Head movement during listening turns in conversation

In five subjects, head movement during conversation was monitored by polarised light goniometry, and recorded alongside speech and a signal proportional to peak amplitude of sound waves (peak loudness). Kinematic properties of listeners' head movements, such as amplitude, frequency and cyclicity, differentiated various conversational functions. That is, they were function-specific: symmetrical, cyclic movements were employed to signal yes, no or equivalents; linear, wide movements anticipated claims for speaking; narrow linear movements occurred in phase with stressed syllables in the other's speech (ynchrony movements); and wide, linear movements occurred during pauses in the other's speech. That, it is argued, bears upon the relation between thesignalling of communicative intentions and the synchronisation of interactional rhythm. Thus, the former appears to determine the timing and tempo of responses such as yes and no, while the latter determines the regulation of synchrony movements. The manner in which these factors interact in other conversational functions and their theoretical implications are discussed.     

Only sane: Autistic barriers in “boring” patients

This paper addresses needs of patients whom Winnicott called boring. Although often functioning well in the work world, they lack a rich inner life and a capacity for intimacy. Thus, psychotherapy is particularly problematic for them. To develop a model for working with this group of patients, the authors elaborate the concept of autistic barriers from British object relations theory, and suggest a changing role for the therapist in four successive phases of the treatment.     

Choice,freedom, and freedom of choice

This paper argues in favour of a distinction between freedom and freedom of choice – a distinction that economists and political philosophers have so far either ignored or drawn wrongly. Drawing the distinction correctly may help to resolve a number of disputes in contemporary political philosophy and non-welfarist normative economics regarding the so-called preference-based account of freedom and the relevance, to judgements about freedom, of degrees of similarity between agents options. The paper begins by setting out three much discussed axioms for the measurement of freedom (of choice?) originally put forward by Pattanaik and Xu. It is suggested that the problems these axioms give rise to can be solved by distinguishing correctly between freedom and freedom of choice. The paper then sets out definitions of freedom, choice and freedom of choice, justifying these in philosophical terms and arguing their superiority to alternative definitions. Finally, on the basis of these definitions and with reference to Pattanaik and Xus axioms, it is shown that an agent can enjoy freedom without enjoying freedom of choice, and that she can enjoy an increase in one of these without enjoying an increase in the other. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I should like to thank Keith Dowding, Martin van Hees, Matthew Kramer, Marco Negri, Serena Olsaretti, Olof Page, Mario Ricciardi, Alan Ritter, Hillel Steiner, Kotaro Suzumura and audiences at seminars in Manchester, Palermo, Pavia and Oxford. I am grateful to the Italian Ministry for Higher Education (MURST) and the Italian National Research Council (CNR) for funding that facilitated the completion of the paper.     

Addiction to fruit machines: A preliminary study among young males

Although most sources treat gambling as an adult phenomenon, adolescent gambling is more widespread than is generally recognized, and in some cases may even be pathological. This paper outlines a preliminary study of eight adolescents addicted to playing and gambling on coin-in-the-slot machines (more commonly known as fruit machines). Factors involved in the onset of fruit machine playing are examined along with their alternative gambling activities and associated problems. The role of skill and excitement components in persistent playing are also discussed.The author would like to thank the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council for funding this work through a research studentship.     

Brief Communications: Treating Problem Gamblers: A Residential Therapy Approach

The Gordon House Association (GHA) is the UK's only specialist and dedicated residential facility for problem gamblers. This paper describes the GHA therapeutic programme which is centred round a nine-month period of residency. Progression through the programme is described by overviewing each of the phases. These are initial assessment and five distinct phases comprising coping with today (Phase One), coping with yesterday (Phase Two), coping with change (Phase Three), coping with tomorrow (Phase Four), and coping on my own (Phase Five). These phases are themselves underpinned within the GHA core therapeutic approach which is also described.     

