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This article utilizes the ongoing debates over the role of certain agricultural insecticides in causing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—the phenomenon of accelerated bee die-offs in the United States and elsewhere—as an opportunity to contribute to the emerging literature on the social production of ignorance. In our effort to understand the social contexts that shape knowledge/nonknowledge production in this case, we develop the concept of epistemic form. Epistemic form is the suite of concepts, methods, measures, and interpretations that shapes the ways in which actors produce knowledge and ignorance in their professional/intellectual fields of practice. In the CCD controversy, we examine how the (historically influenced) privileging of certain epistemic forms intersects with the social dynamics of academic, regulatory, and corporate organizations to lead to the institutionalization of three interrelated and overlapping types of ignorance. We consider the effects of these types of ignorance on US regulatory policy and on the lives of different stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the politics of expertise in an ongoing controversy in the United States over the role of certain insecticides in colony collapse disorder – a phenomenon involving mass die-offs of honey bees. Numerous long-time commercial beekeepers contend that newer systemic agricultural insecticides are a crucial part of the cocktail of factors responsible for colony collapse disorder. Many scientists actively researching colony collapse disorder reject the beekeepers’ claims, citing the lack of conclusive evidence from field experiments by academic and industry toxicologists. US Environmental Protection Agency regulators, in turn, privilege the latters’ approach to the issue, and use the lack of conclusive evidence of systemic insecticides’ role in colony collapse disorder to justify permitting these chemicals to remain on the market. Drawing on semistructured interviews with key players in the controversy, as well as published documents and ethnographic data, we show how a set of research norms and practices from agricultural entomology came to dominate the investigation of the links between pesticides and honey bee health, and how the epistemological dominance of these norms and practices served to marginalize the knowledge claims and policy positions of commercial beekeepers in the colony collapse disorder controversy. We conclude with a discussion of how the colony collapse disorder case can help us think about the nature and politics of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the past few decades, the nursing workforce has been in crisis in the United States and around the world. Many health care organizations in developed countries recruit nurses from other countries to maintain acceptable staffing levels. The Philippines is the centre of a large, mostly private nursing education sector and an important supplier of nurses worldwide, despite its weak domestic health system and uneven distribution of health workers. This situation suggests a dilemma faced by developing countries that train health professionals for overseas markets: how do government officials balance competing interests in overseas health professionals’ remittances and the need for well-qualified health professional workforces in domestic health systems? This study uses case studies of two recent controversies in nursing education and migration to examine how Philippine government officials represent nurses when nurse migration is the subject of debate. The study finds that Philippine government officials cast nurses as global rather than domestic providers of health care, implicating them in development more as sources of remittance income than for their potential contributions to the country’s health care system. This orientation is motivated not simply by the desire for remittance revenues, but also as a way to cope with overproduction and lack of domestic opportunities for nurses in the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on policy issues in research and the ownership of intellectual property at a land grant university in the U.S. Impact of the university and industry relations on biotechnology; Effects of biotechnology on the U.S. economy; Patterns of research funding; Mean research expenditures by source of funding.

We reviewed issues of four key American Counseling Association journals for the years 1967-1991. We searched for articles that included some discussion of the consulting function and report finding 204 articles. We identify the leading author and institutional contributors and key each article to one or more content categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We investigated whether federally tax-exempt hospitals consider community health needs when deciding how much and what types of community benefits to provide., Methods: Using 2009 data from hospital tax filings to the Internal Revenue Service and the 2010 County Health Rankings, we employed both univariate and multivariate analyses to examine the relationship between community health needs and the types and levels of hospitals' community benefit expenditures. The study sample included 1522 private, tax-exempt hospitals throughout the United States., Results: We found some patterns between community health needs and hospitals' expenditures on community benefits. Hospitals located in communities with greater health needs spent more as a percentage of their operating budgets on benefits directly related to patient care. By contrast, spending on community health improvement initiatives was unrelated to community health needs., Conclusions: Important opportunities exist for tax-exempt hospitals to improve the alignment between their community benefit activities and the health needs of the community they serve. The Affordable Care Act requirement that hospitals conduct periodic community health needs assessments may be a first step in this direction.