The VFW — A case study in the “iron law of oligarchy” and goal displacement

The iron law of oligarchy is applied to the VFW. Using participant observation and qualitative interviews, membership of the VFW is dichotomized into a leadership oligarchy and a drinking membership. Opinions of members of the two groups about the purposes of the organization and about each other are documented. An historical analysis traces the change in organizational goals over time from promoting nationalism, fraternalism, and special benefits for members to political advocacy of veterans' rights.     

Welfare Reform in Indiana: The Political Economy of Restricting Access to Education and Training

This article interrogates welfare reform policies that restrict welfare reliant mothers' access to education and training. It focuses on how these policies have been implemented through the Indiana Manpower Placement and Comprehensive Training Program (IMPACT), Indiana's work first response to women's growing experience of poverty. Using methods of inquiry inspired by Dorothy E. Smith's articulation of institutional ethnography, a case study is developed to investigate the critical disjuncture that arises when welfare reliant mothers attempt to navigate these policies in the context of Indiana's extended political economy. It is argued that through these restrictive policies, welfare reliant mothers are forced into Indiana's unrelenting low-wage labor market, increasing the pervasiveness of poverty and further perpetuating the reproduction of inequality.     

Emotional Climate in a European Problem Area: East Berlin and West Berlin Three Years After Reunification

In autumn of 1992, three years after the unification of Germany, during a period of violent attacks against foreigners, 120 students from East Berlin and West Berlin and 20 foreign students living in West Berlin answered the Emotional Climate Questionnaire developed by de Rivera and Fernandez-Dols. Foreign respondents expressed a positive attitude toward their government/state and believed in prosocial behavior to a greater extent than respondents from East Berlin and West Berlin. Whereas East Berlin students disagreed only somewhat with statements in favor of selfishness and egoism, West Berlin students strongly disagreed with them. We attribute the differences that were found in the answers of the foreign students to their national values. In addition, we regard the differences between the emotional climates of East Berlin and West Berlin as reflecting a climate of instability among East Berliners. We interpreted selfishness as a kind of polarized behavior indicating a climate of instability. A factor analysis revealed 5 factors of an emotional climate: Nation's Future, Just World, Reactive Egoism, Scepticism, and Basic Egoism. The concept of emotional climate is discussed on the basis of the current data.     

Theory at risk: Accounting for the excellence movement

Amidst widespread concern about educational crisis and the need for reform, the current excellence movement places a pronounced emphasis on rigor, standards, and a core curriculum of basic studies. At issue here is whether major macro-the-oretical perspectives can account for the emergence of this movement. Functional and Marxian theories do not meet this challenge well, especially insofar as they posit a tight, rational linkage between school and economy and downplay the institutional autonomy of the educational system. A status conflict approach, emphasizing middle class mobilization, offers greater insight, though it must be complemented with a recognition of constraints imposed by capitalist organization and the institutionalization of educational myths.     

Adolescent Women's Recommendations for Enhanced Parent-Adolescent Communication About Sexual Behavior

Family communication about adolescent sexual health and behavior promotes adolescent health and family connectedness. However, few studies seek the perspective of adolescents regarding their recommended strategies for family communication. Findings of a survey of female adolescent family planning patients (n = 249) indicated adolescent recommendations for better family communication included treat teen as an equal, 63%; increase parental knowledge about lifestyle and peer pressures, 61%, and improve parental listening skills, 61%. There were no statistically significant differences according to age, pregnancy history, or school enrollment status for suggested strategies for improved communication with parents. Sexually active adolescent daughters expressed interest in maintaining family connectedness and support with increased time for family activities as well as increased quality and quantity of dialogue between the adolescent girl and her parents.     

