Social Impediments Research Articles

Role of social structural variables in entrepreneurial orientation: A study of women entrepreneurs in Punjab

The paper contributes to the debate on women's empowerment and the discourses surrounding it. It examines the role of social structural variables in generating entrepreneurial orientation among women. Based on an extensive survey of debates and empirical findings in Punjab the paper goes on to demonstrate the resistance faced by women entrepreneurs owing to their social location and how they managed to overcome the social structural impediments.

Similarities and Differences Between Chronic Migraine and Episodic Migraine

To quantify and characterize the similarities and the differences between chronic migraine (CM) patients with medication overuse and episodic migraine (EM) patients with only occasional analgesic use. Population-level epidemiology, characteristics, mechanisms of chronic daily headache, and medication-overuse headache have been widely studied but patient characteristics have received less attention. Methods.-We compared sociodemographic data, family history, physiological and medical history, health services utilized, drugs taken/prescribed, and outcome of 2 groups of subjects: 150 patients, suffering from CM, complicated by probable medication-overuse headache (CM group), consecutively admitted during 2005 to the inpatients' ward of the Headache Centre of the University Hospital of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, to undergo withdrawal from their overused medications; 100 patients suffering from EM, uncomplicated by medication overuse (EM group), consecutively referred to the outpatients' ward of the Headache Centre during November and December 2005. All sociodemographic characteristics were significantly different between the 2 groups. As a whole, the CM group began to suffer from migraine earlier than the EM group. Drug and/or alcohol abuse was significantly higher among first-degree relatives of CM (19%) than of EM (6%) patients. The most frequent comorbid disorders were psychiatric (67%) and gastrointestinal diseases (43%) in the CM group, and allergies in the EM group (31%). Seventy percent of CM patients and 42% of EM patients were taking daily at least another drug, besides those for headache treatment. Most overused medications in the CM group were triptans (43%); the EM group used above all single NSAIDs (56%). At 3-month follow-up, prophylactic treatments reduced, by at least 50%, the frequency of headache in about three-fourths of patients of both the groups; however, headache remained significantly more frequent in the CM than in EM group: only a minority (15%) of CM patients reverted to a headache frequency comparable to that of the EM group. CM patients present more multiple comorbid disorders, polypharmacy, and social impediments than EM patients. These associated conditions complicate CM clinical management. Even after withdrawal from medication overuse, CM could not be completely reverted by current prophylactic treatments.

Opaque Contact Lens Treatment for Older Children With Amblyopia

To investigate the usefulness of daily-wear opaque contact lens treatment for older children with amblyopia. A retrospective chart review of all children undergoing opaque contact lens therapy for amblyopia between 2000 and 2003 was performed. All patients were included except for those younger than 5 years of age, those undergoing maintenance treatment only, those lost to follow-up, or those unable to cooperate with Snellen visual acuity testing. Thirteen children were identified, and seven met the inclusion criteria. The seven patients had a mean age of 7.5 years (range, 5.7-8.7 years). The causes of amblyopia were anisometropia (five patients), cataract (one patient), and strabismus (one patient). For all seven patients, the mean logMAR improvement in visual acuity was 0.52 (range, 0.26-1.22). The average duration of opaque contact lens use was 9.3 months (range, 2-21 months). Compliance problems were encountered in three patients. No major complications occurred, but one patient had an episode of mild superficial punctate keratitis. Daily-wear opaque contact lens treatment is a useful occlusion method for amblyopia treatment in older children with various practical and social impediments to skin patching. Meaningful improvement in visual acuity can be obtained, even in children older than 8 years of age.

