Toward a grounded theory of lesbians' recovery from addiction

This article presents the results of a qualitative study on lesbians' recovery from addiction. The study involved semi-structured interviews with 20 lesbians in recovery from addiction and was analyzed using grounded theory method. The central theme that emerged was self-acceptance, both as a lesbian and as a recovering alcoholic/addict, with considerable interaction between the two. Categories that contributed to this theme were learning to recover, relationships with other people, and relationship with something bigger than self. The discussion addresses how this information can be used to assist lesbians trying to recover from addiction.     

A metahistorical information theory of social change: the theory

Abstract

A new yin-yang metahistorical approach that we call sociohistory is created to explore the possibilities of tracking and explaining social change. For this purpose, a frame of reference is created using Social Viable Systems theory to harness Sorokin's sociocultural dynamics. Epistemological content is enhanced by Frieden's new constructivist information theory called Extreme Physical Information. Its aim is to provide a scientific framework for the metahistory. The coupling of these theories has the potential for explaining and possibly predicting long-term, large-scale or short-term, small-scale sociocultural events. This new theory should be seen as emerging from the convergence of the approaches by Sorokin, Yolles and Frieden.     

A theory of prudential values and a rule utilitarian theory of morality

Ethics can be divided into a theory of prudential values and a theory of morality in a narrower sense. My paper proposes a utilitarian — a rule-utilitarian — theory of morality. But it deviates from most of the utilitarian tradition by rejecting the hedonistic and subjectivistic accounts of prudential values favored by many utilitarian writers. While economists tend to define people's utility levels in terms of their actual preferences, ethics must define them in terms of their informed preferences. To prefer A over B does not mean to have a stronger desire for A than for B. Rather, it means to regard one's access to A as being more important than one's access to B. Even though different people often have quite different preferences, their basic desires seem to be much the same. We must choose our moral rules, and our society's moral code as a whole, by their social utility. An important factor in determining their social utility are their expectation effects. Unlike the rule — utilitarian more code, the act — utilitarian moral code would be unable to give proper weight to these expectation effects. It would also unduly restrict our individual freedom. Finally, I shall argue against Kant that morality is primarily a servant of many other human values rather than itself the highest value of human life.     

A theory of union collective action

The relationship between government behaviors and union collective action has been a neglected research area. Where unions are not heavily involved in policymaking, as long as governments respect the status quo and do not undermine unions’ vested interests in organizational and job security, unions are not likely to break with their past institutionalized behaviors. But what happens when a government promulgates policies that threaten the unions’ vested interests and simultaneously excludes them from the political decisionmaking system? The politically excluded unions’ arsenal of responses ranges from a passive, waitandsee behavior to collective protests. Understanding the process of the latter response is my focus herein.     

A robust theory of resource allocation

The theory of social choice introduced in [5, 6] is robust: it is completely independent of the choice of topology on spaces of preferences. This theory has been fruitful in linking diverse forms of resource allocation: it has been shown [17] that contractibility is necessary and sufficient for solving the social choice paradox; this condition is equivalent [11] to another — limited arbitrage — which is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a competitive equilibrium and the core of an economy [13, 14, 15, 16, 17]. The space of monotone preferences is contractible; as shown already in [6, 17] such spaces admit social choice rules. However, monotone preferences are of little interest in social choice theory because the essence of the social choice problem, such as Condorcet triples, rules out monotonicity.The author is Director, Program on Information and Resources, and Professor of Economics, Columbia University. 1994-5 Salinbemi Professor, University of Siena, Italy. Research support from NSF grants Nos. 92 16928 and from the Leif Johansen Award at the University of Oslo, Norway, are gratefully acknowledged.     

A social choice theory of legitimacy

We develop a formal theory of legitimate collective choice. In our theory a policy choice is legitimate if the process through which the final choice was determined is consistent with some principle that can be used to (perhaps partially) rank the potential policy choices. The set of principles in any choice situation is taken to be exogenous, but a decision-making process is defined so as to deal with any nontrivial set of principles. Such a process is itself referred to as legitimate if it is guaranteed to select a legitimate outcome for each possible exogenous set of principles. We characterize the class of procedures that are legitimate, prove that legitimate policy decisions consistent with principles always exist and characterize the set of policy decisions that are legitimate for a any given set of principles. As we do not require the principles to be weak orders of the alternatives, our theory provides a notion of legitimacy that can be satisfied even when the guiding principles are potentially cyclic or incomplete. Accordingly, our theory illustrates one nontautological means by which majoritarian principles can be reconciled with legitimacy.     

