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The race concordance hypothesis suggests that matching patients and health providers on the basis of race improves communication and patients’ perceptions of health care, and by extension, encourages patients to seek and utilize health care, which may reduce health disparities. However, relatively few studies have examined the impact of race concordance on the utilization of health services. This chapter is grounded on Andersen’s Emerging Model of Health Services Utilization (Phase 4) and extends that model to include race concordance.

The data were collected from a stratified random sample of adult beneficiaries enrolled in North Carolina Medicaid’s primary care case management delivery system in 2006–2007. Propensity score matching techniques were used to sort respondents on their propensity for race concordance and indices were constructed to generate key control variables. Poisson regression was used to examine the impact of race concordance on the utilization of primary care and emergency room care, under the assumption that race concordance would increase the use of primary care and decrease the use of emergency care for minority patients.

While blacks (compared to whites) used less primary care and had more emergency care visits, race concordance was not a statistically significant predictor of either primary care or emergency room use. However, patients’ satisfaction with their primary care providers was associated with significantly fewer primary care and emergency care visits while trust in one’s provider was associated with more primary care visits.

The study findings suggest that the central premises of the race concordance hypothesis require further study to confirm the assumption that better patient – primary care provider relationships result in less utilization of more costly and resource-intensive forms of health care.

The study makes a valuable contribution by expanding the relatively small body of literature dedicated to exploring the impact of race concordance on health services utilization. Additionally, by virtue of researching the experience of Medicaid enrollees, the study controls for health insurance status.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.

It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.

Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.

Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.

Family members provide the bulk of care to persons in later life, representing the vast majority of caregivers. However, studies confirm that men with a history of divorce are less likely than married men to view family members as potential caregivers. This chapter presents findings from a qualitative study on the experiences of 21 ex-wives who chose to provide mostly end-of-life care to their ex-husbands in mid- and late-life. We examine questions about the situational and motivating factors behind ex-wife caregivers’ decisions, and provide, as background, findings about their pre- and post-divorce relationships. Relational outcomes of the caregiving situation also are considered. Several themes emerge, including patterns of proximity and continued contact post-divorce, despite often chaotic former marital relationships; a desire to spare children from the burdens of care; and an opportunity to renew communication or connections with family through the process of caregiving. Implications of our findings include the need to acknowledge ex-spouses as potential caregivers and better understand the enduring bonds between ex-spouses.

The most generally accessible and entertaining history of Britain remains Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and all that which, notwithstanding the title, begins in 55 B.C. with the landing of Julius Caesar in Britain, and not with the assumption of the English throne in 1066 by William, the Conqueror (Sellar & Yeatman, 1930, ch. 1). But even though there are only two dates in the book, it is the later date which is, as they rightly say, “memorable.” This used to be part of a shorthand history of Britain which every schoolboy knew: the seaborne invasion of England, the death of Harold with an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings, the addition of French to the mixture of Saxon, Norse and Latin that already made up the local language. When last summer I visited the French town of Bayeux so that I might at last view the tapestry about which I had read as a small boy, but in which the graphic evidence of Harold's demise is now the subject of some dispute, I discovered something my teachers had never told me. There in the record of the Tapestry is Harold swearing allegiance to William; so that when, two years later, Edward the Confessor died childless, William set sail to claim his inheritance. Or at any rate, that is what the French story is, based on existing Norman sources, of which the Bayeux Tapestry is an important component.