Youth Civic Engagement in the United States: Understanding and Addressing the Impact of Social Impediments on Positive Youth and Community Development

The topic of civic engagement has come to the forefront of many recent discussions about the positive and healthy development of youth. Researchers and practitioners writing about youth civic engagement agree that civic engagement has short- and long-term benefits for youth and for society. These benefits have been discussed in terms of youth psychological well-being, academic achievement, and contributions to the social and political fabric of the country, including the promotion of civil society. Despite the general support across the past few decades for civic endeavors involving young people, such support has been largely absent for youth living in communities deprived of opportunities for civic experience or composed of critical masses of youth and adults willing to become civically engaged. This article discusses the benefits of youth civic engagement for youth and societies and the nature and role of contemporary social impediments to youth civic engagement in the United States.

Avoiding Authoritarianism: On the Problem of Justification in Contemporary Critical Social Theory

Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio‐cultural contexts and historical epochs is the most fundamental difficulty facing critical social theories today. This problem of justification, which can be traced back to certain key shifts in the modern Western social imaginary, calls on contemporary theories to negotiate the tensions between the idea of context‐transcendent validity and their own anti‐authoritarian impulses. Habermas makes an important contribution towards resolving the problem, but takes a number of wrong turnings.

Adolescents Growing Up in Stressful Environments, Dual Diagnosis, and Sources of Success

This article considers the social and psychological challenges to youth in contemporary society. The authors examine the variety of social impediments that face youths in most of our social institutions, from schools and the juvenile justice system to the family. They underscore the need for prevention, health promotion, and comprehensive assessment. Further, they assert that ‘‘dual diagnosis’’ needs to be considered not as a ‘‘special population’’ but as the typical or common experience of at-risk youths once they are diagnosed at mental health centers or juvenile justice reception and diagnostic centers. They conclude that evidence-based assessment, intervention, prevention, and health promotion will start to unravel the matter of misdirected diagnosis and treatment. The articles in this special issue amply illustrate what can be done. [Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention 5:1–8 (2005)]

The Evolution of Post-socialist Projects: Trajectory Shift and Transitional Capacity in a Polish Region

Existing perspectives on the social and institutional underpinnings of regional economic performance lack an account of how regions in post-socialist or developing countries lacking embedded, cohesive, trust-based networks could organize to transform themselves. This paper shows how provisional, contingent post-socialist projects--in opposition to more stable firm, market or network forms of organization--temporarily drawing together sets of actors from diverse organizational environs can enable regions to overcome social impediments to development. Drawing on an in-depth field study of the _ ód old industrial district in central Poland, the first part of this paper demonstrates the projectification of regional restructuring efforts and links it to regional trajectory shift embodied in a variety of far-reaching industrial, institutional and social transformations. The second part of the paper explores the question of how trajectory shift could have occurred in _ ód , despite the lack of incremental interactive learning across project stages. The region is shown to possess a distinctive transitional capacity producing learning by switching in which contingent collective projects are continually and competitively generated across stages to deal with the myriad practical restructuring problems facing regional firms and institutions. Des perspectives existantes des fondements sociaux et institutionnels de la performance économique régionale manquent un compte-rendu de la fac¸on dont les régions des pays postsocialistes ou en voie de développement qui manquent de réseaux ancrés, cohésifs et fondés sur la notion de confiance, pourraient se transformer. Cet article cherche àdémontrer comment des projets post-socialistes, aléatoires, provisoires - par rapport aux formes d'organisation plus stables, fondées sur les notions d'entreprise, de marché ou de réseau - rapprochant temporairement des ensembles d'acteurs des milieux organisationnels différents, permettent aux régions de surmonter les entraves au développement. Puisant dans des études sur le terrain approfondies du vieux district industriel de Lódz situé dans la Pologne centrale, la première partie de cet article démontre la restructuration régionale sous forme de projets et la relie au déplacement de trajectoire régional qui s'incarne dans une gamme de transformations industrielles, institutionnelles et sociales de grande portée. La deuxième partie de l'article examine comment le déplacement de trajectoire aurait pu avoir lieu à Lódz, malgré l'absence d'apprentissage interactif cumulatif à divers étapes du projet. Il s'avère que la région a une capacité de transition pertinente qui produit un apprentissage par glissement, où des projets collectifs subordonnés sont engendrés de façon continue et compétitive à divers étapes afin de traiter de nombreux problèmes de restructuration pratiques auxquels les entreprises et les organismes régionaux font face. In den dominierenden Perspektiven zu den gesellschaftlichen und institutionellen Grundlagen regionalwissenschaftlicher 'Performance' mangelt es an Vorstellungen, wie Regionen in sozialistischen oder Entwicklungsländern, denen kohäsive, vertrauensbasierte Netzwerke fehlen, Transformationsprozesse erfolgreich gestalten können. Dieser Aufsatz zeigt auf, wie nach dem Sozialismus initiierte Übergangsprojekte - im Gegensatz zu etablierteren Organisationsformen, die auf Firmen, Märkten oder Netzwerken beruhen - es Regionen ermöglichen können, gesellschaftliche Barrieren der Entwicklung zu überwinden, indem sie vorübergehend Akteure aus unterschiedlichen organisatorischen Kontexten zusammenbringen. Mit Hilfe einer detaillierten Feldstudie des alten Industriegebiets von Lodz im Zentrum Polens zeigt der erste Teil dieses Aufsatzes die projektförmige Organisation regionaler Bemühungen zur Umstrukturierung. Dabei werden diese Bemühungen mit den regionalen Trajektorienwechseln verknüpft, wie sie in einer Vielfalt von weitreichenden industriellen, institutionellen und gesellschaftlichen Transformationen verkörpert wird. Der zweite Teil des Aufsatzes untersucht die Frage, wie in Lodz ein Trajektorienwechsel möglich war, obschon es an sukzessiven und interaktiven Lernprozessen während aller Etappen des Projekts mangelte. Es wird gezeigt, dass die unübersehbaren Transformationsleistungen der Region auf einem 'learning by switching' basieren. Dabei werden in einem fortwährenden Wettbewerb kollektive regionale Projekte entwickelt, um mit den unzähligen praktischen Umstrukturierungsproblemen fertig zu werden, denen sich Firmen und Institutionen der Region gegenübersehen.

