The Regulation of Marriage and Family Therapy1: An Update

Regulations concerning the practice of marriage and family therapy are reviewed. The current status of efforts to license and certify are presented, based on data from AAMFT state and multi-state division Presidents. Materials should be of significance to individuals and organizations attempting to modify current or promote new legislation.     

Stop the Beat: Quiet Regulation and Cultural Conflict1

This article explores a recent conflict over the youth phenomenon known as “raving” in the City of Chicago. By interviewing participants involved in the conflict, I set out to understand the extent to which the crackdown on raves in Chicago was similar to earlier social reactions to jazz, comic books, rock and roll, and Dead Head culture, as well as to more recent conflicts over punk, rap music, and raves in other cities. While most previous research on cultural conflict has focused on moral crusades, campaigns, and panics, the Chicago conflict represents an example of “quiet regulation.” Opponents refrained from highly visible, morally charged attacks; instead, in the absence of media hype and visible public discourse, public officials justified the crackdown in highly bureaucratic terms—avoiding risk, collecting taxes, enforcing codes. Nonetheless, they also drew on cultural schemas that linked raves and raving with drugs, sex, and deviance. As a result, officials selected a course of regulation that criminalized DJs and discredited the artform. In the absence of a highly visible moral campaign, the rave participants were unable to mobilize and resist the regulation and defend their lifestyle. Sociologists must move beyond highly visible campaigns and crusades and pay greater attention to quiet regulation, both because such regulation is likely to increase in the future and because it has significant consequences for power, cultural expression, and identity.     

Regulation of Board-and-Care Homes

Information about board-and-care homes reported in the media and in federal committee hearings indicates that they are shoddy and exploitative environments that do not provide adequate care. Research done in board-and-care homes in recent years, however, demonstrates that they can provide adequate care and a satisfying environment for some of the people they serve. Policy at the federal, state, and local levels should be guided by both the need to assure the health and safety of board-and-care residents and the needs of residents and operators identified in scientific studies.     

The Regulation of Exploitation

Feminist scholarship on exploitation in assisted reproduction focuses primarily on structural inequalities in society and, particularly, within the medical system. This approach most often determines that these technologies are universally oppressive toward women. This discourse, while valuable, overlooks the interaction between universal structural forces and local conditions that, together, shape exploitation within fertility medicine. This project provides an analysis of the local conditions that shape exploitation in surrogacy arrangements in Israel and the United States. The comparison focuses on the selection and compensation of surrogates to analyze the impact of local forces that define certain practices and regulations as exploitative. By providing a context-specific account, this project identifies the need to address exploitation through an analysis of the local experience of exploitation that occurs within an oppressive universalistic system. Thus, it introduces a framework that can be used to analyze the interaction between universal and local forces that lead to exploitation in surrogacy arrangements.     

Standards,Regulation and Development of School-age Day Care and ‘Open Door’ Services1

The subject is play and day-care services for school-age children. The paper draws on research carried out by the author and colleagues at Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU). It reports a survey of 120 services, randomly sampled, from 20 local authorities in England and Wales. This provides data about the standards to be found in such services when they became subject to registration and inspection under the Children Act 1989, and identifies shortcomings with regard to material resources and practice. The paper then draws on two case studies, and reports and discusses the problems met by local authorities in carrying out their new duties under the Act. These included their inexperience of services for over fives, the lack of resources available to improve services and the transient nature of holiday play schemes. It covers ways in which registration personnel used the Act to raise standards, eg ‘counselling out’, making requirements and conditions, and advising and resourcing service providers. The concluding discussion points to the need for further policy development in this area.     

Voter Preferences and State Regulation of Smoking

Voters' preferences for smoking restrictions in restaurants, bars, malls, indoor sporting events, and hospitals are consistent with state-level restrictions on smoking in each of these public areas. This analysis is based on constructed measures of political pressure that take into account both individual preferences and voting behavior. Although smokers are less likely to vote than nonsmokers, their lower voting rate does not substantially influence the probability that a state has a restriction. Other factors, such as tobacco's role in the state economy and state income, are rarely influential.     

Conscious Regulation of Sexual Arousal in Men

The goals of this study were to examine the effectiveness of emotional reappraisal in regulating male sexual arousal and to investigate a set of variables theoretically linked to sexual arousal regulation success. Participants first completed a series of online sexuality questionnaires. Subsequently, they were assessed for their success in regulating sexual arousal in the laboratory. Results showed that the ability to regulate emotion may cross emotional domains; those men best able to regulate sexual arousal were also the most skilled at regulating their level of amusement to humorous stimuli. Participants, on average, were somewhat able to regulate their physiological and cognitive sexual arousal, although there was a wide range of regulation success. Whereas some men were very adept at regulating their sexual arousal, others became more sexually aroused while trying to regulate. Age, sexual experience, and sexual compulsivity were unrelated to sexual arousal regulation. Conversely, sexual excitation, inhibition, and desire correlated with sexual arousal regulation success. Increased sexual excitation and desire were associated with poorer regulatory performance, whereas a propensity for sexual inhibition due to fear of performance consequences was related to regulatory success.     

An empirical analysis of alleged misunderstandings of coefficient alpha

Cronbach’s alpha is the most frequently used measure to investigate the reliability of measurement instruments. Despite its frequent use, many warn for misinterpretations of alpha. These claims about regular misunderstandings, however, are not based on empirical data. To understand how common such beliefs are, we conducted a survey study to test researchers’ knowledge of and beliefs about alpha. For this survey, we selected authors from recent papers, in which alpha was used. The results provide empirical evidence for the claims that researchers have difficulty interpreting alpha in a proper way. At the same time, we expounded the claims, by showing that whereas some beliefs are fairly typical, others are not so often seen. This non-technical paper, aimed at both statisticians and substantive researchers, is concluded by providing a few suggestions that could be helpful to get us out of the current stalemate regarding the usability of alpha and its alternatives.     