The context of correctness: A comment on rushton

According to Philippe Rushton, the equalitarian fiction, a scientific hoax that races are genetically equal in cognitive ability, underlies the politically correct objections to his research on racial differences. He maintains that there is a taboo against race unequaled by the Inquisition. I show that while Rushton has been publicly harassed, he has had continuous opportunities to present his findings in diverse, widely available, respectable journals, and no general suppression within academic psychology is evident. Similarly, Henry Garrett and his associates in the LAAEE, dedicated to preserving segregation and preventing race suicide, disseminated their ideas widely, although Garrett complained of the equalitarian fiction in 1961. Examination of the intertwined history ofMankind Quarterly, German Rassenhygiene, far right politics, and the work of Roger Pearson suggests that some cries of political correctness must be viewed with great caution.Preparation of this paper was not supported by any grant, foundation, political, or religious organization.specializing in the history of psychology and psychological aesthetics.     

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.     

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.     

Touristic authenticity,touristic angst,and modern reality

The tourist has become the symbol of a peculiarly modern type of inauthenticity. This paper explores the criticisms that have been directed at the reality experiences of the tourist. In so doing, the following inexhaustive typology of touristic realities is developed: 1) the first-order or true tourist, 2) the second-order or Angst-ridden tourist, 3( the third-order or anthropological tourist, and 4) the fourth-order or spiritual tourist. Each of these types represents a progressively more intense search for reality through travel. Each is, however, criticized for participating in its own form of inauthenticity.After exploring the reality experiences and criticisms of each of these travellers, the paper turns the tables on the cultured despisers of tourism to argue that perhaps the lowly first-order tourist is not so inauthentic after all. True, this traveller may not be having a real heroic adventure, but such is not the goal. Rather, the reality experienced by the first-order tourist is a pleasurable liberation from the normal concerns of everyday life which simultaneously reaffirms commitment to that reality. Quite frequently the first-order tourist is less concerned about having a real experience in the visited place than in experiencing family and friendship relationships-relationships completely ignored by the anti-touristic tourists in their search for authenticity in someone else's reality.The author would like to thank Peter L. Berger, Harry C. Bredemeier, Warren I. Susman, and M. Kathy Kenyon for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported in part by NIMH grant no. 5 T32 NH14660.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

Manufacturing Motherhood: The Shadow Work of Nannies and Au Pairs

This paper explores how working mothers and paid child care providers interpret the division of mothering labor in the context of in-home care. The nannies, au pairs, and working mothers interviewed for this study make sense of their shared mother-work in the context of a dominant belief system that values intensive mothering. Consequently, in addition to negotiating the allocation of mothering tasks, they must also negotiate the meanings assigned to these tasks: specifically, they manufacture an image of shared mothering that contradicts their day-to-day practice.     