The Project on Death in America.

From its inception in July of 1994 to the present, the Project on Death in America (PDIA) has provided funding for individuals and institutions to address, through research and model systems of care, the barriers to appropriate compassionate care of the dying. The major medical, social and economic impediments include: changes in the trajectory of dying, exemplified by large numbers of patients living for months or years after diagnosis of incurable diseases such as cancer and AIDS; the increasing age of the population; high-technology medical support systems for patients with respiratory and cardiac failure; the greater emphasis on patient autonomy, along with the concerted shift from societal to individual rights; and the limitations in healthcare resources, particularly for patients with chronic medical illness. The mission of PDIA is to understand and transform the culture and experience of dying through initiatives in research and scholarship, the arts and humanities, through innovations in provision of care, through public and professional education and through public policy [www.soros.org/death]. PDIA is a programme of the Open Society Institute, a non-profit foundation created by George Soros to support the development of open societies worldwide [www.soros.org]. Mr Soros established the project because of his own experiences with the death of his parents. PDIA has committed $35 million over the past 7 years and another $15 million will be granted in the next 2 years to help build capacity and institutionalize palliative care. PDIA has created and funded a Faculty Scholars Program, a Social Work Leaders Program and a nursing leadership summit and consortium. It has also funded a broadly based grants programme, and through a series of special initiatives has attempted to focus attention on the needs of vulnerable populations—with special attention to children, prisoners, minorities and the elderly.

