Social Defenses Against Organizational Learning

It is argued that for organizational learning to occur maladaptive social defenses within the organization have to be altered. The origins of the concept of social defenses are traced through the work of Jaques and Menzies. A new concept of system domain, and related concepts of system domain fabric, and system domain defenses, are proposed in order to account for the difficulties in sustaining organizational change in organizations that share a similar primary task. Organizational learning is defined as occurring when there is co-evolution of organizational container and contained. The article distills variables from three successful consultancy/action research projects which are characteristic of organizations that are learning, and it is hypothesized that the creation of organizational awareness is necessary for organizational learning to occur.     

Psychosemantics of “One-China” Conception: Fourth-Dimensional Resolution of Taiwan–Mainland Political Deadlock

The political conflicts between Taiwan and the Mainland have progressed, for over 50 years, from the historical hot civil war for the exclusive ownership of one China's territorial sovereignty to the contemporary cold rhetoric circularity around the geopolitical symbolism of the one-China principle. In the process, the United States has been intimately entangled in the disputes in terms of 3 alignment stages--from an unambiguous pro-Taiwan before the 1970s, the ambiguous neutrality in the early 1970s, to the contemporary pro-Mainland China. Despite the fact that during the past 3 decades the United States honored the arms sales and the Taiwan Relations Act commitments in Taiwan's favor, and simultaneously conferred the 3 Nos and 3 communiqués in Mainland China's favor, the cross-Strait tensions have persisted without the prospect of a definitive foreseeable resolution. Further, because of the lack of explicit conception of one China, the United States has to constantly resist the opposing persuasions of the 2 sides, and therefore must continue to rely on the ambiguous dual deterrence strategy for maintaining the dynamics balance over the Taiwan Strait. For such endeavors, the Clinton 4 frameworks and the Bush 5 Taiwan policies have proven to be very effective, but mostly to the extent of assuming a passive role in preventing military confrontations.     

Touristic authenticity,touristic angst,and modern reality

The tourist has become the symbol of a peculiarly modern type of inauthenticity. This paper explores the criticisms that have been directed at the reality experiences of the tourist. In so doing, the following inexhaustive typology of touristic realities is developed: 1) the first-order or true tourist, 2) the second-order or Angst-ridden tourist, 3( the third-order or anthropological tourist, and 4) the fourth-order or spiritual tourist. Each of these types represents a progressively more intense search for reality through travel. Each is, however, criticized for participating in its own form of inauthenticity.After exploring the reality experiences and criticisms of each of these travellers, the paper turns the tables on the cultured despisers of tourism to argue that perhaps the lowly first-order tourist is not so inauthentic after all. True, this traveller may not be having a real heroic adventure, but such is not the goal. Rather, the reality experienced by the first-order tourist is a pleasurable liberation from the normal concerns of everyday life which simultaneously reaffirms commitment to that reality. Quite frequently the first-order tourist is less concerned about having a real experience in the visited place than in experiencing family and friendship relationships-relationships completely ignored by the anti-touristic tourists in their search for authenticity in someone else's reality.The author would like to thank Peter L. Berger, Harry C. Bredemeier, Warren I. Susman, and M. Kathy Kenyon for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported in part by NIMH grant no. 5 T32 NH14660.     

Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a transitional object, this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and acting-out behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to reparative regressions.     

Interactional synchrony: Genuine or spurious? A critique of recent research

In two recent articles, McDowall (1978a, 1978b) has challenged the micro-analytic work of W. S. Condon and Adam Kendon. Specifically, he has argued on the basis of his work that interactional synchrony is not a genuine phenomenon, but rather a statistically expectable noise in social interaction. In this paper, we demonstrate that McDowall's results are inconclusive because of confusion as to what constitutes interactional synchrony. We clarify these issues and place McDowall's experiments in their proper perspective.     

“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.     