After the Interview

This article is concerned with after the interview, a strip of time (Goffman 1974, p. 10) between the end of the formal interview and the culmination of leave-taking rituals. Although there is a considerable and growing literature on qualitative interviewing (Arksey and Knight 1999; Kvale 1996; Rubin and Rubin 1995; Weiss 1994), and some corridor talk about the meaning of off the record post-interview comments, this topic has received little attention in the published literature (but see DeSantis 1980 and Wenger 2001). And we think it is an important one, since it illuminates the interviewee's interpretation of the interviewer and interview process, and highlights aspects of the meaning of the topic, and of the interviewer, to the respondent (which is, after all, the endpoint of the qualitative interviewing method). Further, the question of what constitutes after the interview throws into relief the question of what is an interview.     

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.     

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.     

A quantitative theory of preferences: Some results on transition functions

We investigate a general theory of combining individual preferences into collective choice. The preferences are treated quantitatively, by means of preference functions (a,b), where 0(a,b) expresses the degree of preference of a to b. A transition function is a function (x,y) which computes (a,c) from (a,b) and (b,c), namely (a,c)=((a,b),(b,c)). We prove that given certain (reasonable) conditions on how individual preferences are aggregated, there is only one transition function that satisfies these conditions, namely the function (x,y)=x·y (multiplication of odds). We also formulate a property of transition functions called invariance, and prove that there is no invariant transition function; this impossibility theorem shows limitations of the quantitative method.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation.     

The instability of robust aggregation

Levis robust aggregation suggests a generalization of the standard ex ante mode of aggregating individuals expected utilities into a social choice function. This generalization applies some social choice rule not only to the actual individuals but also to hypothetical individuals with all possible combinations of the actual individuals probabilities and utilities. We show that robust aggregation can lead to preference reversals in the social choice when the very same decision situation is described with different degrees of detail, thus violating a desirable stability condition. We also show that any stable robust social choice rule must collapse back into the ex ante mode without recourse to hypothetical individuals. Under sufficient conditions, such as strong Pareto optimality, robust aggregation even leads to an infinite series of reversals in group choices. By contrast, stability is ubiquitous in the standard ex ante mode and is closely related to independence of irrelevant alternatives.I wish to thank Christs College, Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology for their generous financial and academic support. I am grateful to three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. I am much indebted to Isaac Levi, Philippe Mongin and Teddy Seidenfeld for their help and encouragement.     

Why China failed to create an endogenous industrial capitalism

Conclusion Weber almost anticipated the idea of the high-level equilibrium trap. Speaking about bureaucracy, he observed that as always in the area of'techniques' ... advance proceeded most slowly wherever older structural forms were in their own way technically highly developed and functionally particularly well-developed to the requirements at hand. It is a pity that he did not utilize this insight to analyze what he called the increasing stability of the economic situation under conditions of the economically self-sufficient and socially homogenously composed world-empire of China. Instead he pursued the idea that the absence of self-generated capitalism in China was due basically to the lack of a particular mentality. This inappropriate mentality had several aspects. One was the personalist principle. Others are listed in a catalog of alleged traits of personality taken largely from Arthur Smith's Chinese Characteristics. They include stolidity, patience, dislike of novelty, absence of curiosity, credulity, and a general distrust of and dishonesty towards all. Having acknowledged China's considerable technical endowments and inventions (Weber's own quotation marks), he argued that the magic stereotyping of technology and economics... completely precluded the advent of indigenous modern enterprises in communication and industry. The Chinese world, in a famous phrase, was a magic garden in which the ethical rationality of the miracle [was] out of the question. Certain points of detail may be disputed. Thus the miracles attributed to the piety of sons and the fidelity of widows were entirely ethically rational. But the crucial fact is that this conception of the problem led Weber in practice to place an excessive faith in the explanatory power of an analysis of ideas considered in relative isolation from their socioeconomic context. It probably also weakened his sense of the need to sort out more systematically the somewhat internally contradictory opinions that he held on the more specifically economic aspects of Chinese society.

