ABUSE AND VIOLENCE: THE DARK SIDE OF THE FAMILY AN INTRODUCTION

This is a very upsetting topic we are taking on here. It is a dangerous topic. It is polarizing. It is very, very important.     

Assessing the impact of planned social change

It is a special characteristic of all modern societies that we consciously decide on and plan projects designed to improve our social systems. It is our universal predicament that our projects do not always have their intended effects. Very probably we all share in the experience that often we cannot tell whether the project had any impact at all, so complex is the flux of historical changes that would have been going on anyway, and so many are the other projects that might be expected to modify the same indicators.It seems inevitable that in most countries this common set of problems, combined with the obvious relevance of social science research procedures, will have generated a methodology and methodological specialists focused on the problem of assessing the impact of planned social change. It is an assumption if this paper that, in spite of differences in the forms of government and approaches to social planning and problem-solving, much of this methodology can be usefully shared — that social project evaluation methodology is one of the fields of science that has enough universality to make scientific sharing mutually beneficial. As a part of this sharing, this paper reports on program impact assessment methodology as it is developing in the United States today.     

SOCIOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF THE PRESENT (2007 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS)

This essay attempts to take a broad view of the historical forces that have shaped the discipline of sociology and continue to shape it. It is organized around the concept of crisis, arguing that sociology has been produced by crises and that it has been defined by its responses to crises. It identifies an ethic of control and manipulation as a chief product of 19th century responses. It suggests that we have once again entered a period of disruption and rapid change, and that the current challenge of sociology is to situate ourselves, reflexively, within a dense web of philosophical, psychological, social, biological, and environmental linkages, recognizing that we can never see the network in its entirety because we ourselves are nodes within it. However, the ethic of control and manipulation that we have inherited from earlier sociological responses often prevents sociologists from developing an immanent, reflexive, and ecological approach to the crisis of the present that would enable us to place ourselves within this web.     

Rational budgeters in the theory of social choice

The purpose of this paper is to explore duality in the theory of social choice. As application Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and another impossibility theorem using the notion of positive responsiveness are chosen. It will be seen that we can establish notions and theorems which are symmetric to the original ones. However, if we establish impossibility theorems when rational behaviour is described by budget correspondences and not by choice correspondences, we need not assume that every subset of X (a family of alternatives) with cardinality 2 is a budget set. Therefore the dual theorems also may hold for families of competitive budget sets. It will also be shown that although the underlying preferences on X need not be acyclic, local decisiveness on budget sets may lead to global decisiveness on these sets.     

A Cultural Challenge: Understanding Evolution

Abstract

To what extent can what we know from science about the origins of the universe and of life in the universe influence our basic human quest for understanding? From modern science we know that the birth and death of stars is very important. If it were not happening, you and I would not be here. In order to get the chemical elements to make the human body, we had to have three generations of stars. Did we happen by chance or by necessity in this evolving universe? There is a third element here that is very important. It is what I call @opportunity.@ What this means is that the universe is so prolific in offering the opportunity for the success of both chance and necessary processes that such a character of the universe must be included in the discussion. Within such a universe all living things came to be through Neo-Darwinian evolution and the so-called Intelligent Design Movement is not a valid alternative.

If we confront what we know of origins scientifically with religious faith in God the Creator, in the senses described above, what results? I would claim that the detailed scientific understanding of origins has no bearing whatsoever on whether God exists or not. It has a great deal to do with my knowledge of God, should I happen to believe he exists.     

Female Leadership in French Voluntary Associations

Drawing on a recent national survey, this article focuses on the female representation on executive committees in French voluntary associations. To begin with, we observe that this representation is very unequal according to the different officer positions. It is especially low among presidents while it is markedly higher among secretaries. Then, we study the relationship between the associations’ attributes and the likelihood of women being appointed as executive committee members. Our investigation bears out some findings from previous studies on nonprofit female leadership. For instance, we show that the proportion of female officers is higher in organizations whose activities pertain to social service, health, and humanitarian sectors. It is lower in the oldest associations and it decreases as their geographical area of activity increases and as their budget becomes larger. But we also emphasize new results. First, the probabilities that women hold president, treasurer and secretary positions are highly correlated to each other. Second, the likelihood that associations have female presidents is higher in associations with few volunteers. We consider possible explanations for the latter result.     

