Introduction: The Senses in Social Interaction

In this introduction, we provide the scholarly background that motivates the special issue and briefly discuss its content. We touch on contemporary debates in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and anthropology that inform the research undertaken by the contributors. We conclude by deriving six interrelated themes—intersection, entwinement, multimodal, contextually embedded, structured, and serendipitous—from an examination of the articles.     

The Social Life of the Senses: Charting Directions

Sensory scholarship in the fields of sociology, anthropology, history and geography, among others, has proliferated in the last few decades. Sensory works in these disciplines argue for the senses as social, highlighting important insights that further our comprehension of selfhood, culture, and social relations. In this paper, I delineate five interrelated sections that inform how sensory works have developed over time. In the first section, I provide an adumbrated background with regard to the hierarchy of the senses, and call attention to the need to move beyond the hegemony of vision. The second section offers a discussion on how Sociology has contributed to sensory studies, addressed alongside other disciplines. Building upon these two sections, both theoretical directions and methodological issues will be deliberated in the third and fourth sections respectively. The last section locates the development of sensory research in organizational terms, by elucidating upon the various institutional efforts that have been pursued towards organizing sensory research and scholarly publications through different avenues. The article then concludes by putting forward the concept of sensory transnationalism as a suggestion for the next step forward towards broadening sensory research.     

Modulation and Selection of Senses

This essay analyzes two kinds of multiplicity of semantic uses of a single word form. One kind of words have a general meaning, which covers all the more specific possibilities, such as the word cousin. Another kind of words have distinct senses. There are more than one lexical units corresponding to these senses, such as the word bank. Two ways, modulation and selection of senses, are introduced to solve these problems respectively.     

Housing Governance and Senses of Home in Older Age: The Provider Scale

Extensive research examines senses of home in aging, focusing on built and care environments. In parallel, a body of work examines housing governance, reviewing degrees of resident satisfaction. However, there is little crossover between this work, with governance research only rarely considering senses of home. This article argues for attention to the interconnections between provider-scale housing governance and senses of home in older age, arguing that governance mechanisms structure the housing context and provide the framework through which home is experienced and lived. Through a case study of a small, affordable housing community in Sydney, Australia, it shows that housing governance can profoundly shape senses of home in aging, both contributing to and diminishing senses of home. Further, it points to a connection between housing governance and housing design with different housing typologies associated with different aging bodies and forms of management practice, with profound implications for residents' senses of home.     

The Family Rule Concept in the Theory of Family Therapy**

This paper is an exploration of the usefulness of the concept of a family rule in systems thinking. Wittgenstein's analysis of rule conforming behaviour is considered alongside the early contributions of Jackson, Haley and others. Confusion has resulted from using the word “rule” in both its everyday sense and as a theoretical construct. A parallel confusion shows Itself in the activity of reframing where the selection of an alternative context is often theoretically based while the client receives an explanation in the language of everyday intentional actions.     

The Women's Movement and the Family

No abstract available for this article.     

The Child in the Family of a Drug-Using Father: Attachment Styles and Family Characteristics

SUMMARY

The study examined the impact of family characteristics and parental attachment styles on the children of drug-using (DU) fathers in fifty-six families (n = 168) in Israel. Of the DU fathers, 60.7% were characterized by avoidant attachment style. Among the non-DU mothers, 53.6% were characterized by secure attachment style, 42.9% by avoidant style, and 3.6% by anxious/ambivalent style. Surprisingly, family cohesion and adaptability scores were similar to the Israeli norm, perhaps because the DUs had completed detoxification treatment and participated in rehabilitation programs. Of the children, 61.8% were characterized by secure attachment style, 21.8% by avoidant style, and 16.4% by anxious/ambivalent style. Stepwise regression to predict children's attachment styles revealed that maternal security of attachment and paternal anxious/ambivalent style predict similar attachment styles among the children. The important combined effects of spousal attachment styles on the children are discussed.     

Work/Family Policy Stratification: The Examples of Family Support and Family Leave

In the past decade the United States Congress has debated and passed legislative policies concerned with women's work, both in the family and in the labor force. The Family Support Act of 1988 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 fall into this category of legislative policy. A comparative study of Congressional testimony in each case reveals that these two pieces of legislation are excellent examples of how federal policies—and the debates which fashion these policies—maintain and promote a system of policy stratification that perpetuates differences based on gender, race, class and marital and occupational status.     

The Role of Death in the Addict Family

Drug addiction is a potentially life-threatening problem with suicidal ramifications. Within the family of the addict, the addiction takes on a special, participatory meaning; the addicted member is treated as one undergoing a slow death. These families attach special significance to death and give it considerable emphasis. This appears to arise from unresolved and premature deaths experienced by the family, particularly the parents. The addict is substituted for the deceased member. Treatment can deal with these issues directly through making the mourning explicit. The death issue can also serve as a vehicle for family change.     

The Sociology of the Family in Spain:

This paper analyses research undertaken in Spain on the sociology of the family. A set of intellectual and cultural condi- tions at the end of the 19th century suggested that there would be a rapid growth of this area of specialisation. Nevertheless, the disci- pline did not become institutionalised despite the efforts of Adolfo Posada, who had taken the initiative to formalise its status. Other factors which should have encouraged developments in this field such as the debate on the role of women in society, the survey of the Ateneo de Madrid of 1901 or the profound legal changes introduced by the Second Republic in fact made little impact. Although the emergence of empirical sociology at the end of the 1960s is related to the study of the Spanish family, it is in other fields of sociology where advances were more marked. With the death of Franco in 1975 and the legislative and social changes which followed, the sociology of the family acquired greater vigour, although many gaps remain to be covered by research.     

The Family Rule Concept in the Theory of Family Therapy: Part II**

In the second part of this paper the author traces the processes by which it is possible to learn rule conforming behaviours without necessarily being able to formulate the rule or see any point in the rule; the rule is followed blindly. In following a rule blindly a person may nevertheless be engaged in a practice which has a systemic function; he argues that when we positively connote symptomatic behaviours in the process of making paradoxical systemic interventions, we should avoid any suggestion that the family members are acting deliberately with the goal of “helping” in mind.     

Family Loyalty and Adolescent Problem Behavior: The Validity of the Family Group Effect

Erratum . Journal of Law and Society Volume 32 Issue 3 The present study examined the relation between perceived justice and trust within family relationships and adolescent internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. Data were gathered from the father, the mother, and two of their adolescent children in 288 families. The social relations model was used to assess perceived justice and trust at the family level and the individual level. Adolescent internalizing and externalizing problem behavior turned out to be best predicted at the family level. Adolescents from families with less just or trustworthy climates showed more of these problem behaviors. Also associations between adolescent problem behavior and individual characteristics of the adolescents were found: adolescents who were generally viewed as less just/trustworthy were reported to have more problems. Our findings suggest that processes at different levels of family functioning (i.e., individual, whole‐family) should be taken into account when investigating associations between family characteristics and children's outcomes.