The Voice,Language, And The Gendered Self

This paper examines the intersubjective cocreation of gender ambiguities, identifications, and defensive disidentifications as they emerged out of the vicissitudes of an erotic transference–countertransference in the analysis of a man who stutters. The author posits that the patient's ruptured speech provides an entryway into exploring the problematics of gender. For this man, embracing his masculinity placed him in severe conflict with powerful feminine identifications. The author experienced transferentially the embodiment of different gendered states: receptive preoedipal mother, castrating “phallic” mother, sensuous lover, sadistic penetrating male, benevolent father. She suggests that the stuttering can be understood as an emblem of the sacrifice of the lost primordial union with the mother that accompanies the transition into language.     

The Local,The Regional,And The Global In Southeast Asian Transgender Subcultures

Mark Johnson. Beauty and power: transgendering and cultural transformation in the southern Philippines. Oxford: Berg. 1997. 264 pp. £34.99 (hardback); £14.99 (paperback).     

The triangle: The worker,the client,the agency

The power of the agency and its ability to enhance or detract from therapeutic work is discussed in relation to therapeutic failures. Most commonly a triangle involving the worker, the client, and the agency confound the problem. The historical base of this problem and present day influences on worker and client are reviewed. Suggestions are made for system changes to increase the power of the worker and to improve therapeutic work.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Illinois Society of Clinical Social Work, April 25, 1981.     

The economics of altruism: The old,the rich,the female

This study examines whether people of different observed characteristics exhibit different degree of altruism. The article utilizes a National Mental Health Survey that gathered questions about respondents’ self-reported altruism along with their demographic, labor force, and income information. The empirical results revealed the following: (1) Older people are more altruistic. This could potentially be explained by the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) that the older people shift towards emotion-related goals that can be internally rewarding in the present. (2) Higher-income people are more altruistic. This could potentially be explained by the fact that higher-income people could better afford to be more altruistic compared to lower-income people. (3) Women are more altruistic. This could potentially be explained by either biological evolution or social imposition. The main results are robust once the potential endogeneity problem of the income variable is mitigated by the use of the instrumental variable estimation method.     

History,The City and The Interactionist: Anselm Strauss,City Imagery,and Urban Sociology

My goal in what follows is to explore some of the questions, analyses and insights that a scholar, equipped with a sense of history and the sensitivity of an interactionist, might bring to the study of the city. But before I begin that task, I want to spend a little time laying some ground- work. I want to introduce my readers to (or remind them of) two snippets of sociological history: the first snippet has to do with the place-more accurately, the lack of place-of the interactionist perspective within the field of urban sociology; the second deals with the unique contributions of one of the few interactionists to work urban sociology: Anselm Strauss.     

The Built Environment,Health, and Longevity

Abstract

This paper reviews and integrates interdisciplinary literature that investigates the influence of the built environment on the subjective and objective health status of older persons that may improve their quality and quantity of remaining years of life. The development, expansion and synthesis of person-environment and ecological models provides the theoretical foundation. Central to this discussion is the identification and elaboration of salutogenic and pathogenic pathways (Antonovsky, 1979) through which the built environment may influence health, functioning and longevity. Research and knowledge drawn from literature on relocation, housing characteristics and well-being, the meaning of home, delay of institutionalization, technological devices, falls and other injuries, and healthy communities is used to demonstrate environmental pathways to health and longevity.     

The Good King Dagobert, or Clever, Stupid, Nice, Nasty

Children aged 8-10 years in 11 primary schools were asked to draw a very clever person, a very stupid person, a very nice person and a very nasty person. The elicited drawings were analysed for content revealing commonalities and some stereotypes. Cleverness was shown to be gender-independent. Clever people shown were good at maths, wore glasses, and were happy and confident. Stupid people were predominantly male, unhappy, bad at maths, anxious, untidy and small in stature. They were shown as having a negative self-concept. Nice people were mostly female, pretty, smiling and kind. Nasty people were male, aggressive, large, often 'punk' and threatening. It is suggested that the 'stupid' group corresponds to those with learning difficulties and the 'nasty' group to those with behaviour problems. These represent anxiety, threat and disadvantage, whereas the more fortunate are characterised by confidence, prosperity and happiness. This paper uniquely uses the images generated by the children themselves in response to stimulus words. Drawings are independent of verbal report and give children freedom to respond creatively. A comprehensive range of drawings illustrate the paper.     

The AFL-CIO v. CTW: The competing visions, strategies, and structures

As the AFL-CIO approached its twenty-fifth biennial convention in July 2005, seven unions formed a new Change to Win (CTW) coalition to challenge the federation for lead position as the voice of the labor movement. These unions, most of which have disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO, formed the CTW to demonstrate their unsparing discontent with John Sweeney’s leadership of the federation. We examine the reasons for the current breach in the house of labor, the competing visions offered by the AFL-CIO and CTW, and the likelihood that the CTW’s strategy will revive unions. We find that the gulf between the two factions is philosophically deep and practically irreconcilable. The CTW advocates an “engineered breakthrough” approach to revitalize labor whereas the AFL-CIO relies on a more conservative “accelerated evolution” path. There are no guarantees that the CTW’s strategy will work. It presupposes an unmet demand for unions that can be tapped through vast new investments. If the current model of unionism is lacking, as the CTW suggests, a viable replacement must be found. The CTW, with its limited resources, will have to experiment until it finds the right model, if one does indeed exist. The task of rebuilding labor is daunting, but it arguably requires a bold and fundamentally different course from what has been pursued. From this perspective, the breakup seems a logical development.     

The Chicago School,So-Called

Many sociologists believe in the myth of a Chicago School, a unified and coherent body of thought and research practice carried on at the University of Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Chicago never constituted such a coherent system and is better understood as a school of activity, a group of people who cooperated in the day-to-day running of a major department.