The coming revolution of biotechnology: A critique of Buttel

Frederick Buttel was one of the pioneers in studying the social impacts of biotechnology, claiming originally that it will involve profound changes in social structure. Recently Buttel turned around his argument proposing that, rather than revolutionary, biotechnology is more a substitutionist technological form to be applied to declining sectors of the economy than an epoch-making technology. This paper provides both external and internal critiques of Buttel's new position based on the concept of the third technological revolution, looking at the impact of new technologies as a global and interrelated phenomenon, and not on an individual case-by-case basis. The concluding section suggests the necessity of bringing into the analysis those living in the Third World: 60% of this population lives from agriculture and will be affected by the deployment of agricultural biotechnologies, whether through substitutionism or through totally new products.     

The elusiveness of identity in social work practice with women: A postmodern feminist perspective

During the 1980s, feminist literature proposed the existence of a silent, tongue-tied, different woman who craves to exercise her own voice. The more recent postmodern feminism raises questions about the existence of woman, self, and identity as categories, promoting instead the idea of multiple selves and multiple identities. This article visits the concept of identity and its partner self in psychological, feminist, and postmodern feminist literature and discusses why self/identity is problematic for women. An alternative narrative identity is proposed with narrative identity reconstruction integrated into clinical social work practice with women. A narrative excerpt from an interview illustrates the process.Based on a paper presented at a program jointly sponsored by Loyola University of Chicago School of Social Work and The Institute for Clinical Social Work, May 19, 1995, Chicago, Illinois.     

Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

“FOB” and “Whitewashed”: Identity and Internalized Racism Among Second Generation Asian Americans

An analysis of 184 in-depth interviews with grown children of Korean and Vietnamese immigrants finds that the racial beliefs, meanings, and stereotypes of the mainstream society shape how they think about coethnics, generate local identities, and deflect stigma from themselves. We examine the terms FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) and whitewashed that were commonly deployed to denigrate coethnic others as too ethnic or too assimilated while casting those at the bicultural middle as the normals. We describe how this system of intraethnic othering serves as a basis for sub-ethnic identities, intraethnic social boundaries, and the monitoring and control of social behavior. We draw on the concept of internalized racial oppression in framing our findings.     

News of the societies

The following is excerpted from a letter by Bill L. Jett, President, NFSCSW, to Estelle Gabriel, Chairperson of the NASW Committee on Private Practice. It was written on 11/8/73 in response to the NASW proposal for a Registry of Clinical Social Workers and represents Mr. Jett's views on the subject after informally discussing this proposal with the Executive Board of the NFSCSW in Los Angeles during the Biennial Conference of the California Society for Clinical Social Work.     

Recovering from Homelessness: Determining the “Quality of Sobriety” in a Transitional Housing Program

Recent years have seen fundamental shifts in the objectives and delivery of assistance to the homeless. An early emphasis on emergency shelter and monetary housing assistance has been replaced by a focus on programs designed to blend shelter with an array of social services. In most instances, however, programs combining shelter and social services are designed as transitional; that is, they are intended to help homeless individuals and families move from a position of dependence to one where they can live independently. The emphasis in transitional housing programs is on making homeless people housing ready. This paper concerns the process of assessing housing readiness as observed during eighteen months of fieldwork in a federally supported transitional housing program for formerly homeless single adults. The detailed case study that follows supports three important findings. First, there was virtual unanimity among staff and residents that substance abuse was the cause of their homelessness and the key to its solution. Second, success within the program was defined and operationalized along very specific but well understood normative dimensions that have little to do with the material circumstances in which residents find themselves and everything to do with recovery. Third, recovery—the key to housing readiness in this environment—was measured not by objective measures, i.e., number of months sober, but rather by what was widely referred to as one's quality of sobriety, a subjective and consequently often hotly debated measure of attitude and outlook only loosely related to demonstrable abstinence from alcohol. This last finding, that ultimately housing readiness is a subjective judgment, both increases the discretion of shelter staff and generates a systematic disattention to the individual economic issues that are fundamental to an exit from homelessness.     

Gender and the residential telephone, 1890–1940: Technologies of sociability

Recent work on gender and technology debunks the claim that household technologies have liberated women from domestic work. The history of telephone use in North America suggests, however, that global conclusions about gender and consumer technologies may be misleading. Although marketed primarily as a business instrument and secondarily as an instrument to facilitate housework, the telephone was, in a sense, appropriated by women for social and personal ends. This paper explores the affinity of women for the telephone, how women in the half-century before World War II used the telephone, and why. It suggests that there is a class of technologies that women have exploited for their own, gender-linked, social and personal ends.     

When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter

Judith Butler's analysis of corporeal matters offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that language and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of writing with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of writing to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.     

