Back to Normal: Gender and Disaster

Our earlier studies of Hurricane Andrew focused on the destruction of everyday life during the crisis itself and the reconstruction of a taken-for-granted world during the recovery period; this paper examines the significance of gender in these processes. The abrupt loss of taken-for-granted reality occasioned by the storm involved only a slight and momentary disruption of gender roles. The resilience of these roles can be understood only if gender is seen as a property of social organization that shapes not only interactional expectations and pressures, but also cultural and institutional processes, as well as bodily experiences.     

Introduction to the Special Issues on Societal Metabolism: Blending New Insights from Complex System Thinking with Old Insights from Biophysical Analyses of the Economic Process

Population and Environment -     

Johnson's Differentiation Theory: Is It Really Empirically Supported?

Michael Johnson's differentiation of “types” of domestic violence has had a significant impact on courts and providers, in part because of its claim to an empirical basis. Unfortunately, the label “situational couple violence” has already been used by judges and evaluators to minimize abuse claims in custody cases. Johnson's repeated assertion that SCV is the most common form of domestic violence reinforces the marginalizing of domestic violence. But what do his data actually show? Here Professor Meier takes a close look at the research Johnson relies on and finds that it fails to prove his thesis. Rather, the data suggest that Johnson has it exactly backward: Control-based abuse is probably far more common than “situational” domestic violence.     

Life Domain Satisfactions as Predictors of Overall Life Satisfaction Among Workers: Evidence from Chile

This article examines the subjective antecedents of life satisfaction of workers. Adopting a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, we assessed the unique influence that satisfaction with multiple life domains have on evaluative judgments of overall life satisfaction. Based on a nationwide sample of 530 Chilean workers, we simultaneously tested the effects of seven life domain satisfactions that have been consistently included in extant models of life satisfaction and subjective well-being. These were satisfaction with health, financial situation, social relationships, one’s self-worth, leisure-time, family, and work. Having controlled for age and gender, results showed that satisfaction with one’s financial situation was the dominant predictor of overall life satisfaction of workers, with a weight of .36. Satisfaction with family, work, and health had effects of .25, .14, and .14, respectively. Interestingly, satisfaction with one’s self-worth, leisure-time, and social relationships did not have statistically significant effects on life satisfaction, although the first two showed t values near the critical value.     

Social Work: Gender, Care and Justice

Correspondence to: Joan Orme, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Lilybank House, Bute Gardens, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8RT, UK. Summary This article, in examining gender and justice, seeks to examinethe relationship between feminist theory and social work. Specificallyit reviews writings on social work ethics and suggests thatlittle attention has been paid to feminist scholarship thatresonates with social work practice. Focusing primarily on communitycare, it demonstrates how debates within feminism have becomemore complex and have problematized understandings of both careand justice. It argues that for social work it is unhelpfulto dichotomize justice and care; we should aspire to just socialwork practice.     

Belonging and Wanting: Meanings of Social Class Background for Women's Constructions of their College Experiences

Data from 193 women who attended Smith College in the 1960s show that the women retrospectively represented college quite differently depending on their class background. Themes of both social segregation and academic unpreparedness were evident among the women from working- and middle-class families, while themes of a continuation of family tradition were evident among women from upper-class families. Interview data from seven women who graduated from Radcliffe in 1964 suggested that a sense of who belonged and who did not was keenly felt even by women from middle-class backgrounds, and was also noticed by women from upper-class backgrounds. It is noted that class plays a large role in constructing the markers that define "belongingness" on elite college campuses .     

Planning for technological innovation: Part II—investment in technological change in three major industries

In an article in the December 1977 issue the author described an analytical method to determine the reaction of British industry to the oil crisis. The purpose of this paper is to carry forward the discussion by examining and comparing circumstances in three British industries between 1963 and 1975.The paper aims first, to show how and why the cost structures of these three industries differ; second, to examine changes forced upon companies by inflation of earnings, statutory control of prices and the oil crisis; and finally to assess how far these congruent economic forces have impinged on tangible and intangible investment.The data used for this study were drawn from British and Canadian official statistics but, as described in Part 1, a new analytical technique was devised to give due weight to the full range of investment expenditure.     

A framework of decision making for technological change

The first article in this series2 drew a distinction between the costs of line operations- or current outputs—and those costs devoted to investment, or future outputs. As investment encompasses technological change—in practice it is dominated by it—this article examines some of the broader issues underlying decisions to invest and describes in outline a study being made of the economic criteria that are relevant to such decisions. In the longer term the objective is to develop a procedure or framework of criteria to assist the process of decision making; and this would include a frame of reference—a set of statistical time-series and analyses designed for the purpose.