Long-term Crisis Research Articles

Long-term Financial Crisis and Changes in Japanese Financial Policy: Deposit Payoff System and ‘Postponement’ Policy

Long-term Financial Crisis and Changes in Japanese Financial Policy: Deposit Payoff System and ‘Postponement’ Policy

Canadian Library Human Resources Short-Term Supply and Demand Crisis Is Averted, But a Significant Long-Term Crisis Must Be Addressed

Canadian Library Human Resources Short-Term Supply and Demand Crisis Is Averted, But a Significant Long-Term Crisis Must Be Addressed

Diversities of Class and Gender Experience and the Shaping of Labor Politics: Yorkshire's Manningham Mills Strike, 1890–91 and the Independent Labour Party

New evidence on gender and class reveals the diverse experiences of male and female workers in the worsted and in the rising silk plush industry in late nineteenth-century Bradford, Yorkshire and prompts a re-examination of the historiography surrounding the Manningham strike and labor politics. In the context of changing labor processes and the exclusionary policies of Yorkshire trade unionism, the striking velvet weavers in 1890–91 were developing their own political and organizational agenda based on gender cooperation and mutual support, similar to the trade unionism of Lancashire. This agenda was deflected by the rise of the Independent Labour Party and the onset of long-term industrial crisis in the West Riding.

The Long-Term Care Workforce Crisis: Dementia-Care Training Influences on Job Satisfaction and Career Commitment

The present study compares changes in job satisfaction and career commitment among Alzheimer's care staff participating in a two-phase, state-level training collaborative to improve dementia care. Results reveal an increase in extrinsic job satisfaction and a decrease in career commitment. Findings could be related to the effects of both the training interventions and the time lag in data collection. Decreases in career identity depended on whether participants showed a deeper involvement in aging concerns with respect to future employment. Implications for the implementation of future interventions for direct-care staff within a context of organizational and systems-based change are discussed.

Aftermath of banking crises: Effects on real and monetary variables

This paper models the effects of a banking crisis, and in particular distinguishes between a short-term crisis, such as a banking panic, and a longer-term crisis, such as a banking insolvency. Using an optimizing framework, it shows that depositors shift from deposits into cash in both types of crises, which results in an increase in the interest rates on deposits and loans, and a contraction in output and consumption. However, when the crisis is resolved in a finite time period, there is an intertemporal substitution of consumption, and consumption is postponed until the crisis is resolved. This in turn results in a further decline in the demand for money, availability of credit and output.

The FARMING approach: main results and perspectives of the French FARMING groups

The Chernobyl accident led to a long-term crisis that affected agriculture, food and living conditions in complex ways, and that modified the usual economical, political and social relations between public and private stakeholders at local, national and international level. The EC FARMING project aims to create a European stakeholder network to consider possible rehabilitation strategies for rural areas contaminated after a nuclear accident. The Institute of Patrimonial Strategies of the National Institute on Agronomy had responsibility for setting up the French stakeholder group. The objective was to develop favourable conditions and ways whereby stakeholders could deal with such a complex situation as a nuclear emergency and develop rehabilitation strategies. The results from the 3-year work programme on both strategic and technical aspects, showed an increasing commitment from the stakeholders that led to the building up of a common understanding of what a nuclear accident could be and how it could be dealt with.

HIV/AIDS and humanitarian action.

What are the implications of HIV/AIDS for our understanding of crisis and humanitarian aid? HIV/AIDS is both a long-term crisis in its own right and a contributory factor in acute emergencies. The epidemic presents key challenges for both humanitarian and development assistance and for the interface between them. The crisis in southern Africa during 2002 and 2003 highlighted the complex connections between HIV/AIDS food security and famine. This briefing paper examines the implications of HIV/AIDS for our understanding of crisis and of the role of humanitarian aid therein. The disease is clearly a massive crisis in its own right: to the extent that humanitarian response is concerned with increased levels of mortality and morbidity HIV/AIDS can clearly be described as an emergency. However it is a long-term crisis and its impacts will be felt for decades. (excerpt)

Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War

Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War

Caring and competency.