The discursive origins of Israeli separatism: The case of the Arab village

Conclusions We should note, however, that the achievements of the control system cannot in and of themselves explain the success of the discourse on the Arab village. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, one must acknowledge today that what the control system produced was a secondary order reality at best, a representation superimposed over, and obscuring other social realities. It never managed (nor did it try) to stop the proletarianization of peasants. It never managed (though it did try) to put an end to illegal construction and de-facto urbanization. It did not even manage to repress the emergence of grass-roots national political organization in the villages. More often than not, its sole achievement was to obscure official (and academic) perception of these processes. Thus, one often finds nowadays settlements to which the term village is officially applied, while their physical structure already merits urban status. Urbanization took place in the villages regardless of the designs of planners, and this fact alone is enough to demonstrate how discourse detached them from reality. This was also why, in 1976, Orientalists and government experts were completely taken by surprise, when the committee for national direction (composed of village mayors!) organized mass demonstrations to protest government plans to confiscate more Palestinian lands. The events of this day, later known as land day, signaled the emergence of rural Palestinians as a national political force to be reckoned with. Quite contrary to what the notion of hamula struggle led them to believe, experts discovered that the villages were an effective mobilizing ground for national political action.I think it is precisely the dubious character of the achievements of the control system, arising from the systematic blindness inculcated by discourse, which demonstrates that these achievements were indeed of secondary importance in comparison with what was the raison d'etre of the control system and the discourse on the Arab village: their premier achievement was to reproduce the separatist character of Israeli identity. The origins of the control system were diverse indeed: they included divide and conquer practices developed by Arabists; land planning practices; modernization discourse formulated in response to immigration; cooptation strategies developed by the Labor party for electoral purposes; bifurcation of the labor market by Jewish labor unions. There is no one person or group responsible for these. What organized all these diverse practices together was the specific rationality of the control system. This rationality was not an economic one, nor political, nor scientific, nor was it given in any of these practices. It was identical with Israeli identity and the procedures that separate it from its other. This is why Israelis still adhere to the control system and the discourse on the Arab village, even though they fail to predict Palestinian behavior or control it (i.e., it was not their goal to begin with).It is ironic that the discourse on the Arab village would reach the height of its prestige just as the achievements of the control system were evaporating. The conjunction of these two events cannot be explained by the Weberian view of power as the realization of a will, i.e., by focusing on the interest of Jews in maintaining control over Palestinians. Such a view leads to an unavoidable contradiction: If the action of participants in the discourse and the control system is based on their interests, why are they unable to recognize their failure? And if they are not capable of monitoring their own interests, how were they able to create a coherent and effective control system? The answer is that their action is circumscribed by what discourse and the control system permit them to grasp, and this understanding is indeed both limited and enabled by the premier achievement of discourse and the control system: a position of a Western-modern Israeli subject, strictly demarcated from that of the traditional-Oriental rural Palestinian. Power is not so much exercised to realize an Israeli interest, as it is constitutive of the very self-understanding that underlies this interest, a self-understanding predicated on the rejection of the Orient and its exclusion.In this sense, this article merely provides the rough outlines for a future debate on the origins and nature of Israeli separatism. Such a debate has scarcely begun, but implicit understandings of separatism are implicated in the contemporary political debate in Israel. The mainstream of Israeli political thought tends to treat the separation between Jews and Palestinians as a taken-for-granted fact, a direct consequence of Zionism as a nation-building project. Others, on the political left, question this assumption and suggest that separatism should be understood as an institutional system erected in response to certain economic, military, or political interests, a system based on the control and exploitation of Palestinians by Jews.I think both positions limit the debate about separatism. By ignoring the cultural side of separatism, its character as an identity that requires a permanent effort of constitution, they supply an alibi for intellectuals and academics. These can continue using their disciplines and discourses, and even present these as sufficiently detached for a critique of Israeli politics, without examining their role in the reproduction of a separatist identity. Moreover, if separatism is understood merely as control over Palestinians, thus ignoring its side as the subjection of Jews, the consequence is that the distinction usurped by the Israeli upper class is mis-recognized. This class can continue to present its taste, values, and style of life - all those cultural arbitraries that are marked by the double exclusion of the Orient and the diaspora - as the sacred cultural consensus of Israeli society. It was my aim in this article, on the contrary, to demonstrate that separatism informs the core of Israeli culture, and thus the intellectual tools to understand it and fight it can not be taken from among what it consecrates.     

First Contact: Queer Theory, Sexual Identity, and “Mainstream” Film

This paper begins by raising questions about the role of queer theory in media critique, centering on a discussion of four recent mainstream mass-circulation films with significant lesbian and/or gay content. It is asserted that these films operate within accepted discourses on sexuality that require both the notions of public self-disclosure and of the truth of the hetero/homo binary. The methods used by media productions to disseminate that discourse from a lesbian/gay point of view are discussed in terms of the implications of such mass-circulation films being for many persons a first contact point with that discourse.     

