Men's Identities and Sociolinguistic Variation: The Case of Fraternity Men

The variation patterns of the variable (ING) in an American college fraternity are explained by analyzing individual men's contextualized discourse. While most of the fraternity men predictably use a lower rate of the 'vernacular' variant in weekly meetings, several men use a higher rate. I argue that all of the men index alignment roles associated with power, but that these alignment roles are powerful in different, specifiable ways. Qualitative discourse analysis shows that the men with high rates of the vernacular variant use (ING) to index working-class cultural models and confrontational stances, as part of identity displays based on physical, rather than structural, power. Thus, the variable has several potential abstract social meanings, but specific interactional meanings can only be constructed in contextualized practice.     

Systems Theory and Organization Change: A Case Study

A case study of a social welfare agency demonstrates that this organization can control its development as an autonomous system and need not merely shift with the times in response to the changing involvement of the federal government in social welfare programs. A theoretical framework of organizational change utilizes Parson's AGIL for this analysis.     

A Micro-Based Decision Support System for Managing Aggressive Case Management Programs for Treatment Resistant Clients

No abstract available for this article.     

Gendering the Management of Change in Higher Education: A Case Study

This article reports an investigation into the influence of gender at a pre-1992 UK university. Interviews with Heads of Departments and others defined as occupying ‘middle management’ positions reveal three distinct stances to the new higher education, of ‘collaboration’, ‘resistance’ and ‘transformation’ and the article explores how gender influences these stances. It attempts to move beyond a simple focus on gender differences, towards answering Bacchi's (1990) call for ‘a more useful political analysis (which) would draw attention to the way in which the current economic system encourages certain behaviours and discourages others’. It shows that women academics are taking a transformational stance, but that the stances are not gender-specific. Gender is institutionally embedded with other organizational characteristics, such as academic discipline, departmental size, compatibility with external commercial activity, and the ability or otherwise to generate funds. Questions are raised about the contribution of such stances to the future of the new educational order.     

Cues of Men's Parental Investment and Attractiveness for Women: A Field Experiment

An experiment was carried out in which a male confederate, seated at a pavement area of a bar, happened to meet his “sister” (a female confederate) and her baby. In one case, the confederate interacted with the baby, whereas in the other case he paid no attention to him. A few minutes later, while the confederate was alone, he solicited a young woman who was seated near his table and asked her for her phone number. Results showed that when the confederate interacted with the baby, he received more positive responses from women than when he paid no attention to the baby.     

Racism, Rational Choice, and White Opposition to Racial Change: A Case Study of Busing

Despite significant declines in traditional prejudice, whiteresistance to desegregation and affirmative action has led someto argue that a new symbolic racism has emerged as the principalimpediment to racial change in America. Studies of oppositionto busing, however, suggest a nonracial or rational choice explanation;whites oppose busing because it is believed to have too manycosts and not enough benefits. Using data from a medium-sizedmidwestem city, this study estimates a multiple indicator modelfor the effects of traditional prejudice, symbolic racism, andrational choice on four types of opposition to busing—attitudestoward two-way busing, one-way busing, protest, and white flight.Traditional prejudice and symbolic racism are found to be partiallyindependent dimensions whose effects on busing opposition areentirely mediated by certain expected costs of busing. Thus,the findings support both racism and rational choice explanations.There is, however, no support for the notion that symbolic racismis a more important source of opposition to racial change thanis traditional prejudice.     

Mental Health Workforce Change Through Social Work Education: A California Case Study

The 2004 CaliforniaMental Health Services Act requires large-scale system change in the public mental health system through a shift to recovery-oriented services for diverse populations. This article describes an innovative strategy for workforce recruitment and retention to create and sustain these systemic changes. The California Social Work Education Center Mental Health Program provides stipends to master's of social work students at 17 California universities. In return, students must work for 1 year postgraduation in community mental health practice. Results of a 5-year study show that stipend recipients closely mirror the diverse demographics of the state, and 94% have remained in community mental health practice. The article also discusses lessons learned and implications for social work education in California and other states.     

从埃及看中东变局

埃及局势变化的原因,包括政治、经济社会和外交三个方面。穆巴拉克时期的专制统治受到全球化的挑战;经济增长与社会发展脱节导致的严重失业和贫困问题,因为全球金融危机引发的输入型通货膨胀而加剧;长期的亲美、亲以外交引发民众不满和街头抗议。埃及要实现经济社会发展、探索综合发展模式、建立稳定持久的政治体制,这意味着变局将持续相当长的一段时期。埃及在外交上将采取更为独立自主和中立的立场,与土耳其等国组成中立阵营。亲美、反美、中立三个阵营并立,伊朗模式和土耳其模式相互竞争,美国的霸权地位受到削弱,中东变局将催生新的战略格局。     

Neoformation: A Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change

In Vygotsky’s writings on development, we find the concept neoformation in the context of his distinction between quantitative-incremental and qualitative-revolutionary change in psychological development. Few studies have taken up this concept. The purpose of this article is (a) to provide a dialectical grounding to the distinction generally and to the emergence of new psychological and personality forms specifically and (b) to describe a 5-step historical-genetic method that qualitative researchers can use to document the emergence of new psychological (behavioral) forms. This work therefore contributes to the elaboration of a dialectical method that Vygotsky himself has failed to articulate in a systematic way.     