Quality of Life of Patients with Refractory Chronic Rhinosinusitis: Effects of Filgrastim Treatment

In this double-blind placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial, we investigated the influence of filgrastim administration on the quality of life (QOL) of refractory chronic sinusitis patients who did not respond to regular treatments. QOL was considered to be an important outcome measurement because apart from classic sinusitis parameters, it measures the overall burden of the symptomatology of chronic sinusitis patients caused by general malaise, tiredness, and social impediments. The QOL of 56 patients was assessed five times during the 24-week trial with the EuroQol, the Short Form (SF)-36, and the McGill pain questionnaire (MPQ). The QOL scores were all well below population norm scores and scores in a group of patients with chronic sinusitis who had sinus surgery. QOL scores of the filgrastim group suggested a better QOL than the placebo group, although none of the differences were statistically significant. There were indications that it might be possible to determine a subpopulation in which the results are better. Although the QOL measurements were not able to show a significant treatment effect of filgrastim in this group of patients with refractory chronic sinusitis, these measurements are important in studying chronic sinusitis because they enable the comparison of the burden of illness of patients with chronic sinusitis with other patient groups.

Health-related quality of life in young adults with minor congenital heart disease

The present study examined the social impediments experienced by young adults with minor congenital heart disease (CHD) and compared the health status and health-related quality of life of these CHD-patients with a matched group (age, sex) from the general population. Young adults with minor CHD, not in need of surgical correction, were sent a questionnaire. Results showed that a substantial part of the CHD-patients experienced social impediments, i.e. at school (19%), during free time (15%), in choosing (13%) or performing a job (9%), with medical examinations for job/insurance (19%), and taking out a life insurance policy (8%). Those CHD-patients that experienced social impediments reported a health status and health-related quality of life comparable with the general population. Remarkably, CHD-patients without social impediments reported a better health-related quality of life for 6 of the 12 scales, when compared with the general population. This last result might be explained by coping mechanisms resulting in a higher appreciation of health status which is expressed in a higher health related quality of life.

Assessing adolescents and young adults for plastic surgical intervention: pre-surgical appearance ratings and appearance-related burdens as reported by adolescents and young adults, parents and surgeons

Currently available research on psychological aspects of plastic surgery offers little basis for clinical decision making in the plastic surgeon's assessment of adolescents and young adults applying for surgery. Therefore, the research aims were to study: first, how these adolescents and young adults estimate their appearance as compared to their parents and plastic surgeons to determine the reality of their own appearance perception; second, what appearance-related burdens they experience to determine the urgency of their request for surgery; and third, the surgeons' considerations for the operation. Data were obtained from 184 plastic surgical patients aged 12-22 years (71.2% girls), 172 of their parents and 37 surgeons from 16 hospitals in The Netherlands, using appearance rating scales and to surgeons and parents, and reported substantial appearance-related suffering. There was a moderate to large overlap between the adolescent- and parent-reported burdens. In their assessment, surgeons took psychological and social impediments into consideration. In conclusion, plastic surgeons may rightfully assume that adolescents and young adults have a realistic view of their appearance and that they suffer from significant appearance-related burdens. Parents prove to be an important additional source of information.

‘Family Friendly’ Policies: Distribution and Implementation in Australian Workplaces

Abstract‘Family-friendly’ policies have recently gained a high profile in Australia, featuring increasingly in political rhetoric, company policies, industrial provisions and human resource management discourse. While initiatives to enhance the combination of work and family responsibilities may make relatively minor contributions to equal employment opportunity efforts, they do bring into consideration some of the broader social impediments to gender equity in paid employment. Some assessment of their accessibility and impact is therefore warranted. In this paper we examine the distribution of work and family provisions in the Australian labour market, and provide an assessment of their implementation in selected organisations. Our findings indicate that access to work and family provisions is uneven across the Australian labour market, particularly in the private sector; and suggest that even where provision is exemplary, the impact is at best moderate.

Towards Global Marine Traffic Control — the Need, the Technical Feasibility and the Social and Political Impediments

1. Introduction. Active MTC (Marine Traffic Control), in its various forms, is at present mainly confined to port areas and canals and their approaches, whereas all other areas are mainly subject to passive MTC measures; that is, the Collision Regulations, including traffic separation schemes, areas to be avoided by certain classes of vessels, deep water routes, etc. The Collision Regulations, however, despite many attempts to improve them, are fundamentally flawed by specious logic sanctioned, unfortunately, by legislation which is supported in turn by the well-meaning connivance of the courts. This paper highlights some of the insoluble problems of the Collision Regulations and looks at the planning of ocean passages, weather routeing, search and rescue, and fishery protection; and shows that there is already a measure of active MTC in these areas of activity. The future possibility of a comprehensive global active MTC system to deal with avoidance of collisions and strandings, in addition to those other activities, is considered with respect to technical feasibility and to social and political impediments.

