In the UK, current policies and services for people with mental disorders, including those with intellectual disabilities (ID), presume that these men and women can, do, and should, make decisions for themselves. The new Mental Capacity Act (England and Wales) 2005 (MCA) sets this presumption into statute, and codifies how decisions relating to health and welfare should be made for those adults judged unable to make one or more such decisions autonomously. The MCA uses a procedural checklist to guide this (...) process of substitute decision-making. The personal experiences of providing direct support to seven men and women with ID living in residential care, however, showed that substitute decision-making took two forms, depending on the type of decision to be made. The first process, ‘strategic substitute decision-making’, paralleled the MCA’s legal and ethical framework, whilst the second process, ‘relational substitute decision-making’, was markedly different from these statutory procedures. In this setting, ‘relational substitute decision-making’ underpinned everyday personal and social interventions connected with residents’ daily living, and was situated within a framework of interpersonal and interdependent care relationships. The implications of these findings for residential services and the implementation of the MCA are discussed. (shrink)

The lexicographic power ΔΓ of chains Δ and Γ is, roughly, the Cartesian power Πγ∈Γ Δ, totally ordered lexicographically from the left. Here the focus is on certain powers in which either Δ = R or Γ = R, with emphasis on when two such powers are isomorphic and on when ΔΓ is 2-homogeneous. The main results are: (1) For a countably infinite ordinal α, Rα* +α ≃ Rα. (2) RR ≄ RQ. (3) For Δ a countable ordinal ≥ 2. (...) ΔR, with its smallest element deleted, is 2-homogeneous. (shrink)

Originally published between 1925 and 1997 the volumes in this set: Discuss the Impacts of Profitability, Business Cycles and the Capital Stock on Productivity; Evaluate various approaches to managing the uncertainty inherent in the future course of the interest rate cycle; Examine the combined effect of financial instability and industrial restructuring on postwar economic growth and recession in the US; Determine what statistical and other information is needed to formulate both the objects and the means of government economic policy; Ask (...) what theoretical tools should be used in order to clarify the issues of economic policy; Examine the sociological aspects of the business cycle. (shrink)