ECLECTIC STRATEGIC PRACTICE: A PROCESS CONSTRUCTIVE PERSPECTIVE

The development of an integrative individual and family therapy approach has been hampered by fundamental differences in philosophy and theoretical conceptualization among approaches. Given these largely irreconcilable differences systemic framework for a technical eclecticism may represent a logical step toward a more flexible consideration of both individual and family approaches. This article will describe an extension of the strategic therapy model that enables and encourages the selective application of content and techniques from individual and family approaches. Three case examples will illustrate a process-oriented, constructivist rationale for eclectic strategic practice as well as a more collaborative and relationship-oriented perspective of strategic therapy.     

When Strategic Approaches get Stuck: Maps out of the Mire

Using a biopsychosocial model, a three dimensional map provides guidelines for changing from strategic therapy when progress in this approach falters. The method is pragmatic and atheoretical, and brings together ideas from various schools which empirically have been found useful. Practical and inclusive guidelines are offered for family (and individual) therapy which address two important issues: reinforcement of change when progress is occurring, and a shift from an interactional to another dimension when stuck points are reached. The multi-dimensional approach is clear, can be used by individuals or teams, lends itself to teaching and is of particular value for entrenched and complex problems. Four case histories are presented to highlight the approach.     

Mission,money, and merit: Strategic decision making by nonprofit managers

Public and nonprofit organizations need to make strategic choices about where to invest their resources. They also need to expose hidden managerial assumptions and lack of adequate knowledge that prevent the attainment of consensus in strategic decision making. The approach we developed and tested in the field used a dynamic, three‐dimensional model that tracks individual programs in an organization's portfolio on their contribution to mission, money, and merit. The first dimension measures whether the organization is doing the right things; the second, whether it is doing things right financially; and the third, whether it doing things right in terms of quality. Senior managers provide their own evaluations of the organization's programs. Both the consensus view and the variation in individual assessments contribute to an improved managerial understanding of the organization's current situation and to richer discussions in strategic decision making. In field tests, this visual model proved to be a useful and powerful tool for illuminating underlying assumptions and variations in knowledge among managers facing the complex, multidimensional tradeoffs needed in strategic decision making.     

THE NEIGHBORING FIELD OF BRIEF INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY*

The author presents the field of brief individual psychotherapy as a coherent set of conventions, despite its diverse origins in the schools or traditions of dynamic, behavioral, interpersonal or cognitive, and strategic psychotherapy. He proposes the advantages of these shared conventions, but also their drawbacks. He proposes how this neighboring field could help the field of family therapy reduce its errors.     

An Attempt in Modeling the Labor Supply Process of Married Women in Tunisia

ABSTRACT

This article is aimed at determining the appropriate model for a married woman’s labor supply process in the presence of strategic interaction. We here compare two approaches: a traditional model and a strategic model. We try to estimate the process using Probit and Strategic models and specify, via structural equations, the advantage of the strategic model in the study of strategic data. Using the two models on individual Tunisian data enables us to note that as contrary to the woman expectations in a Probit model, the financial side is not a determining factor in the husband’s reaction once his wife gave up her work. This result has been observed only via the strategic model because it takes into account the presence of effect of strategic interaction between a woman’s decision and her husband’s reaction.     

Comprehensive community building initiatives--ten years later: what we have learned about the principles guiding the work

Community building places emphasis on resident engagement, collaboration, and other elements of a more community-driven approach. For the past ten years, we have learned a lot about how to value the principles of community building and have become more strategic about how to make them work. The chapter offers a brief look at this learning and what community building should focus on as we move forward.     

Diversity Management in der Organisationsberatung

Each individual is (in some respect) similar to many, few or no other person. Diversity deals with this individuality i.e. with differences and similarities between people. In the light of internationalization, diversity has become a main interest area of organizations. Diversity Management is a strategic approach which uses individual abilities, experiences, competencies and qualifications as special success factors in companies. It is however, for many companies and managers, a real challenge to overcome mono-cultural thinking, prejudices and the reluctance to change. They need help from specialized diversity consultants.     

Therapeutic Alliance; A View Constructed by a Family Therapy Team

Therapeutic Alliance is a construct which may have value for a family therapy team and influence its day to day practice. This paper discusses whether family therapeutic alliance can be observed, described and measured, and gives an account of the development of the Family Therapeutic Alliance Scale (FTAS) by a brief strategic family therapy team. Our focus is on the use of statistical technique as a means of clarifying the team's construct of therapeutic alliance, informing the team process without being the final arbiter in development of the scale. The second stage outlines the investigation of the usefulness of the construct with a wider group of family therapists. In individual psychotherapies measures of therapeutic alliance have been shown to predict outcome. Our early work suggests this is also true for family therapies and the FTAS may be a predictor for outcome in family work.     

Adolescent and Parent Alliances With Therapists in Brief Strategic Family TherapyTM With Drug-Using Hispanic Adolescents

This study examined the relationship between alliance and retention in family therapy. Alliance was examined at the individual (parent, adolescent) and family level (within-family differences) for families that either dropped out or completed family therapy. Participants were 31 Hispanic adolescents and their family members who received brief strategic family therapy for the treatment of adolescent drug use. Videotapes of first sessions were rated to identify parent and adolescent alliances with the therapist. Results demonstrated that Completer cases had significantly higher levels of alliance across all family members than Dropout cases, and Dropout cases had significantly higher unbalanced alliances than Completer cases. Clinical implications are discussed.     

