The Primal Scene in and about Psychoanalytic Institutions

ABSTRACT

Drawing on notions of primal scene and Bion’s theorizing of groups, this essay looks at the elements in institutional groups where transgressions and corruption may appear and develop and examines the difficulties group members have in working through the violations and potential disruptions to the institution’s functioning.     

Entrepreneurship by Any Other Name: Self-Sufficiency Versus Innovation

Entrepreneurship has been promoted as an innovative strategy to address the employment of people with disabilities. Research has predominantly focused on the self-sufficiency aspect without fully integrating entrepreneurship literature in the areas of theory, systems change, and demonstration projects. Subsequently there are gaps in services, policies, and research in this field that, in turn, have limited our understanding of the support needs and barriers or facilitators of entrepreneurs with disabilities. A thorough analysis of the literature in these areas led to the development of two core concepts that need to be addressed in integrating entrepreneurship into disability employment research and policy: clarity in operational definitions and better disability statistics and outcome measures. This article interrogates existing research and policy efforts in this regard to argue for a necessary shift in the field from focusing on entrepreneurship as self-sufficiency to understanding entrepreneurship as innovation.     

Strategic Experimentation

This paper extends the classic two-armed bandit problem to a many-agent setting in which N players each face the same experimentation problem. The main change from the single-agent problem is that an agent can now learn from the current experimentation of other agents. Information is therefore a public good, and a free-rider problem in experimentation naturally arises. More interestingly, the prospect of future experimentation by others encourages agents to increase current experimentation, in order to bring forward the time at which the extra information generated by such experimentation becomes available. The paper provides an analysis of the set of stationary Markov equilibria in terms of the free-rider effect and the encouragement effect.     

Hong Kong: From Worker to Manager

Review article on: Made by Hong Kong. Edited by Suzanne Berger and Richard K. Lester The Hong Kong Advantage. By Michael T. enright, Edit E. Scott and David Dodwell     

Lesbians and tech: Analyzing digital media technologies and lesbian experience

The rise of the popular Internet has coincided with the increasing acceptance, even assimilation, of lesbians into mainstream society. The visible presence of lesbians in the tech industry and in digitally mediated spaces raises a set of questions about the relationship between queer identities and Internet technologies. This introduction to a special issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies explores some of these questions and provides an overview of the articles that follow.     

Disproportionality in education and employment outcomes of adult foster care alumni

Racial similarities and disparities in the education and employment of 134 African American and 574 White adults placed in foster care as children were examined. Logistic regression was used to compare differences among these young adult alumni who were served by a voluntary foster care agency in 23 U.S. communities. When controlling for demographic background, risk factors, and foster care experiences, race/ethnicity was a significant factor only in the increased odds of White alumni having income at or above poverty level, three times poverty level, and home/apartment ownership compared to African Americans.     

Are Blacks and Hispanics Disproportionately Incarcerated Relative to Their Arrests? Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality Between Arrest and Incarceration

Do large racial and ethnic disparities in prison populations reflect systematic racial and policy discrimination in the criminal justice system, or do they reflect disproportionate involvement of blacks and Hispanics in “serious” or street crime? Our investigation of this question keys off the approach initiated by Alfred Blumstein is his pioneering studies on the topic. While yielding important findings, there are, however, substantial gaps in the empirical literature on the racial disproportionality issue. We attempt to fill those gaps by (1) using both data on prison admission as well as in-stock prison populations, (2) presenting more recent racially and ethnically disaggregated arrest and incarceration data from Pennsylvania for 2003–2007, and (3) including Hispanic offenders in our racial and ethnic disproportionality comparisons. Our results indicate, first, that the representation of blacks, whites, and Hispanics among offenders admitted to state prison and in the prison population corresponds closely to their representation in arrest statistics. Second, using arrests as a marker of violent offending, the overrepresentation of blacks among offenders admitted to state prisons occurs because they commit a disproportionate number of frequently imprisoned (i.e., violent) crimes. Third, for those offenses where there is a within-race difference between arrest and incarceration representation, Hispanics experience the greatest disadvantage. Fourth, failing to account for Hispanics in white and black estimates tends to inflate white proportions and deflate black proportions of arrests, admissions, and prison population estimates, masking the “true” black and white racial disproportionality. We conclude that while there is a need for continued concern with possible racial discrimination in justice system processing, this concern should not distract attention from what arguably is the more important matter—ameliorating the social environmental conditions that foster disproportionate minority (especially black) involvement in violent crime.     

Making it in America: High school completion by immigrant and native youth

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we find that first-generation youth of Hispanic, Asian, and African heritage obtain more education than their parents, but the second generation and third or higher generations lose ground. Differences in dropout rates by race-ethnicity and immigrant generation are driven by differences in human, cultural, and social capital. Low levels of family human capital, school social capital, and community social capital place the children of immigrants at risk of dropping out. However, cultural capital and immigrant optimism buffer first-generation Hispanic youth and the children of Asian immigrants from the risk of dropping out of high school. While human and social capital resources improve with immigrant generation, cultural capital diminishes.