The route to voluntary non-custody: How mothers decide to relinquish child custody

This exploratory investigation of mothers' decisions to voluntarily relinquish child custody indicates that (1) mothers tend to make these decisions alone, i.e., without consulting kin or friends, (2) it is mothers who decide against custody rather than fathers who decide for it, and (3) mothers attribute their decisions either to external factors which disrupted their ability to provide a good home, to idiosyncracies of their relationship to their child, or to stable aspects of their own personalities which rendered them generally incapable of good mothering.Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association, San Francisco, March 1982. Thomasina Borkman, David Haines, and Judith L. Fischer made many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

“Lost Childhood”—Lessons from the Holocaust: Implications for Adult Adjustment

This paper was written in memoriam to the one and a half million children murdered during the Holocaust; in celebration of the tiny percentage who survived; in honor of their rescuers, the Righteous Christians and in meeting our own responsibility as survivors to bear witness.     

Elective single mothers and their children: The missing fathers

Elective single mothers are adult, unmarried women who intentionally become mothers. This study utilized longitudinal data about 17 Caucasian, elective single mothers and their children to identify fathers' roles in these families, and to understand children's views of their fathers. These single mothers and their children resided for the first six years of the children's lives in father-absent households. By age six, most of the children had ghost fathers, whom they had never met or knew little about. The data suggest that the father often becomes a family secret, and that children may blame themselves for their fathers' absence.     

Privacy and privilege: Patients', professionals', and the public's rights

Conflict between the individual's right to privacy and the public's right to know is increasing as insurance companies and other third parties are demanding more information about patients and clients and data banks are storing it for retrieval and later use. Social workers are ethically bound to protect the privacy of their relationships with patients and clients and the confidentiality of their communications. But there are situations in which the obligation to society is deemed greater than the individual's right to privacy, and even in states in which their patients' and clients' communications are granted privilege by law, the social worker can be required by law to divulge confidential information or risk being held in contempt of court. This paper will discuss the individual's right to privacy, privilege and its exceptions, and present examples of court decisions related to these issues.     

Physiographic gestures as decoding facilitators: Three experiments exploring a neglected facet of communication

There is a dearth of studies exploring the role of gestures in the communication of experience, i.e., events external to the speaker; whereas much research has been concerned with gestures as expressions of attitudes and emotion. This state of affairs has tended to reinforce the premature assumption that gestures serve functions quite different from those of speech. Three experiments reported here were designed to investigate this neglected role examining specifically, physiographic gestures (pgs). A variety of tasks were devised; information pertaining to each being recorded on videotape and presented under varying modal conditions. It was found that pgs do contribute to the communication of events external to the speaker. Possible mechanisms are discussed.This is a more extensive version of a paper entitled A Clarificatory Paper on the Role of Gestures in Communication, presented at the British Psychological Society London Conference, 1977, Imperial College.     

The Organization of Nonprofit Activities

This paper investigates the repertoire of organizational forms in Western societies in order to assess the nonprofit sector's distinctiveness. A repertoire of six different ideal type constructs is presented adding to and reformulating existing theories, which have primarily focused on the market and the firm. This new extended theoretical platform builds both on theories discussing market, organization, and governmental failures and on approaches where homo economicus is replaced by homo complexicus and transactions by interactions. This effort aims at making the nonprofit (or voluntary) sector in society both more visible and theoretically substantiated. At the end of this paper, the theoretical framework is applied by analyzing empirical nonprofit organizations.     

Inclusive Governance and “Minority” Groups: The Role of the Third Sector in Wales

Following the establishment of a national legislature in Wales in 1999 the third sector has entered into a pioneering cross-sectoral partnership with the Welsh government. This paper presents the results of a research project that has studied the new structures of devolved governance through the expectations and participation of voluntary organizations representing three marginalized or minority groupings: women, disabled people, and those from an ethnic minority background. The findings reveal that despite varying levels of expectation expressed by minority voluntary groups, active engagement of minority groups in policy making has been a feature of the Assembly's first months. Nevertheless, formidable challenges face both sectoral partners in the new system of governance, not least in creating organizational structures that facilitate partnership working in the devolved polity.