Adolescent and parent alliances with therapists in Brief Strategic Family Therapy with drug-using Hispanic adolescents

This study examined the relationship between alliance and retention in family therapy. Alliance was examined at the individual (parent, adolescent) and family level (within-family differences) for families that either dropped out or completed family therapy. Participants were 31 Hispanic adolescents and their family members who received brief strategic family therapy for the treatment of adolescent drug use. Videotapes of first sessions were rated to identify parent and adolescent alliances with the therapist. Results demonstrated that Completer cases had significantly higher levels of alliance across all family members than Dropout cases, and Dropout cases had significantly higher unbalanced alliances than Completer cases. Clinical implications are discussed.     

Infants' Preferences for Familiarity and Novelty During the Course of Visual Processing

At 4 1/2 months, infants were shown a series of brief choice trials between a stimulus that always remained the same and another that was different on every trial. The point when a consistent preference for the novel stimulus commenced was identified for each infant, and their preferences for the familiar and novel stimuli in trials preceding that point were examined. Infants who saw objects or faces as stimuli both exhibited selective attention to the familiar stimulus prior to preferring novel stimuli, although infants shown kaleidoscope patterns did not. These results document a preference for familiarity early in processing with a procedure that is not subject to ambiguities due to individual differences in processing speed or to collapsing data across infants. The results support a nonlinear model for memory formation during infancy and underscore recently voiced concerns that in research on cognitive development, infants' attention to perceptual familiarity‐novelty must be carefully disentangled from conceptual knowledge.     

Determinants of consistent,timely, and active responses in corporate crises

This paper investigates the individual and combined factors affecting the extent to which corporations respond to crisis events consistently, in a timely manner, and actively. The determinants examined include public relations autonomy, legal dominance, strategic orientation, and organizational factors. A survey was conducted of communications mangers, public affairs personnel, and public relations personnel, drawn from the top 500 companies operating in Taiwan. Results indicate that the relative effect of individual sources of influence on crisis response is greatest for situations in which public relations departments have the most autonomy, followed by those where crisis management is handled with a strategic orientation, those where the legal departments dominate, and those where organizational factors provide the main avenue of address. The results emphasize the intriguing role of public relations autonomy by demonstrating its significant impact on providing a consistent, timely, and active crisis response. The strategic orientation of situation analysis also predicts a consistent response, whereas legal dominance predicts strategic ambiguity or inconsistent communication.     

Strategic Groups and Rent Dissipation

We consider a rent-seeking contest in which players can form strategic groups before expending their outlays. We examine the profitability of endogenous group formation and the effect of such group formation on rent dissipation. We show the following: When just one strategic group is formed in equilibrium, group formation is beneficial both to the group members and to the nonmembers, and rent dissipation is smaller than with usual individual rent seeking. However, when more than two strategic groups are formed in equilibrium, group formation is never profitable to any players, and rent dissipation is greater than with individual rent seeking.     

First-session competency: the brief strategic therapy scale-1

The first session in brief strategic therapy is the most critical phase of treatment. More than a mere "assessment phase," the first session in a true intervention sets the stage for all subsequent therapeutic maneuvers. This article presents a supervisory observation tool, the Brief Strategic Therapy Scale-1 (BSTS-1), a fidelity measure proposed as a more formal method of analyzing performance and competency of the therapist for the first session. During scale development, a narrow group of expert judges defined the core skills of therapists and determined the structure/phases of a brief strategic therapy first session. In addition, expert collaborators gave feedback on the scale's usability. This article concludes with the BSTS-1.     

FAMILY SYSTEMS AND THE INDIVIDUAL CHILD

In working with families with symptomatic children, family therapists may be so focused on the systematic aspects of the problem that they inadvertently neglect the child's individual issues. Through the use of a case example, this paper presents a variety of ways in which one can make use of a psychodynamic understanding of the child's issues while continuing to employ brief, action-oriented intervention strategies. A crucial aspect of the approach described is the devising of tasks which address the child's intrapsychic conflicts.     

Reevaluation of task-centered social work practice

In a brief period of time, the “task-centered” approach to social work practice has become a major treatment modality, offering the clinician a degree of specificity and clarity that is often missing in more traditional practice. This paper reassesses the indications and contraindications for this model, contrasting it with other treatment approaches which also utilize the technical variables of brevity, time limits, and task assignment. The diagnostic criteria for the utilization of this approach are discussed in detail, with special emphasis on its applicability to the severely disturbed client.     

GOVERNING A GROUNDWATER COMMONS: A STRATEGIC AND LABORATORY ANALYSIS OF WESTERN WATER LAW

We examine strategic behavior in groundwater depletion within the setting of state governance of groundwater resources in the American West. Solving a dynamic common-pool resource model for its optimal solution and its subgame perfect equilibrium provides benchmarks for behavior observed in laboratory experiments. Three forms of legal rules—common-pool depletion with a "rule-of-capture" to establish ownership (absolute ownership doctrine), entry restrictions (prior appropriation doctrine), and stock quotas (correlative rights doctrine—are examined in terms of their impact on individual strategic behavior in laboratory experiments.     

Balancing strategy and accountability: A model for the governance of professional associations

An erratum has been published for this article in Nonprofit Management and Leadership 15(4) 2005, 487 [ ]. Professional associations are operating in a context of uncertainty and change, with which their traditional governance structures struggle to manage. After describing this context and presenting a brief overview of relevant governance literature, a project aimed at supporting the redesign of governance structures and procedures among five professional associations in the United Kingdom is outlined. Three specific governance issues are examined: size of councils (council is the term used for a governing body of a U.K. professional association), their composition in relation to electoral processes, and the development of inner councils, or executive boards, within councils. Finally, we present a normative model, the cupped hands model, that has arisen from the research. This model offers a possible means of balancing the representation required by their status as membership associations with the requirement that professional associations become more strategic and proactive.