The long-term crisis in nursing, particularly in acute care hospitals, is demonstrated in studies on negligence by the Institute of Medicine in To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System1 and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.2 A review of the nursing literature reflects unclear definitions of competency and its component caring, and no single theory of competency has been adopted from the literature and used in the education of nurses. The American Nurses 2001 Code of Ethics does not resolve this confusion, because it does not correct the individual acts of nursing incompetencies in acute care hospitals. The author defines caring and competency by providing examples of what they are not in examining 200 actual cases of hospital nursing acts of incompetence by nursing discipline. None of these examples of imputed negligence was reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank because the "corporate shield" protected the nurses by not being named in the complaint nor named as part of the settlement against the hospital.A new model of the hospitalist, the nurse hospitalist, is presented to act as a daily teacher and facilitator for hospital nurses based on a curriculum of day-to-day examples of substandard patient care. This nurse specialist is an inpatient generalist advanced practice nurse who is employed by the hospital and reports to the chief nurse executive. The author proposes that this new model of the nurse hospitalist be devoted entirely to collaborating with nurse leaders, educators, charge nurses, and floor nurses throughout disciplines in advancing the competency of nursing. This daily proactive and prospective model of improving nursing performance in a facultative manner offers strategies to mitigate the limitations of the retrospective model of quality control. Total quality improvement practiced retroactively is ineffective. The author recommends no structural change in the institution but an educational agenda by the nurse hospitalist, with hospital administration to assist nurses in a new learning environment.

The future of the welfare state: crisis myths and crisis realities.

Accounts of the future of the welfare state are often presented in crisis terms. Some commentators identify globalization as a force that has already led to a major retreat by the state and is likely to lead to further downsizing of the public sector. Others see the future burden of an aging population as creating huge public expenditure pressures that can be countered only by increased parsimony in most areas of spending. Although both crisis scenarios contain elements of truth, analysis of recent public expenditure trends shows that both are substantially exaggerated as general representations of likely developments over the next two or three decades. However, unnoticed by most commentators, a real, longer-term crisis is beginning to make itself felt. This crisis arises, in part, from the demographic impact of a cultural transformation in the labor market, in progress for several decades. Extreme scenarios of possible consequences over the next 50 to 100 years include population implosion, mass migration, increasingly dangerous eruptions of right-wing populism, and, possibly, territorial conflict between developed and underdeveloped nations. This is not a crisis of the welfare state but rather a crisis for which the welfare state may be an essential part of the answer. The only way Western societies can lessen the future impact of the ongoing cultural transformation of the labor market is through the redesign of welfare state institutions to confront these new challenges.

Requiem for a National Ideal? Social Solidarity, the Crisis of French Social Security, and the Role of Global Financial Markets

It is well appreciated that demographic trends threaten the integrity of continental European systems of social security. For France these trends imply a long-term financial crisis as well as a crisis of confidence in national economic and social institutions. The payment of social security entitlements is a recurrent and largely unresolved political issue; proposals for comprehensive reform are heavily contested, involving political interests willing to go to the streets. At the same time, governments' incremental changes in benefit formula and accounting have discounted the expected value of future retirement benefits. In this paper, I begin by sketching the logic of pay-as-you-go social security, identifying the basic economic principles and social institutions that sustain such systems. One goal of the paper is to articulate the economic and philosophical roots of social solidarity and the importance of the state as the custodian of the social contract between generations. In doing so, I sketch out the French ideal: a coherent social security system based upon self-reinforcing mutual obligations and institutions. A second goal of the paper is to show how and why the French social security system became unsustainable. Demographic trends have been exacerbated by the use of the retirement system as a form of labour-market compensation policy, thereby undercutting both its financial and its political legitimacy. The third goal of the paper is to indicate how and why global financial markets may play a significant role in resolving the crisis of social security. Basically, I dispute the argument that national systems of social security will persist into the future; internal inconsistencies and the possible defection of those not served by such institutions combined with external opportunities may overturn the past. By making this argument, I do not mean to suggest that the Anglo-American model is necessarily superior to social security systems based on social solidarity. Rather, my point is entirely argumentative: solemn incantations that defend the past, whatever their best intentions, may simply reinforce the nature and significance of the pending crisis.