The effects of family planning effort and development on fertility: an intervening variables framework.

PIP: To pinpoint the intervening variable that transmit the impacts of development and family planning effort on fertility, a modified proximate determinants model was applied to data from 59 developing countries. The intermediate variable included level of exposure to sexual intercourse (the percentage of women 20-24 years old in a union), deliberate marital fertility control (the percentage of married women of reproductive age who were using contraception), and natural marital fertility (operationalized as average per capita calorie consumption). The regression equations indicated that both social development and family planning effort can influence fertility levels substantially through their association with higher levels of contraceptive use. Interestingly, the direct effects of family planning and social development on the crude birth rate became insignificant when the intermediate variables were included in the same equation. Path analysis revealed that social development has an indirect effect of -0.083 via its influence on marriage patterns and of -0.316 due to its effect on contraceptive usage. Family planning has a lesser indirect impact on fertility (-0.487), and -0.111 of this effect reflects program effort's dependence on the level of social development. Economic development is positively linked to fertility, and future research should assess whether this factor is partially counterbalancing the fertility-reducing impact of social development and family planning programs. Although this analysis confirms that delayed marriage and widespread adoption of contraception are key intervening variables, they cannot influence fertility in societies where there are social or cultural impediments to such changes.

Survey-Guided Change in Ship Design and Production: Prospects and Limitations at U.S. Ship

This paper describes and analyzes an attempt to improve the ship design organization of a U.S. shipbuilder guided by data from a survey of the engineering workforce. While the survey was effective in diagnosing social and technological impediments to effectiveness and while it influenced the priorities of a task force established to improve engineering effectiveness, ultimately the task force was dissolved in response to short-term pressures to complete delivery of the first ship on a major contract on schedule. Why was this improvement effort cut short just as it was gaining momentum? The paper argues that the problems that surveys are intended to diagnose are often symptomatic of the very nature of the organization's structure and culture. Organizations are complex, dynamic systems. In the traditional, bureaucratic organizational systems that characterize U.S. shipyards, there are powerful internal dynamics that mediate against major system change. This case illustrates the paradox of using surveys to change a traditional management culture. If managers in the system had the personal flexibility or organizational autonomy to change in response to survey data, it is unlikely that their employees would have reported the problems they reported originally. Overall, this case example suggests that surveys should be viewed not as a guiding force, but rather as an input to organizational change. The survey without a well-designed and orchestrated change process will not lead to organizational improvement and may lead to a change in the wrong direction—a decline in employee morale and trust in management.

Surveillance of Occupational Illness and Injury in the United States: Current Perspectives and Future Directions

Surveillance of occupational illness and injury is essential for targeting workplace prevention efforts. Surveillance systems should include mechanisms for standar- dized data collection, data analysis, and dissemination of results to “all who need to know.” In occupational health, surveillance systems are less developed than in communicable disease prevention. The disparity exists because occupational health surveillance is conceptually more complex and is limited by legal and social impediments. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has listed improvement in systems for occupational illness and injury surveillance as a top organizational priority. In this paper, we review current approaches to surveillance designed to identify cases of occupational illness or injury or to monitor secular trends. Gaps in the surveillance effort include the absence of a functional system for practitioner reporting of selected occupational disorders and a standard approach to collection of certain health data. NIOSH programs designed to address these limitations include a Sentinel Event Notification System for Occupational Risks (SENSOR) which links health care providers with state health departments for the purpose of reporting and follow-up of cases of occupational illness and injury. Other new programs are designed to improve the quality of existing data sources for use in surveillance and to develop new approaches to data collection.

