Managing AIDS in the workplace

Because of the AIDS epidemic and the protections afforded individuals with AIDS under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), employers are well advised to ensure compliance under applicable law to reduce exposure to employee claims of discrimination and to efficiently manage workplace issues associated with AIDS. Employers should implement AIDS policies and programs designed to educate their workforce to reduce the spread of AIDS and to clear up any misunderstandings about the disease which could wreak havoc in the workplace. This article summarizes suggested action steps for employers and outside resources to consult for guidance.     

Challenges and Prospects for Economic Development in Africa

Africa's history of economic development and growth has been characterised by failed experiments, poor planning and impractical orthodoxies. This left the continent at the mercy of states and ruling elites who were unable to meet the challenges of both rising expectations from their citizens and the imperatives of sound policy design and implementation. Difficult existential conditions, including rising levels of poverty and bad governance, have been compounded by the vagaries of the international environment and Africa's peripheral position in its political economy and division of labour. Auspicious growth indicators over the last decade, fuelled mainly by global commodity demand and improved macro-economic management, have recently been undermined by the global financial crisis. The crisis has again exposed the continent to the spectre of depressed growth, with serious implications for state capacity and social welfare. This article examines the main ideological fault-lines, development challenges, and external factors that have characterised Africa's economic development and concludes that the future of the continent will remain one of this century's great challenges.     

The Impact of Environmental Factors on the Measurement of Managerial Efficiency in the Italian Waste Management Sector: Framework and Empirical Evidence

ABSTRACT

The public and private sectors are different in terms of ownership, funding, and control. The degree of publicness influences the decision-making processes, strategies, and actions, thus severely impacting the performance levels. This study contributes to the existing literature on managerial efficiency environmental factors by proposing a framework and methodology for estimating the influence of the “publicness effect.” A new method is tested, relying on the combined integration of three different data envelopment analysis models in the Italian waste management sector. Results show that the “publicness effect” accounts for 33.87% of managerial efficiency for public companies and 11.6% for mixed ones.     

Victim-offender race and support for capital punishment: A factorial design approach

Existing research suggests that juries are more likely to condemn murderers to death when offenders are black victims are white. It remains to be seen, however, whether these decisions reflect broader racial prejudices in society that are imported into the jury room. If they do, then insuring equity in capital sentencing may be beyond reach. Accordingly, this study uses factorial design methodology to examine whether members of the general public are more supportive of capital punishment when asked to rate a vignette describing a murder involving a white victim and black offender as opposed to other victim-offender racial combinations. Our analyses suggest that the race of the offender, but not the victim, has a significant influence on support for capital punishment. Thus, procedural safeguards alone may be unable to eliminate racial bias in capital sentencing.     

Rip-Off transfers: Source of social progress

This article advocates taking from the weak and giving to the strong.     

Undetected opiate use: A comparison of official drug user files and a private methadone clinic's patient records

To address the question of the extent of undetected opiate use and the characteristics of this user-population, a research study was undertaken comparing a random sample of ‘walk-in’ patients from a private methadone treatment clinic to police intelligence files on drug-users in a major eastern U.S. city. An independent law enforcement agency substantiated the accuracy of the police files, and the treatment agency had procedures which verified the addiction of the patients. The result of the comparison of these two information sources disclosed that: (1) 51.8 percent of the patients were unknown to the law enforcement authorities; (2) a higher percentage of blacks were unknown than whites, and (3) seventy percent of the addicts under thirty years of age were not known to the police as drug users. These findings tend to discount official estimates of addiction rates often based on law enforcement records, and suggest some interesting treatment methods and research questions.