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Pharmaceuticals are essential for the management of many chronic conditions. As a result, it is important to examine how the administration of pharmaceutical benefits affects physicians and pharmacists providing chronic care services. In the 1990s, HMOs and PPOs began to more aggressively manage outpatient pharmaceutical benefits, leading to the growth of pharmaceutical benefit management companies (PBMs).

In this exploratory study, 10 primary care physicians and 12 pharmacists in the San Francisco area were interviewed in 1999, and 11 more pharmacists in 2004, on how they worked with PBMs and their controls on prescribing and dispensing. Responses indicated major problems for both health professionals in negotiating with the PBM as a third party payor, in coping with switches and multiple formularies, and in added work for the health care professional. Increased risk to chronically ill patients for poorer outcomes is an important related problem with PBMs.

The Medicare drug benefit law passed in 2003 will likely result in similar problems for many beneficiaries, including those with chronic care needs. The paper proposes some policy solutions to reduce PBM problems for physicians, pharmacists and the Medicare population.

Access for the uninsured for medical care has been studied retrospectively via interviews with the uninsured and by surveys of physicians concerning acceptance of uninsured patients. In this study we simulate the experiences of uninsured persons by calling primary care physician offices seeking appointments to treat current illnesses. Callers were instructed not to volunteer uninsurance status unless requested by office staff. We find that patients can get timely appointments over half the time, insurance information is requested around half the time, and that office staff knowledge of uninsurance status did not affect the probability of obtaining an appointment. Our findings agree with physician survey rates for acceptance of uninsured patients. Our findings demonstrate that medical appointments are likely available for the uninsured, even though the out of pocket costs may be burdensome or unaffordable. Nevertheless, many uninsured persons have incomes above hospital emergency room, charity care guidelines and would be far better off financially and medically to have a medical home.

This chapter connects colorblind ideology to organizational processes. Despite advances in our thinking about colorblindness as the current dominant racial ideology, scholars are reluctant to tie this ideology to organizational processes – creating the impression that colorblindness is an individual attribute rather than a structural phenomenon. Because the frames of colorblindness are usually interpreted through interviews – as opposed to organizational practices – focusing on the frames reinforces the sense that ideologies are free-floating prejudices unconnected to social structures. In this theoretical piece, we draw on the organizational literature, to tie Bonilla-Silva’s colorblind frames – abstract liberalism, cultural racism, the minimization of racism, and naturalization – to organizational processes, showing how mundane organizational procedures reinforce structural inequality. We argue that organizational policies and practices rely on normative Whiteness, devaluing the cultural norms of nonwhites, and passing those practices to successive administrations. Ostensibly nonracial procedures such as hiring, promotion, and performance reviews are rife with racialized meanings.

This paper aims to examine whether employee subjective well-being acts as a mediator in the relationship between perceived supervisor support and turnover intention within the context of select-service hotels.

The sample included hourly employees in select-service hotels in the Midwest USA. The significance of the relationships was assessed using regression, and both the Sobel test and bootstrapping methods were performed to test the mediating effect of subjective well-being on the relationship between perceived supervisor support and turnover intention.

The results confirm subjective well-being acted as a partial mediator in the relationship between supervisor support and turnover intention. Employees who perceive higher levels of support from their supervisors are less likely to leave their organizations. At the same time, supervisor support also positively affects subjective well-being, which reduces turnover intention.

Actions by supervisors’ impact the well-being of their employees, which in turn may influence whether an employee stays with the organization. Organizations could use management training and employee feedback on supervisor support to improve employee support mechanisms. Organizations should also pay attention to improving employee subjective well-being beyond the work place. Improving the well-being of employees and supporting employees can help reduce turnover and may increase employee satisfaction, guest satisfaction and profits.

This study is the first to show that subjective well-being mediates the relationship between supervisor support and turnover intention; and one of the few within the hospitality context to examine the constructs of subjective well-being, supervisor support and turnover together.

A marked increase in the incidence of microbial food poisoning parallels increasing scientific and public concern about microbiological hazards. This literature review highlights the important pathogens involved in the increase and issues salient to developing effective risk‐benefit communication with the public about microbial food poisoning. Research into public perceptions of microbiological food hazards is reviewed, together with public attitudes towards one of the technologies that could combat food poisoning: food irradiation. Suggestions for reducing the incidence of microbial food poisoning through effective communication strategies are provided.

The abolition of slavery in the British Empire demanded a complete transformation of the global legal and political order. Focusing on British India, this chapter argues that this restructuring was, in and of itself, a vital racial project that played out on a global stage. Examining these dynamics over the nineteenth century, I trace how this project unfolded from the vantage point of the Bombay Presidency and the western coast of India, tightly integrated into Indian Ocean networks trading goods, ideas, and, of course, peoples. I show how Shidis – African origin groups in South Asia and across the Middle East – were almost the sole subjects of British antislavery interventions in India after abolition. This association was intensified over the nineteenth century as Indian slavery was simultaneously reconfigured to recede from view. This chapter establishes these dynamics empirically by examining a dataset of encounters at borders, ports, and transit hubs, showing how the legal and political regime that emerged after abolition forged novel configurations around “race” and “slavery.” Documenting these “benign” encounters shifts attention to the racializing dimensions of imperial abolition, rather than enslavement. Once “freed,” the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus that monitored and managed Shidis inscribed this identity into the knowledge regime of the colonial state resulting in the long-term racialization of Shidis in South Asia, the effects of which are still present today.

Cross-level analysis is a problem for mainstream approaches to organizational behavior, but not for psychoanalytic theory. The reason is that psychoanalytic theory is not so much about behavior as about the meaning of behavior, which is relatively invariant across levels. The Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times is analyzed at the individual, the group, the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the organizational levels. Blair’s behavior and the behavior of the Times toward him are explained in terms of a clash between two ways in which meaning is made: the Oedipal and the anti-oedipal.