A structural theory of interlocking corporate directorates

A theory is proposed that explains where interlocking corporate directorates should appear between sectors of an economy, where they should not appear, and the profitability of efficient corporate interlocking. Taking the sector of an economy as the unit of analysis, interlocking directorates are cast as strategically created constraints on those sectors of the economy most “problematic” for obtaining profits in a given industry of firms. The extent to which each sector of the American economy is problematic for obtaining profits in two-digit and four-digit manufacturing industries is estimated from research linking industry profits with the form of the pattern of relations defining the industry as a position in the network of dollar flow transactions given in the 1967 Input-Output Study for the United States. A two-stage process is described for sampling firms representative of large corporations involved in American manufacturing. Measures of alternative strategies for interlocking across sectors are described. Two classes of hypotheses are derived: (1) Firms in an industry should interlock with firms in some other sector in proportion to the extent to which the sector constrains the industry's profits. (2) Controlling for production and market differences, the ability of firms in an industry to obtain unusually high profits reflects their success in creating interlocks with those sectors most problematic for their industry's profits.     

A crash course in implementation theory

This paper is meant to familiarize the audience with some of the fundamental results in the theory of implementation and provide a quick progression to some open questions in the literature. Received: 26 March 2001/Accepted: 21 May 2001     

A general theory of addictions: A new theoretical model

A general theory of addictions is proposed, using the compulsive gambler as the prototype. Addiction is defined as a dependent state acquired over time to relieve stress. Two interrelated sets of factors predispose persons to addictions: an abnormal physiological resting state, and childhood experiences producing a deep sense of inadequacy. All addictions are hypothesized to follow a similar three-stage course. A matrix strategy is outlined to collect similar information from different kinds of addicts and normals. The ultimate objective is to identify high risk youth and prevent the development of addictions.     

A theory of happiness-wealth relationship with status-sensitive communication

Personal happiness might not solely depend on the individual's level of wealth but also on the individual's level of sincere social capital. This paper argues that if sincere interpersonal communication is sensitive to economic status disparities, the accumulation of personal wealth beyond the community's average erodes the individual's sincere social capital. A measure of sincere social capital that is based on such sensitivity is constructed. Its consideration leads to the depiction of the individual's happiness-wealth relationship as an inverted U-shaped curve that peaks at personal wealth that is greater than the community mean.     

A theory and verities of market place behaviour

This study questions traditional notions of competitive economic behaviour from a theoretical perspective of social psychology and systems theory. Inter alia these approaches suggest, firstly, that economic relationships are simply an aspect of broader social relationships and are likely to be characterised by cooperation rather than competitiveness and the likelihood of conflict. Secondly, it is suggested that the conditions required for market participants to he “fully informed” would not he evident because of the potential instability of such a communications network or system.These broad hypotheses are examined by measuring aspects of communications and business behaviour in a wholesale agricultural market. The data. which are analysed by network and correlational procedures, support the hypotheses.     

A neuroeconomic theory of (dis) honesty

We develop a theory of dishonesty based on neurophysiological evidence that supports the idea of a two-step process in the decision to cheat. Formally, decisions can be processed vía a costless “honest” channel that generates truthful behavior or vía a costly “dishonest” channel that requires attentional resources to trade-off costs and benefits of cheating. In the first step, a decision between these two channels is made based on ex-ante information regarding the expected benefits of cheating. In the second step, decisions are based on the channel that has been selected and, when applicable, the realized benefit of cheating. The model makes novel predictions relative to existing behavioral theories. First, adding external complexity to the decision-making problem (e.g., in the form of multi-tasking) deprives the individual from attentional resources and consequently decreases the propensity to engage in dishonest behavior. Second, higher expectations about the benefits of cheating results in a higher frequency of trial-by-trial cheating for any realized benefit level. Third, multiplicity of equilibria (characterized by different levels of cheating) emerges naturally in the context of illegal markets, in which expected benefits are endogenous.     

A theory of how intransitive consumers make decisions

An assumption of transitivity is required for the existence of the utility function of classical economics. However, as argued in the first section, if acquiring and organizing information is costly, rational behavior may require that preferences be intransitive. One might therefore predict that this assumption will often be violated, and evidence is presented that this is the case. We go on to develop a model of preference which does not require an assumption of transitivity, and which can be readily implemented empirically using data on paired comparisons. Using a set of intransitivities, and the forecasting ability of our proposed model is compared with alternatives.