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The Dodgson ranking and its relation to Kemeny’s method and Slater’s rule

In this paper we provide a binary extension of Dodgsons non-binary preference aggregation rule. This new aggregation rule is then compared to two other rules which, as Dodgsons rule, are also explicitly based on distance functions, namely Kemenys and Slaters rule. It is shown that the alternative which is top ranked by any of those rules can occur at any position in the Dodgson ranking.I am very grateful to Nick Baigent, Daniel Eckert and the participants of the CEPET 2002 Workshop in Udine and the Graz University Research Seminar for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. It goes without saying that any remaining errors are exclusively the authors responsibility.     

Individual irrationality and social welfare

Individual preferences inconsistent with personal welfare caused neither by ignorance nor by a positive consideration for the welfare of others are defined as (welfare) irrational. Sources of irrationality (rigid adherence to moral principles, excessive fear of danger, excessive tempetation of pleasure, revenge, inertia, faulty telescopic faculty, the fallacy of diminishing marginal utility of utility, etc.) are discussed. An evolutionary explanation of irrationality is suggested and some implications for individual decision and social policy indicated.I am grateful to two anonymous referees for comments.     

The Effect of a Family Policy Reform on Mother’s Pay: A Natural Experiment Approach

All parents in Norway with children aged one to three, who do not attend publicly subsidised day care, are entitled to a cash-for-care (CFC) subsidy. Studies have shown that the reform has reduced mothers labour supply. In this paper we analyse wage effects of the reform. We put forward a framework for evaluating reforms when reforms are uniformly and equally accessible nation-wide. First, running a simple Difference in differences (DD) analysis, results suggest that the CFC reform has reduced the mothers wages. However, after controlling for the age of the child effect, by running a triple difference approach, we no longer find any evidence of negative wage effects.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with corrections to the authors name and to the heading of table A2.     

Inequality and welfare evaluation of heterogeneous income distributions

This paper establishes the principles that should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria – the equity preference condition and the compensation principle – are shown to be fundamentally incompatible. The paper favours the latter, thereby vindicating the traditional method of dealing with heterogeneous samples. However, inequality and welfare comparisons will usually be well defined only if equivalent incomes are obtained using constant scale factors; and researchers will need to distinguish clearly between inequality of nominal incomes and inequality of living standards. Furthermore, household observations must always be weighted according to family size.     

Gender and Community Context: An Analysis of Husbands’ Household Authority in Rural Guatemala

Drawing on research about womens autonomy, gender, and development, and Latin America, I analyze individual, household, and community-level factors associated with husbands sole authority with regard to four household issues: (1) money management; decision-making about (2) food purchases, (3) medicine purchases, and (4) health providers. The results point to how husbands authority varies across household issues and how the dynamics of authority differ with regard to money management and the other decision-making issues studied. This study found that husbands authority varied not only by individual characteristics but also by community features and thus adds to efforts to represent more fully how context matters to household gender relations.     

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.     

Compulsive gambling and the medical model

The medical model as a conceptual and operative approach to compulsive gambling is discussed. The terms medical model and disease are defined and the practical implications of their application to compulsive gambling are explored. Special attention is given to the addictive disease concept. Finally, a variety of objections to the medical model are described, but it is concluded that the many individual and social advantages of the medical model make it the preferred conceptualization at our present state of knowledge.     

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.     

Factors Contributing to Parents’ Preparation For Special-Needs Adoption

Three hundred and sixty-eight parents shared their perceptions of special-needs adoption preparation. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data to determine and understand what factors contribute to preparation, this study found that 12 child, family, and agency variables were correlated with perceived preparation, and that parents perceived level of preparation was predicted by the childs ability to attach, by the parents relationship with the agency, by the duration of the adoption, and by the parents ages at the time of adoption. Implications of these findings are discussed, as they relate to supporting parents, children, and families in special-needs adoptive placements.