Search results

The social inclusion of youth is addressed from the perspective of goal-directed action in order to understand and foster it effectively. Conceptualized from the perspective of contextual action theory (CAT), the specific understanding of action as levels, perspectives and systems provides the basis to unpack the complexity of human action. One pertinent action system is identified as project. It refers to a series of actions over time with the same goal. Using this understanding, the social inclusion of youth is described though the joint actions and projects between youth and non-familial adults. These joint actions and projects include advocating for youth, providing instrumental knowledge and encouraging community involvement and civil engagement. CAT is also used to conceptualize and conduct research on the social inclusion of youth. Specifically, the action project method was used to describe the joint projects of both youth with disability and immigrant youth as these projects involved the youth’s social inclusion.

The purpose of this note is to expose accounting students and others to recent findings in management control, specifically to the relationship between the informativeness of a performance measure and its usefulness in performance evaluation.

Numerical examples illuminate key ideas and are easy to follow and replicate by students.

Seemingly in contradiction to the controllability principle, performance measures that are informative about actions taken by employees are not necessarily useful for performance evaluation. This occurs when the performance being measured is related to an intermediate task, such as prepping items prior to final assembly. If prepping is an important factor in the quality of not only the intermediate good but also the finished good, and the quality of the finished good can be reasonably measured, it may not be useful to measure the prepping performance. This result holds even if obtaining the intermediate measure is costless and the intermediate measure provides unique information on the effort given to the intermediate task.

Opportunities to measure employees’ intermediate outputs are ubiquitous; therefore, judicious decisions should be made regarding the use of limited monitoring resources. This note contains intuitive, easy-to-follow illustrations (based on recent findings) that will help students and others identify situations where such evaluations are more and less useful.

Imagine a southern belle—sweet, submis‐sive, and charming with her flattering ways and soft drawl. Now conjure up a hussy— lewd, loud, brassy, or perhaps just self‐centered and strongly self‐assertive, forcing her will on everyone around her. The ease with which the pictures leap to mind attests to the vitality of the stereotypes, for stereotypes they are, powerful ones in the American mythology. Although they are clearly unrealistic conceptions of real‐life modern women, they have had and still exercise a potent influence on the literature of the south. Moreover, as the works of many modern southern playwrights show, popular adherence to such myths of femininity—and their inevitable corollaries for masculinity as well—resulted in a miserable human bondage for both women and men.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the proposed changes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), which eliminates Asperger's disorder (AD) and replaces it as “autism spectrum disorder.” Implications of these changes on the identity of adults with AD and the influence of everyday life experiences will be addressed.

Methodology/approach – This research is based on 19 interviews with adults diagnosed or self-diagnosed with AD. Central themes surrounding issues of identity and everyday life experiences were determined using grounded theory approaches.

Findings – This study demonstrates how the diagnosis and self-diagnosis of AD is fused with individual identity. It also shows how Asperger identity is positively embraced. The proposed changes to eliminate AD in DSM-V threaten these assertions of Asperger identity, which could potentially enhance stigma experienced by people with AD. Regardless of its removal, Asperger identity must be considered within the broader context of people's everyday lives and how experiences in social interaction and communication can be strong agents of identity construction.

Social implications – The proposed changes to eliminate AD in DSM-V is a social issue that will impact individuals with Asperger's and their families, as well as health-care professionals, health insurers, researchers, state agencies, and educational providers.

Originality/value of paper – This chapter offers a unique insight into identity construction based on the diagnosis and self-diagnosis of AD.

Purpose – This paper extends research on social movement media by focusing on the use of a literary genre – realist fiction – namely, the labor problem novel in the context of the labor movement and countermovement in late 19th-century America.

Methodology – I do a close reading of a significant early dialogical cluster of such novels to address three key questions: (1) Field position of authors – What was the position of these labor problem authors in relation to the movement field and literary field and how did that positioning matter? (2) Genre selection – What was it about the realist novel that attracted labor problem partisans to it? (3) Internal content – How did authors shape the internal structure and content of their stories?

Findings – As literary activists, authors pivoted between the movement field and literary field selecting the novel for the special powers that it possessed relative to other historically available media. Authors produced stories with a good/evil binary attached to characters that stood for emerging social categories in young industrial America. During the Gilded Age (and beyond) the novel played an important role as medium for the labor movement and its opposition – characterizing collective actors, dramatizing forms of action, providing materials for claims of injustice or threats, solutions to social problems, and new categories and collective identities – all with powerful emotional appeal and entertainment value.

Implications – This study suggests that social movement scholars might expand their purview of cultural media used by movements and also take genre and its selection by activists seriously.

Originality – This study demonstrates how literature – realist fiction – has been shaped by movement agents and played an important, but under-appreciated, role in the struggle over cultural supremacy in the context of movement–countermovement dynamics.

dBase IV Finally Arrives. The granddaddy database system was finally shipped close to Christmas. If you submitted an upgrade order, you should have received it by now.

ONE of the most significant institutions of our day is the Central Library for Students. This truism—which we have frequently stressed—was emphasised by the Report of the Library which was presented at the Annual Meeting held at University College, London, on May 16th. The number of books issued, which was 52,711, does not seem large in comparison with the figures that an average‐sized municipal or county library can present; but the difference lies in the purposefulness which those figures represent. Nearly every book here recorded was one required for special work; few, if any, were for idle reading or for the occupation of undirected leisure. We note with pleasure that the outlier libraries lent 1,606 books out of 1,814 for which call was made. It seems a fair proportion. We were not clear if the balance unsupplied by them was supplied from the funds of the Central Library itself. We appreciate these outlier libraries, who are able to be such owing to grants from the Carnegie Trust, but we look more earnestly to a greater growth of the voluntary co‐operation which has found its adherents in the public libraries. There are now seven urban and two county libraries who place their stocks at the disposal of the Central Library for Students. Why not all of them? As we have said on an earlier occasion, if all adhered, the demands on any one would be small and the advantages without limit.

This survey covers civil, electrical and electronics, energy, environment, general, materials, mechanical, and traffic and transportation engineering. Areas such as biomedical and chemical engineering will be dealt with in future issues. Readers may find that the classifications included in this survey are not mutually exclusive but do occasionally overlap with one another. For instance, the section on environmental engineering includes a review of a book on the environmental impact of nuclear power plants, which might as easily have been part of the section on energy technology. Before we go into a discussion of data bases and indexes, I would like to note in this introductory section some recent bibliographic aids published during the period surveyed. Most engineering libraries will find them very valuable in their reference and acquisition functions. Since normal review sources will cover these books, I am merely listing them below: Malinowski, Harold Robert, Richard A. Gray and Dorothy A. Gray. Science and Engineering Literature. 2d ed., Littleton, Colorado, Libraries Unlimited, 1976. 368p. LC 76–17794 ISBN 0–87287–098–7. $13.30; Mildren, K. W., ed. Use of Engineering Literature. Woburn, Mass., Butterworths, 1976. 621p. ISBN 0–408–70714–3. $37.95. Mount, Ellis. Guide to Basic Information Sources in Engineering. New York, Wiley, Halsted Press, 1976. 196p. LC 75–43261 ISBN 0–47070–15013–0. $11.95 and Guide to European Sources of Technical Information. 4th ed., edited by Ann Pernet. Guernsey, Eng., F. Hodgson, 1976. 415p. ISBN 0–85280–161–0. $52.00.