When Opportunity is the Thing to be Equalised

This paper discusses the goal set out by the United Nations in its Standard Rules on the Equalisation of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. The objective 'equalisation of opportunities' means both to render unlawful discrimination against persons with disabilities in every area of society, and to eliminate those very discriminatory conditions in society which render real participation impossible. The two conflicting approaches to handicap, the individual-centred and the person-environment approach, are both visible in the Standard Rules. This article suggests that the individual-centred approach is structurally related with the understanding of equal treatment as a relationship with formal characteristics, no matter what the setting in which it occurs, while the person-environment approach is related with an active social policy emerging from an understanding of equal treatment as a question of substantial right. There is thus a conflict inherent in the Standard Rules.     

Shared Trauma: When the Professional is Personal

Concepts describing secondary trauma phenomena do not adequately capture the profound impact that collective catastrophic events can have on mental health professionals living and working in traumatogenic environments. Shared trauma, by contrast, contains aspects of primary and secondary trauma, and more accurately describes the extraordinary experiences of clinicians exposed to the same community trauma as their clients. Case vignettes from clinicians in Manhattan and Sderot, Israel are provided to illustrate the transformative changes that clinicians may undergo as a result of dual exposure to trauma. Discussion involves the importance of articulating one??s own trauma narrative and attending to self-care prior to resuming clinical work, as well as opportunities for enhanced therapeutic intimacy and caution regarding boundary alterations that may result from clinician self-disclosure. Agency settings can provide the necessary education, supervision, and support to mitigate the negative effects of shared trauma.     

When the management is the message: Relating values to management practice in nonprofit organizations

The values-expressive character of many private, nonprofit organizations is what distinguishes them from business and government organizations. The distinctive character of these organizations creates a special context for their management. This article examines the origins and development of private nonprofits in the religious realm and explores the implications of this character for management and for education of nonprofit managers.     

When Emotion Work is Doomed to Fail: Ideological and Structural Constraints on Emotion Management

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through “preventive emotion management” but most often they experienced a loss of control, leading some of them to experience “burnout.” This paper defines burnout as “occupational emotional deviance” that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations.     

Handling relational stress and distance with the public: From the service to the helping relationship

What kinds of tensions arise in jobs involving human contacts? And what forms of stress are associated with them? To answer these questions, the work performed by the activists who receive the public in a major French AIDS organization has been studied. Attention is focused not only on the difficulties that crop up in dealing with the public but also on activists' theories for explaining them and endowing them with meaning. These theories, which fit into established approaches to “relational stress” and burnout, do not lack contradictions. Referring to studies in the psychopathology of work and adopting an approach in terms of “distributed cognition” can shift discussion toward an original perspective that, without discrediting activists' explanations, sheds more light on handling relations and adjusting distance with the public.     

Remittances as a Shield to Vulnerable Households in Macedonia: The Case When the Instrument is Not Strictly Exogenous

The objective of this article is to investigate whether remittances sent to Macedonia have a role to play for shielding vulnerable households, by highlighting the importance of a strictly exogenous instrument in an IV context. Results suggest that remittance‐receiving households have, on average, a 20.1 per cent lower vulnerability than non‐receiving ones. However, if one has a reasonable belief that vulnerability and the instrument are determined simultaneously, or are directly correlated due to the existence of a third unobservable factor, then the shielding effect of remittances for vulnerable households remains up to the ninth percentage of direct influence and with a reducing magnitude, and then disappears.     

Challenging assumptions of international public relations: When government is the most important public

To learn more about international public relations it is important to explore the assumptions underlying each nation's practice. Through such analysis, we learn that many of the assumptions that guide Western theories and practices are not applicable in other regions of the world. This article examines one assumption—that the practice of public relations targets a variety of key organizational publics. In many developing nations it is government officials rather than the general public who are of greatest importance to effective public relations. If government is the most important public in developing nations, then this relationship will influence the practice of public relations.Maureen Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Michael Kent is an Assistant Professor of Communication at SUNY-Fredonia in Fredonia, New York.     

When to Use a Standardized Procedure:

It is argued on empirical as well as on ethical grounds that a standardized procedure be used as a second professional opinion whenever possible.     

When corporate actors take over the game: the corporatization of organic,recycling and breast cancer activism

Social change endeavors are increasingly shaped by corporate interests and, in some instances, large corporations take over ideas and practices initiated by social change advocates. We label this process ‘corporatization’ and argue that, while it is clearly a variant of co-optation, it has specific qualities that warrant a separate analytical framework. Using existing research to examine the cases of breast cancer activism, organic food, and recycling in the United States – all extreme examples of corporatization – we conceptualize corporatization as a subset of co-optation in which: (1) corporations come to dominate fields initiated by activists; (2) corporatized versions become widespread; and (3) alternative, ‘response,’ movements emerge to oppose corporatized versions. We posit that, in each case, ‘corporate takeover devices’ allowed corporate entities to ‘join the game’ and eventually come to dominate fields initiated by social movements.     

When approved is not enough: development of a supervision consultation model

The dramatic increase in the literature that addresses family therapy training and supervision over the last decade has been predominantly in the area of theory, rather than practice. This article describes the development of a meta-supervisory learning context for approved supervisors and provides examples of interactions between supervisors that subsequently influenced both therapy and supervision. We delineate the assumptions that inform our work and offer specific guidelines for supervisors who wish to implement a similar model in their own contexts. We provide suggestions for a proactive refiguring of supervision that may have profound effects and benefits for supervisors and supervisees alike.     

When the Methodological Shoe is on the Other Foot: African American Interviewer and White Interviewees

Some scholars engaging in the insider/outsider debate have argued that the pairing of researcher and subjects based on racial similarity—i.e., “race matching”—is the most effective means for conducting qualitative research. Although insider/outsider status has been discussed with respect to white researchers' studies of African Americans, I explore the heretofore rarely discussed situation in which an African American is the researcher and whites are the subjects. I argue that insider status with respect to race continues to be based on a presumed connectedness linked to phenotypical characteristics—like skin color or hair texture. Yet, rather than experiencing a solely insider or outsider status, researchers and subjects experience what I call “insider moments” wherein their interests converge and they are able to share in the kinds of interactions that yield important insights. I conclude by evaluating the utility of insider/outsider status in qualitative research.