Toxic fear: the management of uncertainty in the wake of the Amsterdam air crash

This paper examines the management of uncertainty among emergency responders, the media, and the public following the crash of an Israeli cargo plane carrying apparently hazardous cargo in Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer area. While the authorities’ management of the emergency created by the initial crash was effective, the long-term crisis management performance was considerably less effective. It is argued that, particularly in hazardous materials emergencies, considerable management attention is required in the long-term aftermath rather than seeking a quick declaration of “all clear” or determination that the crisis is over. This paper examines the roles of all actors in the crisis and addresses the nature of communications in the “disaster after the disaster”. The evolution of a “toxic fear” among citizens is documented and the social psychology of crisis management in the aftermath is examined.

Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (review)

228Comparative Drama refer to a stage property representing the tomb, or does it merely indicate that the actor is expected to evoke the existence ofa tomb in the imagination ofthe viewer? Such questions cannot be answered definitively, and Dessen and Thomson are careful to announce within their entries when such conundrums arise. Possible criticisms of this volume are few and are confined to quibbles over the content of particular entries. For instance, one may observe a slight inconsistency in the authors' treatment oftermswhose current meanings differ from their earlymodern connotations. Dessen and Thomson prudentlydeclare that "presendy," in Renaissance stage directions, means "immediately" rather than "soon," but in their treatment ofthe word "sad," they neglect to point out that the term often means "serious" (OED 4) rather than "sorrowful." Also, consecutive entries for "thunder" and "thunder and lightning" cover much of the same ground and could probably have been combined into a single entry. However, these cavils do little to tarnish the noteworthy achievement of this dictionary, which admirably fills a void on the reference shelffor both scholars ofearly modern drama and beginning students. Michael D. Friedman University of Scranton Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, eds. Discontinuities: New Essays on RenaissanceLiterature and Criticism. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1998. Pp. xx + 244. $65.00. You will not agree with everything in this book. What is probable is that, whatever your specialty and your point ofview, you will find parts ofit much more convincing (or unconvincing) than the rest. A diverse and often contentious set ofreflections on the studyand teaching ofearlymodern texts, Discontinuities abounds with disjunctions and contradictions. In their introduction, the editors themselves anticipate the reader's "experience ... of constantly having the ground from underneath one cut away" (xviii). Whether or not the reader herself is so unsure of matters as to react with such insecurity, Comensoli and Stevens have succeeded in creating a forum for an exceptionally honest and provocative exchange of opinions. Although no such volume can be comprehensive , this one exposes to an unusual degree of scrutiny many of the conflicting forces that shape the field as it stands now, in the aftermath of the upheavals ofthe 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and offers contrastingalternatives for Reviews229 renewal. The essays, contributed for the most part (and in comparable numbers) by critics from Canada and from the United States, mainly attest to the importance of six interrelated influences in the study of Early Modern texts today: new historicism, post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and questions about canonicityand textual tradition or"reproduction." (This seems a large enough net to cast in one book—even ifit does not extend to the equally prominent subjects ofpost-colonialism and race, or to queer theoryapart from one briefappearance.) With a few exceptions, however, these authors share an overriding concern with die theoretical significance ofhistoricism. Many contributors see our uncertaintyabout the latter as symptoms ofa long-term crisis, in which die stakes are high for future scholars as well as for the broader reception —if there is to be any—of Renaissance texts into the culture of a new millenium. Among the manifesto-writers is Linda Woodbridge, whose essay, "Dark Ladies: Women, Social History, and English Renaissance Literature," is one of several in Discontinuities that are so trenchandy written as to qualify as position papers on the state ofthe discipline.Woodbridge evokes a nightmare prospect in which, "stretched on a hermeneutical torture rack with new historicists pulling on our arms and deconstructionists on our feet,we maybecome unable to read or interpret at all" (67). When she then pleads for the adoption of a "middle ground—readings that, given what we know about social history and literary history, are more probable than others" (68), her eloquence gains plausibility from the inclusive, eclectic, undogmatic quality of her own work as a critic. Throughout her career,Woodbridge has stood squarelywhere she stands here; whatever her proposal may lack in systematizing pretentions it makes up in its honest pragmatism, its unmysterious concern with maintaining (or recovering ) a common ground for practical criticism after the ideological divisions ofthe recent past. Close to Woodbridge in this respect, yet far more concerned with the blind spots ofdeconstruction than with those ofhistorians, is Sylvia...