Discussion of Anna Ornstein's paper

Summary I have used only a few themes in Dr. Ornstein's rich paper to suggest another range of perspectives. While the theories of self and ego psychology differ, there are in every person overlapping elements which we have called self and ego. We need to continue to advance our understanding of each in the service of advancing our capacities to treat.The Shirley Greenberg Memorial Lecture delivered at Simmons College, School of Social Work Boston, Massachusetts on June 9, 1983     

The Paradoxes of Modernity: Scientific Advances,Environmental Problems,and Risks to the Social Fabric?

Recent reviews have contrasted U.S. sociologists' empirical work on technological risks with the theoretical risk work of Giddens and Beck, but the reality is more complex. Most U.S. sociologists are less likely than Giddens or Beck to see risks as transcending socioeconomic and other divisions, but the United States–based work tends to interpret the trustworthiness of scientific–technical expertise in ways that lie between the arguments of Beck and Giddens. An examination of early nuclear technologies indicates that the United States–based perspectives provide a better fit, for theoretical as well as empirical reasons. The development of nuclear technologies was mixed, rather than high or low, in its competence and trustworthiness, and it created social and environmental risks that did not so much transcend social divisions as to reinforce them.     

Implementation of the Walrasian correspondence without continuous,convex, and ordered preferences

This paper consideres the problem of designing better mechanisms whose Nash allocations coincide with constrained Walrasian allocations for non-neoclassical economies under the minimal possible assumptions. We show that no assumprions on preferences are needed for feasible and continuous implementation of the constrained Walraisan correspondence. Further, under the monotonicity assumption, we present a mechanism that is completely feasible and continuous. Hence, no continuity and convexity assumptions on preferences are required, and preferences may be nontotal or nontransitive. Thus, this paper gives a somewhat positive answer to the question raised in the literature by showing that, even for non-neoclassical economies, there are incentive-compatible, privacy preserving, and well-behaved mechanisms which yield Pareto-efficient and individually rational allocations at Nash equilibria.I wish to thank J. S. Chipman, J. Jordan, M. Richter, H. Weinberger, the editor, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. I am particularly thankful to L. Hurwicz who stimulated my interest in this problem and provided detailed comments and suggestions.     

The prevalence rates of pathological gambling: A look at methods

Planning the gambling environment requires protection of the public's health, safety and welfare. Whereas most public gaming provisions and statutes address the public's fears of organized crime as well as some welfare needs, rarely do they safeguard the public's health regarding the spread of the mental disease known as pathological gambling. Measurement of the prevalence and incidence of this disease would enable policy planners to evaluate both the state's responsibility for an epidemic and the adequacy of publicly funded treatment programs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods which underlie three different estimates of the prevalence rate of pathological gambling and to critique them in the light of sound epidemiological procedure. In 1975, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) of the University of Michigan conducted a national survey and a survey of the state of Nevada on behalf of the U.S. Commission on a National Policy Toward Gambling. Using discriminant function analysis coupled with subjective inspection of cases in the at-risk pool, the researchers estimated rates of probable and potential pathological gamblers. In 1984 and 1985, this author surveyed residents in the Delaware Valley and the state of Ohio using the cumulative clinical signs method which also posited rates of probable and potential pathological gamblers. In 1986, researchers at the Office of Mental Health for the State of New York employed a formal screening device to survey residents and proposed a rate of probable pathological gamblers and a rate of problem — although not pathological — gamblers. All three approaches produced different estimates. The utility of prevalence and incidence rate research in this field is threatened by a lack of consensus about the proper epidemiological procedure to be employed in arriving at these estimates. There is also confusion about the distinction between a probable and a potential pathological gambler. The planning purpose, method, validity and reliability of prevalence rate research about pathological gambling are addressed in this paper.     

Nationalism in America: The case of the Populist movement

As a marker of national identity, the term American is culturally meaningful but also difficult and contradictory. In the first part of this article, we develop the claim that analyzing nationalism as discourse provides a meaningful lens for the study of this boundary-making process. In particular, the distinctions between civic/ethnic and inclusive/exclusive forms of nationalism have proved nettlesome for a consideration of American nationalism. In the second half of the article, we use data from the Southern Populist movement of the late nineteenth century to provide both relational and cultural analyses of the use of the term American. Although its use was primarily civic, it had important but complex racial implications.     