Alphabet Economics: The link between names and reputation

In economics, most coauthored papers have all coauthors in alphabetical order. It is sometimes argued that this conveys advantages to people whose names start with letters that come early in the alphabet. This paper examines whether the alphabetical ranking of names affects someone's reputation. Overall, we find that faculty members with earlier last name initials are more likely to get employment at high standard research departments. Furthermore, we show that the relationship between alphabetical placement and academic success remains significant if we use as an alternative measure of reputation the number of people showing an interest in the papers of a particular academic. This paper also investigates whether the reported alphabetical effect creates differential incentives for coauthoring. It is found that the reputational advantage of first-authorship motivates people to manipulate their names so as to obtain a more beneficial alphabetical position within the majority of articles.     

Prospective ergonomics: origin, goal, and prospects

So far ergonomics has been concerned with two categories of activities: correction and design. We propose to add a third category: prospection, and by so doing, we introduce a new series of activities that opens up the future of ergonomics. Corrective ergonomics relates to the past and comes with a demand and a client. It is turned towards the correction of existing situations and aims to reduce or eliminate problems. Here, after delimiting and defining the problem, the challenge is to find the best solution. Ergonomics for design relates to the present and also comes with a demand and a client. It is turned towards the design of new artefacts that have already been identified by a client, and that will allow users to do some activity and attain their goals. Here, after defining the scope of the project and the functional requirements, the challenge is to do the best design. Finally, prospective ergonomics relates to the future and does not come with a demand and a client. It is turned towards the creation of future things that have not been identified yet. Here the challenge is to detect existing user needs or anticipate future ones, and imagine solutions. These three categories of activities overlap and are not exclusive of each other. In this paper we define prospective ergonomics and compare it with corrective ergonomics and ergonomics for design. We describe its origin, goal, and prospects, we analyze its impacts on education and practice, and we emphasize the need of new collaboration between ergonomics and other disciplines.     

Inter-group contact and out-group altruism after violence

Altruism among humans is common. It is especially prominent among in-group members. However, we are struck by results from laboratory-in-the-field experiments with out-group members of different ethnic or religious backgrounds. In all instances, the groups were rivals in civil wars. While we find almost no altruistic behavior among groups that were engaged in fighting, out-group altruism emerges with the passage of time. To address the underlying mechanism that might explain this puzzling result, we use a laboratory experiment that sorts between a norms revision explanation and a contact hypothesis explanation. Our findings show that contact with out-group members, in a mutually beneficial task, results in a reversion to prior levels of out-group altruism following conflict. Our findings reinforce the idea that deeply held attitudes toward a stigmatized out-group change following productive interactions with those out-group members. It is clear that hostility between groups need not persist over time.     

Money in marriage

Abstract

Mrs Allonby: I dont't think we should ever be spoken about as other people's property. All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition of what married women's property really is. But we don't belong to anyone. A woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde 1893

The author suggests that it is vital that we address money directly in our work with couples. It is an area that has been relatively neglected, both by practitioners and researchers. Everyday talk testifies to the meaning and importance that money plays in people's lives. It also conveys attitudes about the way men and women view each other and relate to one another. The psychological implications of these social attitudes for women are addressed and an agenda is suggested for further thought and research.     

Little Theories and Big Problems: Chicago Sociology and Ethnic Conflicts*

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like “theory” and “theorist,” both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a “grounded theory” ( Glaser and Strauss 1967 ). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing ( Rose 1962 ). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: “Exactly what is symbolic interaction”” He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, “It is what they do at Chicago.”     

Ritual Dynamics: Mayor Making in Early Modern Norwich

Through a detailed analysis of a Guild Day ceremony in early modern England we demonstrate that liminal points in this ritual are interrelated to form a "pattern" or "dance" of liminal pulsations. We argue it is the felt necessity, on the part of participants, to complete that pattern that provides a dynamic to any ritual event. It impels participants to continue the ritual to its conclusion and leads them to resist any interference with the "flow" of the ritual. "Flow", we assert, is thus both an interior state of participants and an exterior social characteristic of a ritual. It is created by the structuring of liminal points in a ritual, the liminal pulsations, but it achieves its dynamic by affecting the interior states of participants so that they feel impelled to "close off" the ritual and complete it.     

