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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the number of design elements in the context of building facades in urban streetscapes and visual preferences of users to enable a more meaningful citizen participation in the design of local streetscapes.

This paper developed a web application, which manages experiments through programmatically creating scenes and displaying them online to participants using questionnaires. It collects preferences towards the number of design elements in the scenes and determines the statistical relationship between them.

The results offer an empirical description of a semi-convex relationship between the number of elements and preferences. They confirm that participants from a particular area inter-subjectively agree in their visual judgements towards the number of design elements, and justify the employment of a regression model fitted on the preferences of residents to assess design proposal in their area.

The paper offers an empirical description of the relationships between preferences and a wide range of values of the number of design elements and empirically supports that people from one area inter-subjectively agree in their judgements towards a visual aspect of the building facades. The study introduces a new analytical component, known as the vertex, which could alter future methods on the visual evaluation of the built environment.

This mixed-methods study reports on an outreach clinics program designed to deliver genetic services to medically underserved communities in Wisconsin.

We show the geographic distribution, funding patterns, and utilization trends for outreach clinics over a 20-year period. Interviews with program planners and outreach clinic staff show how external and internal constraints limited the program’s capacity. We compare clinic operations to the conceptual models guiding program design.

Our findings show that state health officials had to scale back financial support for outreach clinic activities while healthcare providers faced increasing pressure from administrators to reduce investments in charity care. These external and internal constraints led to a decline in the overall number of patients served. We also find that redistribution of clinics to the Milwaukee area increased utilization among Hispanics but not among African-Americans. Our interviews suggest that these patterns may be a function of shortcomings embedded in the planning models.

Planning models have three shortcomings. First, they do not identify the mitigation of health disparities as a specific goal. Second, they fail to acknowledge that partners face escalating profit-seeking mandates that may limit their capacity to provide charity services. Finally, they underemphasize the importance of seeking trusted partners, especially in working with communities that have been historically marginalized.

There has been little discussion about equitably leveraging genetic advances that improve healthcare quality and efficacy. The role of State Health Agencies in mitigating disparities in access to genetic services has been largely ignored in the sociological literature.

The desirability of electronic document delivery systems has been argued for years and the reasons for the slow progress of the idea are discussed. An explanation of the technical background is provided followed by some examples of electronic means of information distribution such as facsimile and disc‐based systems. Some experimental projects are described and the article concludes with a description of document image processing systems used for business purposes which have a number of features in common with delivery systems.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesise academic research in environmental accounting and demonstrate its shortcomings. It provokes scholars to rethink their conceptions of “accounts” and “nature”, and alongside others in this AAAJ special issue, provides the basis for an agenda for theoretical and empirical research that begins to “ecologise” accounting.

Utilising a wide range of thought from accounting, geography, sociology, political ecology, nature writing and social activism, the paper provides an analysis and critique of key themes associated with 40 years research in environmental accounting. It then considers how that broad base of work in social science, particularly pragmatic sociology (e.g. Latour, Boltanksi and Thévenot), could contribute to reimagining an ecologically informed accounting.

Environmental accounting research overwhelmingly focuses on economic entities and their inputs and outputs. Conceptually, an “information throughput” model dominates. There is little or no environment in environmental accounting, and certainly no ecology. The papers in this AAAJ special issue contribute to these themes, and alongside social science literature, indicate significant opportunities for research to begin to overcome them.

This paper outlines and encourages the advancement of ecological accounts and accountabilities drawing on conceptual resources across social sciences, arts and humanities. It identifies areas for research to develop its interdisciplinary potential to contribute to ecological sustainability and social justice.

How to “ecologise” accounting and conceptualise human and non-human entities has received little attention in accounting research. This paper and AAAJ special issue provides empirical, practical and theoretical material to advance further work.

Recently, the institutional performance model has been used to explain the increased distrust of health care system by arguing that distrust is a function of individuals’ perceptions on the quality of life in neighborhood and social institutions. We examined (1) whether individuals assess two dimensions of distrust consistently, (2) if the multilevel institutional performance model explains the variation of distrust across neighborhoods, and (3) how distrust patterns affect preventive health care behaviors.

Using data from 9,497 respondents in 914 census tracts (neighborhoods) in Philadelphia, we examined the patterns of how individuals evaluate the competence and values distrust using the Multilevel Latent Class Analysis (MLCA), and then investigated how neighborhood environment factors are associated with distrust patterns. Finally, we used regression to examine the relationships between distrust patterns and preventive health care.

The MLCA identified four distrust patterns: Believers, Doubters, Competence Skeptics, and Values Skeptics. We found that 55 percent of the individuals evaluated competence and values distrust coherently, with Believers reporting low levels and Doubters having high levels of distrust. Competence and Values Skeptics assessed distrust inconsistently. Believers were the least likely to reside in socioeconomically disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods among these patterns. In contrast to Doubters, Believers were more likely to use preventive health care, even after controlling for other socioeconomic factors including insurance coverage.

Our findings suggest that distrust patterns are a function of neighborhood conditions and distrust patterns are associated with preventive health care. This study provides important policy implications for health care and future interventions.

There are a number of peculiarities of British management — for example the preponderance of accountants, the comparative absence of technical expertise and the idea that “management” is a function in its own right. Research into why this should be.

The traditional functionalist analysis of the motivational properties of budgetary controls and variance reports has identified a number of dysfunctional features of typical systems, but has failed to explain why these persist. Through an examination of the case of a simple labour cost reporting system, it is suggested that part of the reason is that, for senior managers, accounting control systems serve to delegate the blame for organisational problems. The features of a system which enables this to be easily accomplished are, in some respects, the precise opposite of those which are generally considered ideal from the motivational point of view.

Heraeus sales engineer Heraeus Equipment Ltd. have appointed a new sales engineer to cover Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England. He is David Armstrong (27), who joined the company in December after having had several years' experience as a technical sales representative in the laboratory equipment field. He has a B.Sc. in chemistry from Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh.

Over the last decade, writings on the personnel profession have been pervaded by a sense of exclusion from the major management decisions. For example, Hunt and Lees report that human assets are rarely considered in decisions on company acquisition policy and that personnel managers are only involved in relatively peripheral aspects, such as the transfer of pension rights. Daniel found that personnel managers are normally excluded from decisions on re‐organisation which follow the introduction of new technology, although they are sometimes involved in other forms of organisational change. In fact even this latter involvement may be of a fairly passive character in view of Evans and Cowling's finding that personnel managers do not usually take an executive role in company re‐organisation.