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.     

Creating Accessible Queer Community: Intersections and Fractures with Dis/Ability Praxis

This article explores the intersections and fractures that disability theory and activism present to queer community. The authors begin by drawing upon a multiple axis approach from feminist theory, then discuss the problem of defining disability and queer. They then explore the intersections and fractures of these identities and theories, hoping to raise awareness among queer activists and scholars and introduce them to conceptual and practical tools. In particular, disability studies offers a way to reconceptualize and ground theory and practice in the messiness of real bodies and to make visible the mythic normate against which cultural Others are defined.     

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.     

Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

Shrewdly irrational

This comment on Professor Etzioni's essay consists of three parts. First, it suggests that much of the evidence he describes, both for and against the rationality hypothesis, is much weaker than it appears. Second, it discusses some additional evidence that poses difficulty for the narrow rationalist view. Finally, it examines Etzioni's caring and sharing evidence, which poses the sharpest challenge of all to the rationalists. It suggests that although caring and sharing is indeed irrational by the conventional standard, there are good reasons why someone who is purely self-interested might wish to become a caring and sharing person. To be such a person, it argues, is to be shrewdly irrational.     

Gender and the residential telephone, 1890–1940: Technologies of sociability

Recent work on gender and technology debunks the claim that household technologies have liberated women from domestic work. The history of telephone use in North America suggests, however, that global conclusions about gender and consumer technologies may be misleading. Although marketed primarily as a business instrument and secondarily as an instrument to facilitate housework, the telephone was, in a sense, appropriated by women for social and personal ends. This paper explores the affinity of women for the telephone, how women in the half-century before World War II used the telephone, and why. It suggests that there is a class of technologies that women have exploited for their own, gender-linked, social and personal ends.     

When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter

Judith Butler's analysis of corporeal matters offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that language and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of writing with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of writing to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.     

The Impact of Assessment Procedures on the Relationship between Paper and Pencil and Behavioral Indicators of Social Skill

This study investigated the relationship between paper and pencil measures and molecular behavioral indicators of social skills in three widely used assessment options. A total of 221 students engaged in either a get acquainted or role play interaction, in which they were given instructions and knew they were being observed. A third group engaged in a waiting period interaction, in which they were given no instructions to interact and had no knowledge of being observed. Results showed that subjects in the get acquainted and role play situations scored higher on several measures of social skills than those in the waiting period situation. In addition, there was most variability in the measures of social skills in the waiting period situation. In general, trait measures exhibited poor correspondence with behavioral measures of social skills in all situations. However, state paper and pencil measures of social skills exhibited strong correspondence with behaviors in the waiting period, but not in the get acquainted or role play situations. Implications for the assessment of social communication skills through commonly used assessment procedures are discussed.     

Viewing Telephone Therapy Through the Lens of Attachment Theory and Infant Research

This article discusses the use of the telephone for psychotherapy and applies basic tenets of attachment theory and research on infant development to understand the therapy process. Clinical case examples of four models of attachment (secure, insecure ambivalent, insecure avoidant, disorganized) illustrate diverse patient capacities to use the telephone during a planned 10-week break from ongoing, in-person treatment. It is suggested that telephone therapy may be variously effective based on the attachment system that becomes activated due to the separation, and patients with insecure avoidant or disorganized attachment patterns may have more difficulty managing the alternative treatment modality.     

Habermas and green political thought

Conclusion My principal ecocentric objection to Habermas's social and political theory has been that it is thoroughly human-centered in insisting that the emancipation of human relations need not require or depend upon the emancipation of nature. Although Habermas has moved beyond the pessimism and utopianism of the first generation of Critical Theorists by providing the conceptual foundations of the practical and emancipatory cognitive interests, he has, as Whitebook points out, also markedly altered the spirit of their project. Yet it is precisely the spirit of the early Frankfurt school theorists, namely, its critique of the dominant imperialist orientation toward the world (rather than its critique of a simplistically conceived idea of science) and its desire for the liberation of nature, that is most relevant to - and provides the most enduring Western Marxist link with - the ecocentric perspective of the radical Greens.

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The Practice of Multimodal Approaches, the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Communication, and the Search for Responses

The development of multimodal approachespresents an opportunity for human beings to increasetheir competence in managing complexity, while at thesame time brings a challenge of cross-culturalcommunication. Some claim that two approaches have beenproposed for tackling this challenge: an approach offrameworks and an approach ofdiscourse. Some go further to contenddropping frameworks and taking up discourse. This paper argues that, if it istrue that there exist these two approaches, neither theframeworks nor the discourseapproach alone is sufficient. It is suggested thatresearchers and practitioners may be better equipped byparticipating in discourses with and among frameworks.Employing three metaphors, this paper proposes that, inthe way force-fields andconstellations require and imply each other, both frameworks anddiscourse are necessary for human beings to act as aPeircian fiber-cable in socialproblem-solving.Requests for reprints should be addressed to Zhichang Zhu, Department of Information Systems, Lincoln School of Management, Lincoln LN6 7TS, United Kingdom.     

The partisanship of silence: Symbolic politics of school desegration in Boston

This article analyzes the symbolic aspects of the school desegration controversy using disputes in Boston as a case in point. The symbolic communication between actors in the public forum contains implicit views of the rights and obligations of different participants in the controversy, and the role of various individuals and collectives in the history of the controversy. These views also provide a framework for understanding the position of specific actors, which may constrain their ability to participate effectively in the controversy. This article analyzes these constraints with respect to those actors who attempted to establish a mediator role between pro-integration and anti-busing forces.Prepared under grants from the National Institute of Education (NIE-6-00-3-0187, NIE-6-76-0038), National Institute of Mental Health, (R01-MH-27618) and the Carnegie Corporation.     