The Decision to Divorce

The decision to terminate an unhappy marriage through obtaining a divorce is almost never an easy decision for either spouse. It is usually reached only after other options and alternatives have been considered and then rejected as non-viable solutions to the problems that have developed between the spouses. As Bernard (1970: 3) has noted, despite the increasing frequency of its occurence, "It is not likely that divorce will ever become matterof- fact, nor that it will ever become painless or casual or nonchalant . . . It will probably always be an extremely painful experience for most people, as breaking close ties always is, even outside marriage." From this perspective, our coming to terms with divorce means only that we recognize its inevitability in many cases and try to mitigate some of the worst of its consequences. In this paper we review the process through which a sample of 500 respondents reached the decision to obtain a divorce. Specifically, major problems that existed in their relationship that prompted them to finally seek a legal termination of their union will be considered. In addition, we will examine barriers that had to be overcome before that decision was finally reached as well as major sources of social support that encouraged the decision. We will begin with a brief theoretical review of the major orientations that have been developed in the literature to account for the process through which the individual ultimately decides to seek a divorce.     

Feminist psychotherapy with japanese women

Abstract

It has been ten years since first feminist therapy practice took place in Japan. Under circumstances in which there is still great lack of acceptance and understanding of psychotherapy in general, the need for feminist therapy is increasing today. After the revision of laws and institutions has succeeded, we Japanese women need to face a reality in which we learn how to build a flexible strength to negotiate with our environment. It is not easy to grasp a suitable identity avoiding the so-called super woman image. This paper illustrates the activities of Feminist Therapy at “Nakama” (means companion) and some issues regarding feminist therapy that need be discussed. One case is also discussed from a feminist perspective. Although not being presented, in this paper, the issue of sexual violence against women and need for care of the victims is an initiative that needs to be taken by feminist therapist.     

Rationalizations of Condorcet-consistent rules via distances of hamming type

In voting, the main idea of the distance rationalizability framework is to view the voters’ preferences as an imperfect approximation to some kind of consensus. This approach, which is deeply rooted in the social choice literature, allows one to define (“rationalize”) voting rules via a consensus class of elections and a distance: a candidate is said to be an election winner if she is ranked first in one of the nearest (with respect to the given distance) consensus elections. It is known that many classic voting rules can be distance-rationalized. In this article, we provide new results on distance rationalizability of several Condorcet-consistent voting rules. In particular, we distance-rationalize the Young rule and Maximin using distances similar to the Hamming distance. It has been claimed that the Young rule can be rationalized by the Condorcet consensus class and the Hamming distance; we show that this claim is incorrect and, in fact, this consensus class and distance yield a new rule, which has not been studied before. We prove that, similarly to the Young rule, this new rule has a computationally hard winner determination problem.     

Beware of Allies!

In science and technology studies (STS), reflexivity is not the foremost political or ethical concern that it is for some postmodernists, feminists, anthropologists, or those earnest students of Bourdieu. For us, reflexivity is a practical methodological concern. When reflexivity is raised in our scholarly communications it is, without irony, about crafting scientific communications (i.e., scholarly accounts like articles or books) reflexively. This paper therefore is an actor-network account of making reflexive actor-network accounts, specifically, in the process of writing-up qualitative research findings. It is a paper about research. It is a paper about the research process. As our empirical contribution, we report on research we previously conducted and about the subsequent steps we took toward a (publishable) way of reporting it. We are trying to honestly disclose how the process of preparing a reflexive account is more than merely a matter of cleaning-up the messiness of data, but also, and perhaps foremost, a process of finding, aligning, and occasionally distancing our accounts from our allies?—?in our case, actor-network theory (ANT) and reflexivity.     

Representations of Labour: Visual Sociology and Work

This paper explores the potential that visual methods, approaches, and resources offer to the sociologist of work. It looks at the way work is represented in a range of publications and asks questions about what the visual can add to our understanding of the workplace, workers, and work processes. It argues that we need to develop and expand a sociological language of the visual in order to better understand cultural and other aspects of work and employment.     

The Soul of Fatherhood

SUMMARY

This paper proposes several lenses through which one can look past the obvious roles of fathers and see into the meaning that fatherhood has for our culture. The paper suggests that we are reinventing social fatherhood and redefining what it means to protect. It also describes how the very language of who we are as parents is shifting.     

Approximability of Dodgson’s rule

It is known that Dodgson’s rule is computationally very demanding. Tideman (Soc Choice Welf 4:185–206, 1987) suggested an approximation to it but did not investigate how often his approximation selects the Dodgson winner. We show that under the Impartial Culture assumption the probability that the Tideman winner is the Dodgson winner converges to 1 as the number of voters increase. However we show that this convergence is not exponentially fast. We suggest another approximation—we call it Dodgson Quick—for which this convergence is exponentially fast. Also we show that the Simpson and Dodgson rules are asymptotically different.