Muddying the Waters Does Not Have to Entail Erosion: Ecological Feminist Concerns with Purity

Ecofeminists call attention to the associations that have been made between woman and nature, which can operate as a source of both subjugation and resistance, exploitation, and inspiration. This paper expands upon feminist critiques of purity by phrasing these concerns in an ecological feminist perspective. This theoretical exercise of problematizing the ideal of purity sheds light upon the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression. Preservationist work has tended to employ the logic of purity by focusing on protection of the purity of the wild regions of the earth from the polluting forces of humanity. However, such approaches retain the troublesome nature/culture dualism. The author illustrates how attempts to fragment and radically separate people from the environment can prove to be highly dangerous. She connects the theoretical resistance to purity to the important activist work that is being done to expose environmental racism. Finally, she discusses how muddying the waters and resisting the logic of purity can offer a promising approach to pressing problems revolving around the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression.     

Wilhelm Reich in the alternative therapies and clinical social work

This paper raises questions concerning the use of Wilhelm Reich's discoveries in the alternative therapies as they impinge on clinical social work. Clinical social workers use Reich's theoretical concepts and treatment techniques that come to them second-hand from the alternative therapies. Social work graduate schools appear not to recommend him to students. Reich's theoretical and treatment concepts concerning body or muscular armor and its three-layered structure are discussed. Red and black fascism is related to the secondary layer in discussion of the sociopolitical character. Questions related to orgonomic counseling for social workers are raised and recommendations made for social work to open channels of communication with the American College of Orgonomy.     

The partisanship of silence: Symbolic politics of school desegration in Boston

This article analyzes the symbolic aspects of the school desegration controversy using disputes in Boston as a case in point. The symbolic communication between actors in the public forum contains implicit views of the rights and obligations of different participants in the controversy, and the role of various individuals and collectives in the history of the controversy. These views also provide a framework for understanding the position of specific actors, which may constrain their ability to participate effectively in the controversy. This article analyzes these constraints with respect to those actors who attempted to establish a mediator role between pro-integration and anti-busing forces.Prepared under grants from the National Institute of Education (NIE-6-00-3-0187, NIE-6-76-0038), National Institute of Mental Health, (R01-MH-27618) and the Carnegie Corporation.     

Psychoanalytic perspectives on child abuse

This paper examines the application of selected concepts from classical psychoanalysis, ego psychology, object relations theory, and self psychology to the assessment and treatment of child abuse. Child maltreatment is conceptualized as deriving, in part, from impaired symbiotic and separation-individuation experiences. The role of certain defense mechanisms employed by the formerly abused parent in perpetuating intergenerational cycles of abuse is explored. Disturbances in the development of the nuclear self (as postulated by Kohut) in abusive parents are considered. Fairbairn's model of the inner object world is used to illuminate scapegoating processes. The concept of protectiveness is discussed in relation to the abused child's use of primitive defenses and inhibition of autonomy. Countertransference issues are viewed in relation to the problem of workers' burnout.This paper was written for completion requirement for the degree of M.S.W. at Hunter College School of Social Work. The auther wishes to express her appreciation to Phyllis Caroff, Richard Gaines, Mary Beth Globenfelt, Arthur Green, Wendy Kamaiko, Jeffrey Seinfeld, and Anna Clare van Dalen for their assistance and generous contributions to this paper.     

Qualitative immediacy and the communicative act

Qualitative immediacy (also termed quality in its philosophical sense and esthetic quality) is of fundamental importance within the pragmatic conception of meaning as interpretive act, and yet it has been virtually ignored by social scientists. The concept is traced through its foundations in Peirce's philosophy, its development in Dewey's theory of esthetic experience, and its relation to the general pragmatic conception of the self. The importance of the I in Mead's view of the self is seen as similar to Firstness in Peirce and esthetic experience in Dewey. Those turning to qualitative approaches ought to consider qualitative immediacy as a genuine addition to our understanding of human communication.I am grateful for helpful comments from Milton Singer, Kevin McMurtrey, Benjamin Lee, and Thomas Buckley, and for an opportunity to discuss this paper in the seminar on dialogue at the Center for Psychosocial Studies, Chicago. A postdoctoral fellowship (T32 MH 14668) at the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training, Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, and the University of Chicago, provided time for the writing of this paper.     

The Guijin Therapist and the Nature of Therapeutic Truth: A Relational Perspective

The professional literature is replete with examples of the benefits of the client–clinician dyad being of the same ethnic group. Noted advantages include a perceived implicit understanding of the clients subjective experience and a furthering of the therapists personal and professional growth as a result of the therapeutic interaction. This paper suggests that there are also benefits to the clinician being considered a guijin or outsider to the clients culture of origin. Utilizing a relational perspective with an emphasis on multiple self-state theory, this paper will discuss the advantages of being perceived as an outsider when working with an Asian bicultural client.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual International Conference for the Advancement of Private Practice in Clinical Social Work in Lisbon, Portugal on June 8, 2002.