The Dilemma of Human Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa

The question of human rights in the Third World is one of the central humanitarian issues of the last quarter of the twentieth century. In this essay, I intend to address the issue by examining English-speaking African countries in an historical and comparative context. English-speaking African states have a common colonial heritage, sharing an official language and institutional structure. Moreover, the ruling Elites of these countries were generally educated in Britain or the United States, where in many cases they developed a commitment to the democratic ideals of the Western world. Thus in sub-Saharan English-speaking nations a body of Third World countries can be identified which, at least in their ideals, resemble Western democracies, yet which in their practice do not seem able to attain the degree of civil and political liberty to which they ostensibly aspire. This suggests that there may be social, economic, or historical impediments to an implementation of their ideals; in other words, that structures limit the realization of values. It is the task of the scholar to

Footloose and Fancy Free — Residential Choices of SFO- and LAX-Based Airline Pilots

Footloose and Fancy Free Residential Choices of SFO- and LAX-Based Airline Pilots JAMES J. PARSONS" MOST OF THE world's population lives where they do as a result of chance rather than choice. Historical accident and inertia on the one hand, and economic opportunity, job, and family ties on the other, largely determine our places of residence. Even in the United States, the wealthiest and most mobile of nations, this is true. But where would we live if we were completely free to choose, if we were not bound to place by cultural or economic ties or social impediments, if we were to select the most attractive, most congenial environment we could find in which to spend our lives? The choice would be highly subjective. Public opinion polls on residential preference show that most Americans are relatively satisfied with where they live, without strong desires to move elsewhere. The principal alternative preference these polls have demonstrated is for the small town or rural areas, preferably not too far from the bright lights of the city. A nostalgia for the simpler ways and the simpler life of the past increasingly pervades our residential fantasies. But despite such expressed preferences, the nation's population can hardly be said to be decentralizing very rapidly. Job° James J. Parsons is Professor, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley. 81 82ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS opportunities in small towns are simply not as numerous, diverse, or attractive as in larger places. In many cases, information influences the decision of where to live as much as economics. We are most confident and comfortable about places familiar to us and accessible to us — places where we know our neighbors. Choices tend to be made accordingly. Study Group— Methodology In looking for an optimal index group, freed from both financial and informational limitations, a group that has moved about and for whom the inertia born of long residence in one or a few places would be minimal, I thought first of retired military personnel. Cosmopolitan, they have generally seen the world and have the income to support themselves pretty much wherever they may choose to live. Such people do tend to pile up in a few attractive locations. Thus, there are said to be more than 250 retired admirals in Coronado, some 200 retired generals in San Antonio, and so on. Long Beach, Monterey, Honolulu , Florida, and the Denver area are similar poles of attraction . But there is a fatal flaw in this line of reasoning. Such retired military officers are almost always found within easy access of a government commissary (PX) for discount purchases and near an Army or Navy hospital. Their choice of retirement residence is strongly influenced by government subsidies relating to food and to health services that are available only in certain places. Another major factor in the clustering of retired officers of flag rank is the fraternal tie. They are graduates of only two "universities" who have worked together rather closely for up to thirty or more years. The group that comes closest to fitting my bill, I believe, may be the country's 36,000 male commercial airline pilots. They are extremely well paid, generally have seen a great deal of the world, and are generally well educated and curious. Further, they tend to have long "breaks" (time off) between periods of actual employment (flight assignments), so they have more time to spend at home than most working Americans. YEARBOOK · VOLUME 41 · 197983 Vacations are generous; pilots with less than 12 years service get 23 to 30 days per year, others more senior up to six weeks. Labor agreements negotiated over the past 15 years have given flight personnel increasing control over their own lives. Senior pilots for Pan Am, for example, can schedule their flying time each month so as to complete it within 10-12 days, requiring only one such period per month away from home. With that kind of time on their hands and the 'travel bug' pretty well suppressed by the nature of their work, pilots find a place in the country (with plenty of space for projects to keep them busy) to be very appealing. Also...