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.     

Recovering from Homelessness: Determining the “Quality of Sobriety” in a Transitional Housing Program

Recent years have seen fundamental shifts in the objectives and delivery of assistance to the homeless. An early emphasis on emergency shelter and monetary housing assistance has been replaced by a focus on programs designed to blend shelter with an array of social services. In most instances, however, programs combining shelter and social services are designed as transitional; that is, they are intended to help homeless individuals and families move from a position of dependence to one where they can live independently. The emphasis in transitional housing programs is on making homeless people housing ready. This paper concerns the process of assessing housing readiness as observed during eighteen months of fieldwork in a federally supported transitional housing program for formerly homeless single adults. The detailed case study that follows supports three important findings. First, there was virtual unanimity among staff and residents that substance abuse was the cause of their homelessness and the key to its solution. Second, success within the program was defined and operationalized along very specific but well understood normative dimensions that have little to do with the material circumstances in which residents find themselves and everything to do with recovery. Third, recovery—the key to housing readiness in this environment—was measured not by objective measures, i.e., number of months sober, but rather by what was widely referred to as one's quality of sobriety, a subjective and consequently often hotly debated measure of attitude and outlook only loosely related to demonstrable abstinence from alcohol. This last finding, that ultimately housing readiness is a subjective judgment, both increases the discretion of shelter staff and generates a systematic disattention to the individual economic issues that are fundamental to an exit from homelessness.     

Social Engineering in Context: Some Observations on Turner

The concept of social engineering has more negative baggage than Jonathan Turner supposes. It assumes an ability to control events that is normally lacking and which cannot be attained by following rules of thumb. A paradigm that better links theory with practice is preferable.     

The prevalence rates of pathological gambling: A look at methods

Planning the gambling environment requires protection of the public's health, safety and welfare. Whereas most public gaming provisions and statutes address the public's fears of organized crime as well as some welfare needs, rarely do they safeguard the public's health regarding the spread of the mental disease known as pathological gambling. Measurement of the prevalence and incidence of this disease would enable policy planners to evaluate both the state's responsibility for an epidemic and the adequacy of publicly funded treatment programs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods which underlie three different estimates of the prevalence rate of pathological gambling and to critique them in the light of sound epidemiological procedure. In 1975, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) of the University of Michigan conducted a national survey and a survey of the state of Nevada on behalf of the U.S. Commission on a National Policy Toward Gambling. Using discriminant function analysis coupled with subjective inspection of cases in the at-risk pool, the researchers estimated rates of probable and potential pathological gamblers. In 1984 and 1985, this author surveyed residents in the Delaware Valley and the state of Ohio using the cumulative clinical signs method which also posited rates of probable and potential pathological gamblers. In 1986, researchers at the Office of Mental Health for the State of New York employed a formal screening device to survey residents and proposed a rate of probable pathological gamblers and a rate of problem — although not pathological — gamblers. All three approaches produced different estimates. The utility of prevalence and incidence rate research in this field is threatened by a lack of consensus about the proper epidemiological procedure to be employed in arriving at these estimates. There is also confusion about the distinction between a probable and a potential pathological gambler. The planning purpose, method, validity and reliability of prevalence rate research about pathological gambling are addressed in this paper.     

Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a transitional object, this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and acting-out behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to reparative regressions.     

Organizational Cultures as Holding Environments: A Psychodynamic Look at Organizational Symbolism

The traditional formulation of symbols asbundles of meaning has supported manyfine-grained analyses of organizational culture.However, it tends to obscure deeper psychodynamicelements that are essential to shaping how culture forms,develops, and dies. This paper adapts the idea ofholding environment from Winnicott, Kegan,and others to sketch the potential contribution of such a psychodynamic perspective. An illustrativecase is presented to support the argument.     

Mead,Contemporary Metatheory,and Twenty-First-Century Interdisciplinary Team Work

George Herbert Mead is reintroduced here as an exemplary practice-minded scholar. His work at Hull-House inspired practitioners to interpret and advocate for the poor and oppressed. Mead pioneered an approach to cross-cultural boundary work that was used to help clients interpret their experiences, to mediate between clients and social institutions, and to represent clients' needs to a nonsympathetic middle class. Contemporary sociological practice occurs in a fragmented, divisive society reminiscent of late nineteenth-century Chicago. Mead's notions of universe of discourse, international mindedness, and the democratic assumption are wedded to those of metatheorists and developed as a metatheory for use. Four metatheoretical tools—translation by membership focus, by metaphor, by map, and by model—are recommended to sociologists committed to interdisciplinary, multitheory service.     

Braudel's ecological perspective

Fernand Braudel, a leading figure in theAnnales school of French historiography, employed principles and practices from several social science disciplines in his historical studies. Significant among these was sociology. Although he did not formally recognize that a major element in his sociological perspective was human ecology, an analysis of his work reveals how extensively he employed an ecological paradigm. His success in using this paradigm demonstrates the utility of the principles of human ecology in historical and comparative studies and suggests strongly that fresh insights into contemporary social systems can be gained by combining Braudel's total history and ecology's holistic approaches.