Suchergebnisse

BACKGROUND/AIMS—Landmines have long been used in conventional warfare. These are antipersonnel mines which continue to injure people long after a ceasefire without differentiating between friend or foe, soldier or civilian, women or children. This study focuses on Afghan non-combatants engaged in mine clearing operations in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Russo-Afghan war. The patterns and types of injuries seen are described and experiences in their management, ways, and means to prevent them, and recommendations for the rehabilitation of the affected individuals are given. METHODS—It is a retrospective and analytical study of 84 patients aged 19-56 years who sustained mine blast injuries during mine clearing operations in Afghanistan from November 1992 to January 1996. The study was carried out at a military hospital with tertiary care facilities. The patients were divided into three groups on the basis of their injuries. Group 1 required only general surgical attention, group 2 sustained only ocular injuries, while group 3 had combined ocular and general injuries. Patients in groups 2 and 3 were treated in two phases. The first phase aimed at immediate restoration of the anatomy, while restoration of function wherever possible was done in subsequent surgical procedures in the second phase. RESULTS—It was observed that 51 out of 84 patients (60.7%) had sustained ocular trauma of a variable degree as a result of the blasts. The mean age of the victims was 29 years and they were all male. A total of 91 eyes of 51 patients (89.2%) had been damaged. Bilaterality of damage was seen in 40 (78.4%) patients. Most, 34 (37.3%), eyes became totally blind (NPL). Only a few escaped with injury mild enough not to impair vision. Foreign bodies, small and multiple, were found in the majority of eyes; most, however, were found in the anterior segment, and posterior segment injuries were proportionally less. CONCLUSIONS—The prevalence of blindness caused by mine blast injuries is quite high. The resulting psychosocial ...

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Mexico encouraged the development of industrial assembly plants known as maquiladoras along its northern border and in selected areas of the interior. Although it began as a stopgap measure to employ men returning from the U.S. bracero worker program, the Border Industrialization Program soon became Mexico's principal development initiative for the border region. Since then, numerous scholars have evaluated the success of the plants by examining their impacts on the economy, the environment, and labor. This study adds to this research literature by assessing the impact of the maquiladora program from the perspective of the assembly line workers. It describes and analyzes the activities of a grassroots, participatory development effort to organize maquiladora workers for more than 20 years. Participatory approaches to development are defined and described in terms of the problems and challenges that animate this field of research. The findings demonstrate how participatory efforts at organizing constitute one of the few avenues available to workers to resist factory exploitation and improve their general well-being. The study confirms some of the shortcomings of participatory development theory, such as its conceptual ambiguity, significant time commitment, and general cumbersomeness, but it provides justifications for its continuance.

Since the publication of the seminal book of essays Household and family
in past time in 1972, much research on the history of the family has
concentrated on the situation in western and eastern Europe, and relied
almost exclusively on census-type documents. It is, for example,
established that whereas mean household size was small, the mean age at
first marriage fairly high and neo-localism (the formation of an
independent household on marriage) dominant in western Europe, almost
the opposite applied in eastern Europe. Yet these findings do not preclude
the possibility of discovering regions where in statistical terms the mean
household size was not large and the proportion of complex households
not particularly high, but where the neo-local mode of household
formation was not the norm. Such a region could have a preference for
joint families (two or more married sons co-residing with their father) with
a low-fertility demographic regime, or stem families (one co-residing
married son) with that of intermediate to low fertility.Traditional Japan is an example of just such a stem-family society.
There the household, not the individual, was perceived as the basic social
and legal unit of society. This unit was called ie and its headship, authority
and property were expected to be handed down from the father to a
particular son, enabling the household to follow alternating stages of
'simple', 'multiple' and
'extended' forms over the developmental cycle,
more or less in accordance with the predictions of Lutz Berkner. As
articles in the section of Laslett and Wall's Household and family on Japan
have already shown, the mean household size in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Japan was not higher than that in England, but the
mean age at marriage was lower than in the English population.
Moreover, household formation and succession rules under the Japanese
ie system were not compatible with the simple family mode.

This paper addresses the question "To what extent can job satisfaction be explained as the revenue of social capital?" By conceiving someone's social network as social capital we specify conditions under which social ties do lead to job satisfaction. We inquire into the idea of goal specificity of social capital, which implies that a network with a given structure and content will have different impacts on various aspects of job satisfaction. If the content of the ties and the structure of the network at the job engender material well-being or produce social approval, satisfaction with the corresponding job aspects increases. Data were collected in 1993 using written questionnaires in two Dutch governmental agencies, one with 32 and the other with 44 employees. These workers' networks were charted using nine name-generating questions. Social capital, it turns out, is not an all-purpose good but one that is goal specific, even within a single domain of life such as work. Three effects stand out: First, the structure of the network and the content of the ties do matter. Networks of strategic, work-related ties promote an employee's satisfaction with instrumental aspects of the job, like income, security, and career opportunities. Second, closed networks of identity-based solidarity ties improve an employee's satisfaction with social aspects of the job, like the general social climate at work and cooperation with management and colleagues. Third, a network with a bow–tie structure (i.e., where a focal actor is the link between two or more mutually exclusive cliques) generally has strong negative effects on satisfaction with the social side of the job; although a bow–tie type network of trusting ties does increase satisfaction with the social side. This implies that Krackhardt's hypothesis on the unpleasant feelings produced by bow–tie type networks has to be specified for the content of the ties that constitute such a network. The most important conclusion of our analysis is that goal specificity of social capital ...