Regulation of aging by germline stem cells

The author discusses a recent paper published in Science (see Arantes-Oliveira) that shows that germline stem cells in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans send a signal to a steroid hormone receptor and a forkhead-family member to stimulate reproduction and shorten longevity. The author compares the new results to previous findings in the fruit fly and discusses possible mechanisms behind the inverse relationship between reproduction and life-span extension.     

Regulation of US Charitable Solicitations Since 1954

A major shift in the climate for the solicitation of charitable donations in the United States occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. Starting with legislation passed by the Legislatures of New York and Massachusetts in 1954 and eventually including 40 largely similar laws in force today, state governments grew to playing a predominant part in the regulation of appeals for public support for charitable activities. State regulators, voluntary oversight and advocacy groups, accounting standards-setting bodies, and the data-collection activities of the Internal Revenue Service all influenced the development of the body of regulations which now shape the process of seeking support for nonprofits?? work. This article summarizes the effect of earlier innovations in the field of fundraising and then examines the interplay of public and private actors in the course of the creation of the present regulatory climate.     

Prostitution: Collectives and the Politics of Regulation

The regulation of prostitution is changing as rapidly as its organization and sex workers have had more influence on this than usually recognized in either theory or research on prostitutes' rights. Using examples from the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand, the paper shows how elements of prohibition, legalization and decriminalization are variously adopted in response to specific interests and their political representation. With the focus on law reform, the impact of collectives is compared to that of other contemporary players in the politics of prostitution, including community groups, councils, the police and the sex industry itself. But attention is also paid to health and occupational initiatives, and the conditions promoting the self‐regulation of sex work both by prostitutes and employers. The paper also argues that the role of collectives, together with changes in the wider regulatory context, reflect and reinforce increasing differentiation within prostitution.     

Charity Watchdogs and the Limits of Information-Based Regulation

Transparency concerns and the concomitant accountability challenges have motivated policy and legal scholars to explore information-based regulatory approaches. We examine their usefulness in the context of the nonprofit sector which tends to show signs of governance failure. Although nonprofits are required by law to disclose information on fund use, nonprofit donors face difficulties in accessing and interpreting information about how nonprofits are deploying resources. Charity watchdogs make this information available to donors in a convenient format. In theory, this should allow donors to reward nonprofits that devote resources to service delivery and to punish those that are less careful about controlling overheads. To test the relationship between charity ratings and donations, we examine 90 nonprofits in the state of Washington for the period 2004–2007. Drawing on ratings data provided by Charity Navigator, we find that changes in charity ratings tend not to affect donor support to these nonprofits. We explore this statistical finding via interviews with 10 charities located in Washington State. Supporting the statistical results, we find that charities believe that donors tend not to systematically embed ratings in their donation decisions. Instead, they believe that donors assess nonprofits’ effectiveness and trustworthiness via other means such as familiarity, word-of-mouth, or the visibility of the nonprofit in their community. In sum, the policy challenge is to provide information which users desire such as organizational effectiveness as opposed to basic fund allocation in the case of non-profits. What matters for policy efficacy is not how much information is provided but of what type.     

A Graphical Exposition of the Economic Theory of Regulation

This article provides a novel graphical exposition of the economic theory of regulation. In particular, we show—within a single graphical construct—a number of features that emerge from the theory. Through a variety of applications we are able to provide an improved understanding of many questions that have vexed economists, including the markets likely to be chosen for regulation, the propensity of regulatory benefits to be spread across interest groups, the symbiotic nature of regulation and cross-subsidization, and the economics of deregulation. We also are able to depict graphically the relationship between the economic theory of regulation and the traditional normative model of regulation, which assumes that regulators maximize social welfare. (JEL D72 , L51 )     

青年民间组织规制的伦理向度

民间组织的兴起使公共福利和市场供给的不足得以代偿,但公众对民间组织的价值吁求超越了其伦理现实。文章从伦理的视角研判青年民间组织生长所面临的民间性阙如、非营利性蜕变、制度虚置与内部治理失范、参与失灵与公共理性缺位等诸多困境,探寻青年民间组织伦理规制之可能。     

浅析公交营运企业的成本规制

该文针对城市公共交通行业现状及发展瓶颈,借鉴国内外规制理论,阐述了建立公交企业成本规制的必要性、主要思路及基本原则。     

Unforeseen Implications of Regulation to Authenticity in Clinical Practice

The authors, both long-time LCSWs, utilize an existential framework and postmodern lens to explore the implications of increased professional regulation in clinical practice. Specifically emphasized, are the themes of litigation-fear and the threat of license revocation that are prevalent in the field of clinical social work at this time. The authors argue that this “climate of fear” can lead to a slippery slope for a profession that has long valued the individual’s right (both client’s and practitioner’s) to self-determination, authenticity, and creativity and call for an increased conversation among practitioners about the desired role of regulation in the profession with the overall goal of protecting a true understanding of ethics in social work.     

Regulation of technology adoption when individuals pursue multiple utility

Should regulatory approaches to technology adoption in U.S. agriculture be command and control in character, or use economic incentives? This paper addresses this question while testing the “I and We” multiple utility model and suggesting socioeconomic theory as a conceptual framework. Results show that one perhaps cannot understand farmer response to regulation without considering norms. Introducing the “We-utility” notion into the standard “I-utility” model adds explanatory power. Government's regulatory role needs to be shifted to first providing the impetus for action and then to helping in the evolution of norms, no matter which approach is used. The proposed socioeconomic theory goes beyond standard microeconomics by including both the idea of norms and that of positive freedoms, and thus introducing ethical considerations into economic analysis.