Long-Term Care: Addressing the Real Issues

There is a long-term care crisis in this country, but recent initiatives are trying to treat the wrong symptoms, and the proposed remedies will do little or nothing to address the real problems that employers and employees face. The recent proposal to promote the purchase of long-term care (LTC) insurance for employees in the workplace provides no financial relief for their elderly loved ones who are in need of care now. Similarly, the initiative for a caregiver tax credit is not a solution for employees who will soon be inheriting caregiving duties-the nearly half of the work force. Employers can provide answers-but not by tossing LTC insurance at employees who have little or no chance of using it. Help arrives when employers begin offering a responsible way for their caregiver workers to access comprehensive professional assessments, guidance and care planning. At the same time, it's crucial to establish a process where elderly family members of employees have an opportunity to purchase LTC insurance through the employee's group plan. These remedies address the heart of the longterm care crisis and the eldercare concerns faced by working adults today.

The crisis of 1999 - managers control pay, but demands symbolise dangerous shift in power

The NHS starts its ascent towards fine ideals, but is often pulled back to ground level by the realities of pressure within a huge system. The everyday frictions of waiting lists and problems in communication are accompanied by a longer term crisis. Past experience (and many thanks to Stuart Ingham for originating this hypothesis) points to a pattern of ten-fifteen year crisis with past peaks in 1963-4, 1975 and 1987. Are we moving towards the crisis of 1999?

Black children away from home: Black children – issues of identity

AbstractThis paper explores the experiences of black children in Care and away from home. The issues explored are particularly pertinent for these children in making sense of their own identities, lives and emotional attachments. The material referred to is drawn from work carried out within the Child Psychology Service for Black Children Looked After – Southwark Social Services/Guy’s Hospital. The paper concentrates on the concept of identity as it affects black children. Children of mixed parentage are discussed with regard to their sense of ethnic identity. Cross’s (1991) model of identity development is referred to and is found to be helpful in understanding self-rejection and conflict not as indicative of long-term crisis, but as part of a process, a quest for self and integration.

The Coming Crisis and the Responsibility of the Left

There is a meaningful sense in which capitalism, nationally and globally, has been in crisis for a long time. And yet it is equally true that capitalism is now approaching a crisis of another kind, a temporally much more restricted phenomenon, a culminating phase of the long-term crisis, one that portends a fundamental break in the continuity of the historical process.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

External borrowing, capital formation and growth in developing countries

Since the summer of 1982 the banking community has been faced with an international debt crisis of unprecedented dimensions. The debt rescheduling agreements that have been negotiated since then involve sums totalling no less than $ 100 billion. However, they give the international financial system no more than a breathing-space. The following two articles deal with different aspects of this crisis. Rainer Erbe examines the question as to what growth effects were associated with external borrowing. Can a lack of growth effects be made responsible for the crisis or were other factors more important? This is followed by an article by Anton Konrad who discusses the proposals which have been made for long-term crisis management. What are their chances of success?

Topological relationships among crisis variables.

The psychological changes which ac- company long-term crisis were compared to those which accompany short-term stress. Levels of cri- sis, anxiety and depression were analyzed for pa- tients who underwent surgery for cancer (long- term crisis group) and for patients who underwent surgery for serious, but remediable problems. Results suggest that long-term crisis is qualitatively different from short-term stress. In particular, crisis is characterized by sudden, discontinuous changes in psychological functioning, while short- term stress is not characterized by such changes.

The Long-Term Crisis of the Alliance

The Long-Term Crisis of the Alliance