A Cognitive Stress Reduction Program for Recently Unemployed Managers

This study examined the effectiveness of a structured cognitive stress reduction program for unemployed managers involved in an outplacement program. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. One group of managers received structured weekly counseling using a cognitively based stress reduction program. They were compared with a control group that received unstructured advice about managing stress as part of a typical outplacement program. The managers who received the cognitive intervention, as compared with managers in the control group, found reemployment significantly sooner and showed reductions in levels of state anxiety and anger that were statistically significant.     

Engagement: Who's Engaging Whom?

A definition of ‘engagement’ in therapy is developed, based upon the proposition “the client engages the therapist”. Engagement is then distinguished from ‘joining’, and a consideration of the relational power between client and therapist, implied by this definition, shows it to be consistent with systemic theory for therapy.     

Youth Culture Religious Movements: Evaluating the Integrative Hypothesis*

This paper assesses the “integrative hypothesis” as an aid to understanding the current emergence of new religious movements appealing mainly to young persons. Four ways in which these movements reintegrate young persons into the social system are identified: adjustive socialization, combination, compensation, and redirection. The limitations of each of these as an explanation for the integrative consequences of youth culture religious movements are discussed. A distinction is made between adaptive movements which actually appear to reassimilate social “dropouts” into conventional instrumental routines, and marginal movements which appear to take converts out of conventional roles and routines, but which also perform latent tension management functions for the social system. The correlated properties of adaptive and marginal movements and the tendency for marginal movements to evolve into adaptive movements are discussed. Finally, the problem of “reductionism” in analyzing religious movements in terms of their latent integrative “functions” is discussed.     

Beyond reductionism,with invidious comparisons between behavioral and paretian sociology

An acceptable reductive analysis does no more nor less than find the constitutive elements of a phenomenon. It should focus on observables, including indirectly given data but not including merely convenient assumptions. It should state propositions which refer to variables which are generalizable. Using these criteria, behaviorism is found to be wanting. In contrast, Pareto's model of five significant residues provides for a constitutive analysis which uses observables and generalizable variables. Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York, August 1976.     

VOTING, SPATIAL MONOPOLY, and SPATIAL PRICE REGULATION

Regulations often require that local public utilities engage in high rates of freight absorption. These regulations, often mandating uniform pricing, are shown to arise logically as a consequence of self-interested voting behavior. We specifically consider the case of a single-plant spatial monopoly which is regulated by consumers distributed around the plant. Consumers may change their delivered price by voting to require a rate of freight absorption which differs from the profit-maximizing rate. Voting outcomes under a median voter model predict the high rate of freight absorption often observed in practice.     

Educational needs of inpatients with severe & persistent mental illness: a partial replication

Although a great deal has been written about the importance of patient education, few replications of past research have been conducted to increase clinicians' confidence in the conclusions of previous studies. This is especially true of studies conducted in clinical settings where findings may or may not be generalizable to other institutions. This partial replication study tested whether previous findings about patient education in an outpatient setting were applicable to an inpatient setting using a modified version of the instrument. A 1998 study published in this journal suggested that differences may exist between the perceived health education needs of outpatients and their health care providers. In this partial replication, we examined the differences between the educational needs of inpatients and those perceived by their attending nurses. As in the original study, we found discrepancies between patients' actual needs and nurses' perceptions of those needs, supporting the importance of assessing patients' health educational needs in the treatment planning process.