Search results

The first Wisconsin Ph.D.s who came to MSU with an institutional bent were agricultural economists and included Henry Larzalere (Ph.D. 1938) whose major professor was Asher Hobson. Larzalere recalls the influence of Commons who retired in 1933. Upon graduation, Larzalere worked a short time for Wisconsin Governor Phillip Fox LaFollette who won passage of the nation’s first unemployment compensation act. Commons had earlier helped LaFollette’s father, Robert, to a number of institutional innovations.⁴ Larzalere continued the Commons’ tradition of contributing to the development of new institutions rather than being content to provide an efficiency apologia for existing private governance structures. He helped Michigan farmers form cooperatives. He taught land economics prior to Barlowe’s arrival in 1948, but primarily taught agricultural marketing. One of his Master’s degree students was Glenn Johnson (see below). Larzalere retired in 1977.

This chapter provides an overview of the Department of Defense (DoD) laboratory structure to help equipment designers, modelers, and manufacturers determine where research, testing programs, or relevant findings can be found. The chapter includes a discussion of the performance measures and metrics typically used in DoD laboratories and concludes by considering the current state-of-the-art as well as the state-of-the-possible for human performance measurement.

There are many different views and opinions held about the value of training. Some people, of course, reach the top without any formal training whatsoever and expect others to do the same. This is all well and good if, presumably, you are able to train yourself. Most need the support of formally organized training courses or continuous learning, working on the assumption that there are always things to learn. It does not matter how old or experienced you are, there will always be a gap in your knowledge that requires attention. Beware the people who know it all as they will be the ones who have the blind spots and just cannot see trouble ahead. If these people are at the top of the organization and just happened to be in the right place at the right time, which could happen if an organization has been particluarly successful, then this could have disastrous consequences on the business. Business means change, and if you cannot cope or are not prepared to accept or adapt to this change, the end result is inevitable.

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed profitability with labor's interests, and ended class conflict. They thought that Keynesian policies insured a near full-employment, low-inflation, continuous growth economy. They viewed the United States as the “new lead society,” eliminating industrial capitalism's backward features and progressing toward modernity's penultimate “postindustrial” stage.⁷ Many Americans believed that the ideal of “consumer freedom,” forged early in the century, had been widely realized and epitomized American democracy's superiority to communism.⁸ However, critics held that the new capitalism did not solve all of classical capitalism's problems (e.g., poverty) and that much increased consumption generated new types of cultural and political problems. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that mainstream economists assumed that human nature dictates an unlimited “urgency of wants,” naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites. In his view, mainstream economists’ individualistic, acquisitive presuppositions crown consumers sovereign and obscure cultural forces, especially advertising, that generate and channel desire and elevate possessions and consumption into the prime measures of self-worth. Galbraith held that production's “paramount position” and related “imperatives of consumer demand” create dependence on economic growth and generate new imbalances and insecurities.⁹ Harsher critics held that the consumer culture blinded middle-class Americans to injustice, despotic bureaucracy, and drudge work (e.g., Mills, 1961; Marcuse, 1964). But even these radical critics implied that postwar capitalism unlocked the secret of sustained economic growth.

This chapter provides an introduction to Volume 29, Health-Care Delivery and Reform: Roles of Patients and Providers. This chapter discusses the topic of health-care systems and health-care reform from an American perspective and also focuses on the roles of patients and providers and how recent sociological literature examines some of these issues. It also serves as an introduction to the volume. It explains the organization of the volume and briefly comments on each of the chapters included in the volume.