives. Utilizing a data set of 680 SOEs in China, covering the period of 1980 to 1994, we test the relative effectiveness of these two kinds of reform measures. This is possible due to the fact that reform measures based on each of these two schools of thoughts were practised in China. Our results yield strong support for the ownership school while leaving very mixed evidence for the management school. Moreover, we find that the impact of ownership diversification was of the same order of magnitude on the economic performance of state enterprises as that of enhancing product market competition.State-Owned Enterprise, Privatization, Gradual Privatization, Managerial Reform, Enterprise Restructuring, Managerial Autonomy, and Managerial Incentives

Dietary fat and the prevalence of hand osteoarthritis: data from the osteoarthritis initiative

OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of total dietary fat intake on the prevalence of hand osteoarthritis (HOA) utilizing data collected in the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) study cohort. METHODS: This is an observational cross-sectional study. Subjects from the OAI cohort with hand radiographs were analyzed for HOA, defined as a Kellgren-Lawrence score of ≥2 in two or more joints on different fingers. Dietary data and socioeconomic factors were collected from the baseline study visit. Logistic regression analysis assessed the association of total fat intake and disease prevalence. Odds ratios were calculated from the coefficients and confidence intervals were calculated with log-likelihood. RESULTS: HOA was prevalent in 1,106 out of the 2,993 participants (37%). Total fat intake did not show a significant relationship to disease prevalence when adjusted for age, education, income, race, smoking, BMI, prescription NSAID use, calcium intake, protein intake, total calories, saturated/monounsaturated fats, and alcohol consumption. There was a significant association of HOA with age, sex, education, race, total calories, and alcohol intake. Sex was analyzed independently to assess for effect modification, showing an association with age (P<0.01) OR (95%CI) 1.03 (1.02,1.03), race (P<0.01) 1.16 (1.09,1.23), and alcohol consumption (P<0.01) 1.06 (1.02,1.09) among only female subjects. Male subjects showed a strong association with age (P<0.01) 1.02 (1.01,1.02). CONCLUSION: Total fat intake does not show a significant association with HOA prevalence with the study sample from the OAI cohort. Age, race, and alcohol consumption showed significant associations depending on sex. More research is needed to further investigation these associations among different groups

Translating Wang Xiaoshuai: From Third Front to Cultural Revolution

AbstractSince the turn of the century, there has been an upturn of cultural production about the Third Front (1964-80) within China, yet mainstream knowledge of this military-industrial project and former state secret remains limited, particularly outside of China. This article examines the English-language reception of Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Third Front trilogy” of films, arguing that – despite the moniker – reviewers have tended to marginalise the Third Front and focus instead on the Cultural Revolution proper (1966-68), creating a slippage between these two distinct events. This “translation” of campaign time has occurred because of English-language reviewers’ assumptions about the Mao era and how it should be depicted by Chinese artists, as well as a Chinese-English subtitling strategy in one film that anticipates and encourages these same assumptions about the Mao era. Moreover, despite generally adopting a critical tone towards the CCP, film reviewers have reproduced – and propagated – the judgement of the 1981 Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of the Party since the Founding of the PRC that the Cultural Revolution was “ten years of turmoil”. Consequently, not only do these reviewers enfold the Third Front into the Cultural Revolution, they also homogenise the complexities of the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, film reviewers unwittingly provide the Party with useful assistance in globally disseminating and maintaining its version of PRC history, as well as hindering the emergence of alternative accounts of the Mao era