The University: An Agent of Social Change?

Can universities be agents of progressive social change? How would we know if a university was acting as an agent of social change? Drawing on four case studies, I raise a number of questions to problematize our understanding of the university as an agent of social change. I outline a number of contributing factors that appear to explain successful cases. I conclude by arguing the relevancy of these cases for larger, and more traditional, sociological projects.     

Mission,money, and merit: Strategic decision making by nonprofit managers

Public and nonprofit organizations need to make strategic choices about where to invest their resources. They also need to expose hidden managerial assumptions and lack of adequate knowledge that prevent the attainment of consensus in strategic decision making. The approach we developed and tested in the field used a dynamic, three‐dimensional model that tracks individual programs in an organization's portfolio on their contribution to mission, money, and merit. The first dimension measures whether the organization is doing the right things; the second, whether it is doing things right financially; and the third, whether it doing things right in terms of quality. Senior managers provide their own evaluations of the organization's programs. Both the consensus view and the variation in individual assessments contribute to an improved managerial understanding of the organization's current situation and to richer discussions in strategic decision making. In field tests, this visual model proved to be a useful and powerful tool for illuminating underlying assumptions and variations in knowledge among managers facing the complex, multidimensional tradeoffs needed in strategic decision making.     

From Codes to Contextual Collaborations: Shifting the Thinking About Ethics in Social Work

In this article, the authors argue that the current emphases in social work on codes, standards, and decision-making models are insufficient to the task of ensuring ethical relationships between workers and clients. Three fundamental assumptions that underpin codes and standards are analyzed. The authors then explore the nature of ethical relationships and demonstrate how codes and standards, in their current form, do not address the complexity and contextuality of the social work relationship. After considering why the profession relies so heavily on codes and standards, they call for a re-thinking of ethical relationships, offering ideas and recommendations for those relationships.     

Women’s Involvement in Terrorism

Women have had a long history of participating in terrorist activity. This history extends from the earliest modern terrorist group, from the nineteenth century Russian People’s Will to the current wave of suicide bombings carried out by the Chechen Black Widows and the Tamil Tiger’s Birds of Paradise. This article traces the history of female involvement in modern terrorism and then goes on to make a number of generalizations about this experience. Among other things, the writers point out that women have played strong leadership roles in left-wing, revolutionary bands, while these roles have been far fewer with right-wing and racist aggregations. Women have tended to be late-comers to contemporary, religiously-inspired terrorism: Muslim religious authorities first had to endorse their participation.     

Lindesmith on Addiction: A Critical History of a Classic Theory

The evolution of Alfred Lindesmith's classic theory of addiction is analyzed as a product of the particular intellectual currents and controversies in and for which it was developed. These include the conflicts that pitted qualitative against quantitative sociology; the fledgling discipline of sociology against medicine, psychiatry, and psychology; and advocates of therapy for addicts against those who would simply punish them. By casting the meaningful experience of drug effects exclusively in terms of symbolically mediated mental representations of brute physiological sensations, Lindesmith's theory posits an epistemologically untenable dualism between mental and bodily perception that unnecessarily limits the explanatory scope of sociological research. As an alternative to this dualism, a praxiological approach to the meaning of drug-induced behavior and experience is proposed.     

Betting the farm on high food prices: A consumer based approach to agriculture protection

Our question is quite simple: If agriculture protectionism is a product of economic development, why is agriculture protected at such varying degrees by otherwise similarly developed countries? Previous attempts to fit agriculture into general models of trade policy formation have relied exclusively on producer demand for protection and merely assume the associated demand for lower prices that might come from consumers. Not surprisingly, these previous studies add only minimally to this strange phenomenon. Our method turns this approach on its head by modeling the political strategy of agriculture protection on the costs incurred by the consumer. Taking both producers and consumers into account more accurately reflects the intent of extant theoretical models of protectionism. Our results show that using the consumer as the dependent variable provides more robust results on common independent variables. Recent global events show that consumer disapproval of agriculture policies should not be underestimated by political scientists or politicians.     

Unique Learning Needs of Physically Handicapped Social Work Students

Recognition of physically handicapped social work students' unique learning needs and utilization of their “rehabilitation” experiences and perspectives enhances class learning. Role play and simulations can be structured to help them assess whether their handicap enters into the client-worker relationship and practice ways of dealing with possible client system responses. Diversity in term paper topics and agency placements conveys a variety of career options and allows them to develop confidence in working with nonhandicapped client systems. The instructor should respect students' independent efforts to develop coping skills in dealing with classroom and agency logistics.