Summary In all health care systems exists governmental regulation, as the market for health is unanimously regarded as imperfect. The German health care market is a good example for a strongly regulated market in nearly each submarket, partially the determination of prices. Reimbursement of...

Summary The demographic, technological and economic changes in Germany require a profound reform of the health care system, especially concerning the ambulant medical care. For many years too strict legal regulations prohibited the development of adequate care structures; the major reform of...

Abstract In economic applications it is often the case that the variate of interest is non-negative and its distribution has a mass-point at zero. Many regression strategies have been proposed to deal with data of this type but, although there has been a long debate in the literature on the...

Abstract In this paper, we investigated the utility of data mining to classify individuals into predefined categories of a target variable, based on their social and political attitude. Data collected for a social psychology study conducted in Greece in 1994 were used for this purpose. We...

Critical theory is concerned with enhancing individual wellbeing and autonomy through societal critique that has its origins in philosophy, sociology and political economics. Critical social science is the application of a critical theoretic within a social‐science domain. Accounting is a...

In this study, industrialisation has been evaluated in the context of social change theory. Industrialisation as a period of social change is the source of public library development. The public library has emerged as a result of the changes in educational and cultural structure caused by...

Although services research has made extensive use of metaphors, there is a need to understand the way metaphors incorporate assumptions about the phenomenon under study, the focus of research attention and managerial implications. Defines metaphors as a transfer of information from the familiar...

This essay examines the issues that the ongoing revolution in biosciences and biotechnology pose to social science. A convenient frame for examining these issues is the framework of “thematic priorities” established by the British funding agency for social science, the Economic and Social...

This paper develops four alternative scenarios depicting possible futures for genomics applications within a broader social context. The scenarios integrate forecasts for future genomics applications with key drivers that are shaping genomics. Each scenario is a narrative depiction of an...

New technologies are posing new challenges to social science. Their very novelty also challenges the established methods that social research institutions have used to define their priorities. The UK’s Economic and Social research Council (ESRC) confronted these challenges, in part, by...