Extensive Interviews (extensive + interview)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Purchasing Cooperatives for Small Employers: Performance and Prospects

THE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2000
Elliot K. Wicks
Health insurance purchasing cooperatives were established in the early to mid-1990s for the purpose of making health insurance more affordable and accessible for small employers. Extensive interviews at six cooperatives reveal that while some cooperatives enrolled large numbers of small employers, most have won only small market shares and a number have struggled for survival, not always successfully. They have allowed small employers to offer individual employees choice of health plans, but none has been able to sustain lower prices than are available in the conventional market. Among the important impediments to their success are limited support from health plans and conflicts over the role of insurance agents. [source]


Organizational Challenges and Strategic Responses of Retail TNCs in Post-WTO-Entry China

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 1 2009
Wance Tacconelli
abstract In the context of a market characterized by the enduring legacy of socialism through governmental ownership of retail businesses, the continued presence of domestic retailers, and increasing levels of competition, this article examines the organizational challenges faced by, and the strategic responses adopted by, a group of leading food and general merchandise retail transnational corporations (TNCs) in developing networks of stores in the post-WTO-entry Chinese market. On the basis of extensive interview-based fieldwork conducted in China from 2006 to 2008, the article details the attempts of these retail TNCs to embed their operations in Chinese logistics and supply networks, real estate markets, and consumer cultures,three dimensions that are fundamental to the achievement of market competitiveness by the retail TNCs. The article illustrates how this process of territorial embeddedness presents major challenges for the retail TNCs and how their strategic responses vary substantially, indicating different routes to the achievement of organizational legitimacy in China. The article concludes by offering an analysis of the various strategic responses of the retail TNCs and by suggesting some future research propositions on the globalization of the retail industry. [source]


Landscapes of the Law: Injury, Remedy, and Social Change in Thailand

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2009
David M. Engel
Sociolegal theorists since Weber have postulated that state law operates by interacting with and responding to nonstate legal orders. This article, examining conceptions of injury and compensation in Thailand, analyzes two ways of mapping law onto the landscape. The first is associated with state law and legal institutions established at the turn of the twentieth century. The state legal system imagines space from the outside in, drawing a boundary line and applying law uniformly throughout the jurisdiction it has enclosed. A second type of mapping, which has been more familiar over the centuries to ordinary Thai people, imagines space from the inside out. Nonstate legal orders are associated with sacred centers and radiate outward, diminishing in intensity and effectiveness with distance. This article, based on extensive interviews with injured persons and other actors and observers in northern Thailand, examines the interconnections between these two ways of imagining the landscape of law. It suggests that recent transformations of Thai society have rendered ineffective the norms and procedures associated with the law of sacred centers. Consequently, state law no longer interacts with or responds to nonstate law and surprisingly plays a diminished role in the lives of ordinary people who suffer injuries. [source]


The Eagleton Affair: Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern, and the 1972 Vice Presidential Nomination

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2009
JAMES N. GIGLIO
The frequent mention of the Eagleton affair during discussions over vice presidential selections in the past election cycle has further enhanced the relevancy of the controversy surrounding Senator George McGovern's choice of Senator Tom Eagleton as his running mate in 1972. That soon led to Eagleton's forced resignation because of past treatment for depression,the only nominee who has ever had to depart from the ticket. This is the first scholarly study of that controversy. It is grounded in extensive interviews and archival research in the McGovern and the untapped Eagleton Papers. This Greek tragedy has much to say about the two protagonists and the casual way in which political parties sometimes selected vice presidential candidates. As a result, the Eagleton affair has also contributed to a more thoughtful approach to the selection of vice presidential nominees. [source]


Language use predicts phenomenological properties of Holocaust memories and health

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 9 2009
Adriel Boals
Twenty Holocaust survivors gave extensive interviews about their experiences in the Holocaust and their lives since. This study affords a rare opportunity to explore language use and trauma using a within-subjects design. Consistent with past research which has shown that cognitive word use typically increases when describing stressful experiences, participants used a higher percentage of cognitive words when describing their Holocaust experiences, in comparison to describing non-Holocaust experiences. Four years after the interviews, participants completed memory questionnaires in relation to their Holocaust experiences and measures of physical health and cognitive functioning. The extent to which participants used an elevated use of insight words when describing their Holocaust experiences 4 years earlier was related to lower ratings of visceral emotional reactions, less avoidance and better lifetime physical health. The results are discussed in terms of how use of cognitive words when describing traumatic memories reflects adaptive psychological and coping processes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Pathways to industrial environmental improvement in the East Asian newly industrializing economies

BUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Issue 2 2002
Michael T. Rock
After the adoption of ,grow first clean up later' environmental strategies, governments in the East Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) turned to environmental ,clean-up' by enacting landmark environmental legislation, creating command and control environmental agencies and promulgating tough air and water emissions standards. Available evidence suggests there is wide variability in the performance of these new environmental regulatory agencies. Most attribute this variability to differences in ,political will'. However, why have some governments among the East Asian NIEs been able to muster the ,political will' to impose duties on industrial polluters while others have not? This paper answers this question by summarizing a larger study (Rock, 2002) which examines the ,politics of industrial pollution' control in six East Asian NIEs. Each case study is based on extensive interviews, the collection of data on the effectiveness of pollution management policies, and the integration of both with the political economy literature on each economy. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment [source]