Plan and control

Conclusion Is closer and closer social control the inevitable price of progress, a necessary concomitant of the continued development of modern social forms? We believe that this is indeed the case. Against those who see the new communications technologies as the basis for a coming communications era, and the new information technologies as the panacea for our present Age of Ignorance, our own argument is that their development has, in fact, been closely associated with processes of social management and control. The scale and complexity of the modern nation state has made communications and information resources (and technologies) central to the maintenance of political and administrative cohesion.The Information Revolution is, then, not simply and straight-forwardly a matter of technological progress, of a new technological or industrial revolution. It is significant, rather, for the new matrix of political and cultural forces that it supports. And a crucial dimension here is that of organizational form and structure. Communication and information resources (and technologies) set the conditions and limits to the scale and nature of organizational possibilities. What they permit is the development of complex and large-scale bureaucratic organizations, and also of extended corporate structures that transcend the apparent limits of space and time (transnational corporations). They also constitute the nervous system of the modern state and guarantee its cohesion as an expansive organizational form. Insofar as they guarantee and consolidate these essential power structures in modern society, information and communication are fundamental to political-administrative regulation, and consequently to the social and cultural experience of modernity.The exploitation of information resources and technologies has expressed itself, politically and culturally, through the dual tendency towards social planning and management, on the one hand, and surveillance and control, on the other. In historical terms, this can be seen as the apotheosis of Lewis Mumford's megamachine: technology now increasingly fulfils what previously depended upon bureaucratic organization and structure. But the central historical reference point is the emergence, early in the twentieth century, of Scientific Management (as a philosophy both of industrial production and of social reproduction). It was at this moment that scientific planning and management moved beyond the factory to regulate the whole way of life. At this time, the gathering of social knowledge became the normal accompaniment of action, and the manufacture of consent, through propaganda and opinion management, was increasingly based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. If, through Scientific Management, the planning and administration of everyday life became pervasive, it also became the preeminent form and expression of social control. Planning and management were, necessarily and indissociably, a process of surveillance and of manipulation and persuasion. To the extent that these administrative and dominative information strategies were first developed on a systematic basis, it was at this historical moment, we believe, that the Information Revolution was unleashed. New information and communications technologies have most certainly advanced, and automated, these combined information and intelligence activities, but they remain essentially refinements of what was fundamentally a political-administrative revolution.Recent innovations in information and communications technologies have generally been discussed from a narrow technological or economic perspective. It has been a matter of technology assessment or of the exploitation of new technologies to promote industrial competitiveness and economic growth. This, in the light of our discussion, seems a partial and blinkered vision. The absolutely central question to be raised in the context of the Information Revolution of the eighties, is, we believe, the relation between knowledge/information and the system of political and corporate power. For some, knowledge is inherently and self-evidently a benevolent force, and improvements in the utilization of knowledge are demonstrably the way to ensure social progress. Information is treated as an instrumental and technical resource that will ensure the rational and efficient management of society. It is a matter of social engineering by knowledge professionals and information specialists and technocrats. For us, the problems of the information society are more substantial, complex, and oblique.This, of course, raises difficult political and philosophical issues. These are the issues that Walter Lippmann comes up against when he recognizes in the Great Society that centralization of power which deprives [citizens] of control over the use of that power, and when he confronts the disturbing awareness that the problems that vex democracy seem to be unmanageable by democratic methods. They are the issues that Lewis Mumford addresses when he argues that the tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation. And they are the monumental issues that concern Castoriadis in his analysis of instrumental reason and the rationalist ideology, those myths which, more than money or weapons, constitute the most formidable obstacles in the way of the reconstruction of human society.Among the significant issues to be raised by the new information technologies are their relation to social forms of organization, their centrality to structures of political power, and their role in the cultural logic of consumer capitalism. Sociological analysis is naïve, we believe, when it treats the new telecommunications, space, video, and computing technologies as innocent technical conceptions and looks hopefully to a coming, post-industrial Utopia. Better to look back to the past, to the entwined histories of reason, knowledge, and technology, and to their relation to the economic development of capitalism and the political and administrative system of the modern nation state.     

Privacy and privilege: Patients', professionals', and the public's rights

Conflict between the individual's right to privacy and the public's right to know is increasing as insurance companies and other third parties are demanding more information about patients and clients and data banks are storing it for retrieval and later use. Social workers are ethically bound to protect the privacy of their relationships with patients and clients and the confidentiality of their communications. But there are situations in which the obligation to society is deemed greater than the individual's right to privacy, and even in states in which their patients' and clients' communications are granted privilege by law, the social worker can be required by law to divulge confidential information or risk being held in contempt of court. This paper will discuss the individual's right to privacy, privilege and its exceptions, and present examples of court decisions related to these issues.     

