Capture and culture: organizational identity in New York Blue Cross.

This article explores the changing corporate culture of New York's Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan in its first fifty years. As the plan grew, corporate culture evolved over four sequential phases: the plan first had the character of an experiment, then that of a movement, a business, and, most recently, a corporate agglomerate. Accompanying this evolution has been an identity crisis, as the need to adapt to a turbulent environment has challenged the plan's settled understanding of its core values, namely, voluntarism, community, and cooperation.     

Urban agriculture: addressing practical and strategic gender needs

This paper considers the role of urban agriculture in addressing the practical and strategic needs of African women, and assesses the gender implications of embracing urban agriculture as a development intervention strategy. Empirical evidence from Botswana and Zimbabwe points to the multi-faceted role of urban agriculture whereby some women use this activity to support their households on a daily basis, and others use it as an avenue for social and economic empowerment over the longer term. In order to benefit rather than burden women, the promotion and support of urban agriculture must take on an emancipatory agenda, which supports individual, practical and strategic goals, and ultimately challenges the structural conditions that give rise to women's involvement in the activity in the first place.     

Techniques for evaluating regulatory change

This paper demonstrates the applicability of two empirical techniques—the Heckman two-stage switching regression and the event study methodology—for evaluating regulatory or legislative change relating to companies and in particular to the regulation of company reporting. These techniques measure the impact of regulatory changes once they have happened. They could be used in practice if regulatory changes were subject to a review procedure. The availability of these relatively sophisticated techniques should encourage the quantitative analysis of regulatory changes. Comparisons of effects across member states of the European Union would be interesting but would obviously need care.     

Civil rights and regulatory wrongs: the Reagan administration and the medical treatment of handicapped infants

Beginning in 1982 the Reagan administration tried to impose federal regulations (based on the civil rights approach of Section 504) on the medical treatment of handicapped newborns in the nation's hospitals. After issuing three sets of regulations, the administration found itself rebuffed by the courts and in ill repute with providers and parts of the public, especially after its widely publicized intervention in the case of Baby Jane Doe illustrated the pitfalls of federal regulation in complex medical decisions. Congress, however, soon enacted legislation employing different means to protect handicapped newborns. The episode offers insights into the dynamics of the U.S. system of separated powers, the limitations of the "civil rights" approach, and the importance of negotiating structures for the resolution of private moral dilemmas with public implications.     

Temporary migration in Shanghai and Beijing

In a number of developing countries, temporary migration plays a key role in the labor market. In China, where permanent migration is carefully controlled, movement without an official change in household registration (temporary migration) is relatively unrestricted. It has increased dramatically since the economic reforms introduced in 1979. Using data from surveys in Shanghai and Beijing, this article focuses on the sociodemographic characteristics of temporary migrants in relation to their reasons for moving and the duration of their stay at destination. Many temporary migrants come to these cities in search of work; however, many others move for noneconomic reasons associated with family reunion and retirement. Moreover, the distinctive socioeconomic features of Shanghai and Beijing also influence the characteristics of temporary migrants and their reasons for coming to the cities. Alice Goldstein is senior researcher at the Population Studies and Training Center of Brown University, Providence, R.I. 02912. Her research deals with the interrelations among population mobility, urbanization, and economic development. Among her most recent publications isPermanent and Temporary Migration Differentials in China, East-West Population Institute Paper No. 117 (Honolulu: 1990) (co-author with Sidney Goldstein). Shenyang Guo recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has held an appointment as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University. His research interests encompass fertility changes and economic development in China.