Professionals' attitudes towards men in early childhood education: A national study

A national sample of women and men working in early childhood education was drawn from the membership of the National Association for the Education of Young Children in order to assess their attitudes toward the suitability, professional practice, and administrative capabilities of men in early childhood education. Men and women were found to hold similar views toward the capabilities and roles of male preschool teachers across all these areas. The general lack of polarity of attitudes between men and women on many popularlyheld beliefs about men in the early childhood field is discussed in relation to previous alleged stereotyped attitudes toward male preschool teachers.     

城市化、分权与农村生活的重组

文章关注于发展中国家城市化的当代模式，并探讨这些模式对农村发展的涵义。发展中国家的不同国家和地区之间的城市化并不是统一的模式，且当代城市化模式所导致的在农村-城市联系中经济和社会多样性的程度是前所未有的。移民和分权是城市化在微观层次的两方面。城市化必然意味着或是永久的或是暂时的从农村流向城市的人口的净转移，而这些移民也对农村地区不平等产生了影响。而发展中国家城市化的一个新特征表现在它是伴随着行政的分权而发生的。分权的一个结果是使影响地方发展的行动者增加，另一个结果是没有任何一个人可以垄断资源或外部联系和信息。     

Global generations: social change in the twentieth century

The concept of generation within sociology has until recently been a marginal area of interest. However, various demographic, cultural and intellectual developments have re-awakened an interest in generations that started with the classic essay by Karl Mannheim. To date, the sociological literature has generally conceptualized generations as nationally bounded entities. In this paper we suggest that the sociology of generations should develop the concept of global generations. This conceptual enhancement is important because the growth of global communications technology has enabled traumatic events, in an unparalleled way, to be experienced globally. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the era of international generations, united through print media, and the mid-twentieth century saw the emergence of transnational generations, facilitated by new broadcast communications. However, the latter part of the twentieth century is the period of global generations, defined by electronic communications technology, which is characterized, uniquely, by increasing interactivity. The 1960s generation was the first global generation, the emergence of which had world-wide consequences; today with major developments in new electronic communications, there is even more potential for the emergence of global generations that can communicate across national boundaries and through time. If in the past historical traumas combined with available opportunities to create national generations, now globally experienced traumas, facilitated by new media technologies, have the potential for creating global generational consciousness. The media have become increasingly implicated in the formation of generational movements. Because we are talking about generations in the making rather than an historical generation, this article is necessarily speculative; it aims to provoke discussion and establish a new research agenda for work on generations.     

Using and interpreting analogue designs

Researchers in rehabilitation counseling and disability studies sometimes use analogue research, which involves materials that approximate or describe reality (e.g., written vignettes, videotaped exemplars) rather than investigating phenomena in real-world settings. Analogue research often utilizes experimental designs, and it thereby frequently possesses a high degree of internal validity. Analogue research allows investigators to exercise tight control over the implementation of the independent or treatment variable and over potentially confounding variables, which enables them to isolate the effects of those treatment variables on selected outcome measures. However, the simulated nature of analogue research presents an important threat to external validity. As such, the generalizability of analogue research to real-life settings and situations may be problematic. These and other issues germane to analogue research in vocational rehabilitation are discussed in this article, illustrated with examples from the contemporary literature.     

Methods for comparing policies using multiple criteria: an urban example

This paper looks at a variety of methods that can be used in evaluating a set of alternate policies using multiple criteria. The methods examined are the structural mapping of indifferences, utility values, lexicographic ordering, factor analysis, concordance analysis and multidimension scaling. Each method is tested using hypothetical data for a problem in which alternative policies are proposed for allocating monies to housing and health projects in a town. The aim is to try to reveal as objectively as possible, a set of preferred alternatives from which one can be chosen in the political decision-making process. After describing and testing the methods individually, they are compared both on the basis of their results and on the principles involved in their approach. Conclusions about the validity of each method are given, and it is emphasized that all methods should only be used as aids in the choice of an optimal policy.     

Soft Regionalism in Action: Examining Voluntary Regional Councils’ Structures,Processes and Programs

In the United States, the voluntary regional council is the dominant organizational form used by local, state and federal agencies to address regional issues. However, research addressing the details of their operations including their structures, processes and programs has been limited. This article reports on a survey of thirty of these regional councils that are located in large metropolitan areas. The findings indicate that these councils reflect a form of “soft regionalism.” Primarily, they facilitate, coordinate and energize, but they don’t have the more expansive capabilities of consolidations, regional governments and annexations.     

The effects of governing board configuration on profound organizational change in hospitals

This study extends the literature on governing boards and organizational change by examining how governing board configurations have influenced profound organizational change in U.S. hospitals, and the conditions under which such change occurs. Hospitals governed by boards that more closely resembled a corporate governance model were more likely to experience positive changes such as diversification and merger and less likely to undergo negative changes such as closure. Organizational performance influenced change, but largely independent of governance configurations. Only in the case of closure did we find that governance configuration operated jointly with organizational performance.     

British sociology and public intellectuals: consumer society and imperial decline

The following is the lecture given for the BJS 2005 Public Sociology Debate given at the London School of Economics and Political Science on ll October 2005. This lecture on the character of British sociology provides a pretext for a more general inquiry into public intellectual life in postwar Britain. The argument put forward falls into several distinctive sections. First, British social science has depended heavily on the migration of intellectuals, especially Jewish intellectuals who were refugees from fascism. Second, intellectual innovation requires massive, disruptive, violent change. Third, British sociology did nevertheless give rise to a distinctive tradition of social criticism in which one can argue there were (typically home-grown) public intellectuals. The main theme of their social criticism was to consider the constraining and divisive impact of social class, race and gender on the enjoyment of expanding social citizenship. Fourth, postwar British sociology came to be dominated by the analysis of an affluent consumer society. Finally, the main failure of British sociology in this postwar period was the absence of any sustained, macro-sociological analysis of the historical decline of Britain as a world power in the twentieth century.