Making Practice Learning Part of Our Core Business: A Case Study of Organisational Change

Implementing the new degree in social work in Britain will require practice agencies to deliver an increased number of practice learning opportunities to students undertaking social work training. Indeed the Practice Learning Taskforce (2004 Practice Learning Taskforce. ‘Making change work for us’. London [Google Scholar]) estimates that, in London, a 70% increase from 2002/3 to 2006/7 will be needed. In order to achieve this practice agencies are being urged to transform themselves into learning organisations. Given that social work programmes in many areas are already struggling to find sufficient placements for their students this is likely to be hugely challenging. Research carried out by Lindsay &; Tompsett suggests that, in order to achieve this, social work agencies need to bring planning for practice learning more centrally into the organisation's strategic planning. This paper presents a case study of the author's experience in an English social services department that attempted this. It concludes that practice agencies, in moving towards becoming learning organisations, need to pay attention both to the structural arrangements they develop and the organisational processes involved.     

Chinese Rural Health-Seeking Behaviour and the Dilemma of Sufferers of Chronic Sickness: A Case Study from Inner Mongolia

Chinese society is entering a ‘period of chronic sickness’, especially hypertension, hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia, resulting from a more easily available diet rich in animal fat and protein. The damage is greatest in rural areas where medical and welfare facilities are limited and patients present late, which they justify as needing to continue farming despite sickness. Thus, contrary to Parsons’s observation regarding Western medical treatment, a patient’s sick role is neither ‘deviant’ nor separated from their everyday social role and lifestyle. Villagers might however be officially encouraged to regard biomedical, religious and traditional folk therapies as neither old-fashioned nor in conflict, but as a spectrum providing emotional/psychological and sometimes physical benefit, reinforced by returning to the greater community and family care existing before village social fragmentation. This recreation of a holistic perspective could enhance the quality of rural life, especially of chronic sickness sufferers.     

Understanding Men's Health and Illness: A Gender-relations Approach to Policy,Research, and Practice

Abstract

Men's health has emerged as an important public concern that may require new kinds of healthcare interventions and increased resources. Considerable uncertainty and confusion surround prevailing understandings of men's health, particularly those generated by media debate and public policy, and health research has often operated on oversimplified assumptions about men and masculinity. A more useful way of understanding men's health is to adopt a gender-relations approach. This means examining health concerns in the context of men's and women's interactions with each other, and their positions in the larger, multidimensional structure of gender relations. Such an approach raises the issue of differences among men, which is a key issue in recent research on masculinity and an important health issue. The gender-relations approach offers new ways of addressing practical issues of healthcare for men in college environments.     

A Culture-Centered Approach to Listening: Voices of Social Change

Drawing on an understanding of marginalization as intrinsic to mainstream communication theorizing and research, this essay argues that exploitation is rooted in the denial of the communicative capacity of the margins and in the co-optation of the margins as the subjects of top-down communication directed at the margins by experts. The distributions of communicative infrastructures map out the inequities in distributions of economic resources, reifying the unequal distribution of resources by perpetuating values embedded in the interests of the power elite. Listening offers an opening for interrogating the inequities in the global landscape of distribution of power, by attending to the unvoiced assumptions and principles underlying the logics of concentration of power in the hands of the transnational elite. Drawing from postcolonial and Subaltern Studies theories, I engage with the culture-centered approach to outline key tenets of listening as entry points to addressing the global inequities that are produced by neoliberal globalization. Listening through inversion, incompleteness and imagination works in solidarity with the margins to co-construct theory rooted in the ontologies, epistemologies, and values of the margins.     

Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Change in China: A Case Study of Anti-incinerator Protest in Guangzhou

This study examines the anti-incinerator protest in Guangzhou in China. It uses the advocacy coalition framework to analyze the dynamics between Guangzhou Municipal Government and the protesters. The research covers the establishment of a Public Consultative and Supervision Committee for Urban Waste Management in Guangzhou, a public consultative mechanism for waste management, which is a new development in the policy-making process in socialist China. The ultimate plan will be to demonstrate how policy adjustment is not determined solely by the outcome of protests but is also affected by both a decentralized political structure and the socio-cultural foundation. Consequently, the discussion also explores the gradual transformation of public participation in China’s environmental policy.