Emotional Climate in a European Problem Area: East Berlin and West Berlin Three Years After Reunification

In autumn of 1992, three years after the unification of Germany, during a period of violent attacks against foreigners, 120 students from East Berlin and West Berlin and 20 foreign students living in West Berlin answered the Emotional Climate Questionnaire developed by de Rivera and Fernandez-Dols. Foreign respondents expressed a positive attitude toward their government/state and believed in prosocial behavior to a greater extent than respondents from East Berlin and West Berlin. Whereas East Berlin students disagreed only somewhat with statements in favor of selfishness and egoism, West Berlin students strongly disagreed with them. We attribute the differences that were found in the answers of the foreign students to their national values. In addition, we regard the differences between the emotional climates of East Berlin and West Berlin as reflecting a climate of instability among East Berliners. We interpreted selfishness as a kind of polarized behavior indicating a climate of instability. A factor analysis revealed 5 factors of an emotional climate: Nation's Future, Just World, Reactive Egoism, Scepticism, and Basic Egoism. The concept of emotional climate is discussed on the basis of the current data.     

Policies over time and pareto optimality

This paper is concerned with sequences of policies that occur over time in voting models and planning procedures. The framework for our analysis includes assumptions that are satisfied by models in the corresponding literatures, together with other standard assumptions for microeconomic analysis that involve time. The starting point for our analyses is the prespective that results from combining the following (widely held) views: 1) certain voting models and planning procedures can be interpreted as being non-tatonnement or sequential processes (where each policy in the sequence that is generated is actually experienced by voters or consumers) and 2) an alternative being Pareto optimal in any given period (temporal Pareto optimality) is the appropriate efficiency criterion only if the alternative is the final outcome from a tatonnement process-and that, otherwise, one should examine the efficiency of the entire path (using intertemporal Pareto optimality). Our first observation about the planning literature is that is has (by and large) neglected the efficiency criterion that is appropriate for the discrete-time procedures that can be interpreted as non-tatonnement or sequential processes-and that, what's more, such trajectories will (in general) fail to meet this criterion. Our second observation identifies some results that can be used to establish that some of these trajectories will at least be ultimately intertemporally Pareto optimal. In our discussion of voting theory, we review Buchanan's opposition to requiring (social) choice consistency for voting procedures-and his argument for this position on (Pareto) efficiency grounds. We then consider voting procedures that can be interpreted as non-tatonnement or sequential processes and arrive at the conclusion that, in these cases, (i) majority rule cycles are intertemporally Pareto inefficient and (ii) achieving intertemporal Pareto optimality requires choice consistency. We then go on to show that related observations apply to Kramer's normative conclusions about his dynamical model of political equilibrium — and identify some further references where similar observations apply. In the final part of our discussion of voting models, we arrive at the further conclusion that, in the most relevant cases, a trajectory that stays in the temporal Pareto set is not necessarily more desirable (on efficiency grounds) than one that doesn't.This paper has been improved by helpful comments and suggestions that have been provided by Kenneth Arrow, an anonymous referee, and the editor who handled the paper.Peter Coughlin gratefully acknowledges financial support provided by (i) National Science Foundation Grant No. SES-8409352, and (ii) the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (with support from National Science Foundation Grant No. BNS-8700864 and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation).     

Words of power: The power of words

Conclusion The original hapiness of words (Foucault) is gone ; there are no innocent languages (Barthes) anymore. All are related to social experiences, because a language originates in and has its primary reference to the everyday life. (Berger and Luckman, 1967, p.38) Any language is related to a given society, and both language and society are shaped by history. Obviously, American and French histories have been quite different.     

What are opportunities and why should they be equal?

In order to clarify the concept of equal opportunities we need an accurate definition of opportunity. Opportunities can be defined in terms of qualifying actions through which an agent can achieve an advantageous position. It is concluded that equal opportunities is often used as a catchword in cases when opportunities are not really equal, and no one tries seriously to make them so. In many of these cases it would have been more accurate to speak of open opportunities and procedural justice. These are important enough aspects of social justice, that should be appreciated for what they are, rather than being falsely represented as equal opportunities.Received: 13 April 2001     

Lying about running: The functions of talk in a scene

The running scene rests upon a system of beliefs (a code) about the qualities of running performances. Membership in the scene entails the interrelated use of conversational forms and the presentation of a team identity. The forms consist of nomic talk, ritualized lying and code truth telling. Within each form, the runner may lie about or manage information regarding running performances in order to construct, maintain or attack the system of beliefs. The lie, then, plays a major role in the scene as a device of social interaction.     

On Being a White Person of Color: Using Autoethnography to Understand Puerto Ricans' Racialization

This article uses autoethnography to make larger conceptual/theoretical points about racial/ethnic identity categories for Puerto Ricans in the United States. I utilize Puerto Rican-ness to illustrate the limitations of U.S. race and ethnic constructs by furthering racialization analyses with seemingly contradictory categories such as white and people of color. I contrast personal experiences to those of racial/ethnic classificatory systems, the American imagery of Puerto Ricans, and simplistic, political identifications. Travel, colonial relations, intra-ethnic coalitional possibilities, and second-class citizenship are all aspects that expand on the notion of racialization as classically utilized in sociology and the social sciences. Although this is not a comparative study, I present differences between racial formation systems in Puerto Rico and the U.S. in order to make these points.     

Psychotherapy as an eductional process

Clients in psychotherapy with social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists learn things that they did not know previously. This learning modifies their view of reality and themselves. Clients learn that their problems are, to an extent universal, interpersonal—both out from themselves and to themselves from others, due to experiences in their past in their families, perhaps solvable by identifying with successful others, often due to unrealistic expectations about themselves, others and existence in general. Successful therapy is marked by culture-building interaction by the client and the therapist with the client's subjective understanding modified to enable greater autonomous action.     

Freud's “Anna O.”: Social work's Bertha Pappenheim

The story of Anna O. has loomed large in psychoanalytic history, but few social workers know that the young woman, who was so influential in the development of Freud's thinking, became a pioneer social worker in Germany. The story of the transformation of the troubled young woman, who was actually Joseph Breuer's patient, is the focus of this paper. In addition, some of the facts of the case are discussed as social constructions. Anna O./ Bertha Pappenheim participated in the creation of the talking cure and eventually went on to be a leading feminist, developer of social programs for women, and social reformer.     

New dimensions of social movements: The high-level waste-siting controversy

This paper argues that the widespread, irreversible, and catastrophic potentials associated with some contemporary genres of grievances make derivative social movements novel in respects different from those emphasized by French, Italian, and German analysts using the concept new social movements. This European concept distinguishes between new and old protests to emphasize significant changes in the nature of the contemporary state or the value systems of its citizens, a distinction that has not been accentuated in the United States. The argument here is that only certain contemporary technology movements are really novel—and for reasons other than those alleged by advocates of the new social movements.     

Max Weber,critical theory,and the administered world

The sociological perspectives of Max Weber and the Frankfurt School have been viewed as polarities in much of the recent literature. The Frankfurt sociologists were advocates of a neo-Marxism that stressed dialectical reasoning and rejected the notion of value-neutrality. Weber adhered to the canons of causal logic and cultivated the ideal of objectivity in social research. Notwithstanding these theoretical and methodological differences, Weber and the advocates of critical theory arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions about the fate of the modern world. Weber saw the advent of a bureaucratic iron cage which would effectively negate the role of the individual, while the Frankfurt sociologists posited the onset of an administered world in which human activity would be smothered in an ever-expanding network of management and control. Given these commonalities, a revision of the standard evaluation of Weber and critical theory is suggested.     

CSWJ Forum: Is Clinical Social Work a Profession? Preliminary Considerations

Clinical social work, as it currently exists, is rooted in the formation of a professional association which represents the interests of professionals primarily concerned with direct practice. A diverse group of practitioners now describe themselves as clinical social workers, and clinical social work is increasingly being described as a profession. This article reviews the history of professions, and employs commonly accepted sociological criteria to begin to evaluate clinical social work's current standing as a profession.     

The Impact of Assessment Procedures on the Relationship between Paper and Pencil and Behavioral Indicators of Social Skill

This study investigated the relationship between paper and pencil measures and molecular behavioral indicators of social skills in three widely used assessment options. A total of 221 students engaged in either a get acquainted or role play interaction, in which they were given instructions and knew they were being observed. A third group engaged in a waiting period interaction, in which they were given no instructions to interact and had no knowledge of being observed. Results showed that subjects in the get acquainted and role play situations scored higher on several measures of social skills than those in the waiting period situation. In addition, there was most variability in the measures of social skills in the waiting period situation. In general, trait measures exhibited poor correspondence with behavioral measures of social skills in all situations. However, state paper and pencil measures of social skills exhibited strong correspondence with behaviors in the waiting period, but not in the get acquainted or role play situations. Implications for the assessment of social communication skills through commonly used assessment procedures are discussed.