Use of Technology in Delivering Career Services Worldwide

The authors review the trends in the use of computers in the delivery and support of career guidance and counseling identified at the symposium International Perspectives on Career Development. The papers presented emphasized that 20th‐century computer‐based systems continue to be used, mainly delivered via the World Wide Web. These systems are enhanced through audio, video, graphics, strategies to provide needs assessment, and support by cybercounselors or expert system design. The papers also revealed a new trend: the use of elegant Web sites to store and search immense libraries of resources needed by professionals and clients and to facilitate communication and collaboration among professionals in cyberspace. Concerns, issues, and resources related to many areas, including the readiness of clients to use computer‐based systems, were also raised; existing sources of guidelines are noted.     

Social identities and political cleavages: the role of political context

Summary. Using a novel method, the paper investigates the influence of social group identities on attitudes and on voting in a variety of political contexts. Examining the major regions of Britain, Canada and the USA, we find considerable national and regional diversity in the nature of social cleavages. For example, social class and race had widely different effects across societies, but within societies their effects on attitudes and on voting were very similar. However, despite that, age and religion had a similar effect on attitudes across societies; the effects on voting varied considerably. The significant within-country differences underline the importance of using region, rather than country, as the unit of analysis. More importantly, these results highlight the role of political context, especially competing cleavages and the structure of party competition, in the establishment of politically relevant social cleavages.     

Silphids in urban forests: Diversity and function

Many ecologists have examined the process of how urbanization reduces biological diversity but rarely have its ecological consequences been assessed. We studied forest-dwelling burying beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae)—a guild of insects that requires carrion to complete their life cycles—along an urban-rural gradient of land use in Maryland. Our objective was to determine how forest fragmentation associated with urbanization affects (1) beetle community diversity and structure and (2) the ecological function provided by these insects, that is, decomposition of vertebrate carcasses. Forest fragmentation strongly reduced burying beetle diversity and abundance, and did so far more pervasively than urbanization of the surrounding landscape. The likelihood that beetles interred experimental baits was a direct, positive function of burying beetle diversity. We conclude that loss of burying beetle diversity resulting from forest fragmentation could have important ecological consequences in urban forests.     

Household debt and financial assets: evidence from Germany, Great Britain and the USA

Summary.  We explore the determinants of debt, financial assets and net worth at the household level by using survey data for Germany, Great Britain and the USA. To identify which households are potentially vulnerable to adverse changes in the economic environment, we also explore the determinants of a range of measures of financial pressure: the probability that a household has negative net worth; the debt-to-income ratio; mortgage income gearing; the saving-to-income ratio. Our empirical findings suggest that the poorest and the youngest households are the most vulnerable to adverse changes in their financial circumstances.     

Something new in old Europe?

This paper investigates whether EU research programmes have led to innovations in European social research. This is based on an assessment of a group of EU‐funded projects on the changing nature of work in Europe. EU‐funded projects have contributed to the creation of a European social space for European researchers, but at the cost of consolidating English as the lingua franca of European social research. Such projects tend to involve heterogeneous research actors and are oriented towards policy issues. To some extent they are therefore representative of a ‘Mode 2’ form of knowledge production. More clearly, they have ensured that social research about Europe is no longer simply comparative research. The new EU Sixth Framework Programme on RTD will undermine many of these achievements through its focus on conventional definitions of ‘excellence’ and the insistence on large‐scale research instruments.     

The Exclusion of Disabled People from Positions of Power in British Voluntary Organisations

Disabled people are excluded in various ways from a wide range of social privileges, activities and institutions. Voluntary and charitable organisations promote themselves as champions of disabled people in their struggle for access to the ordinary choices and opportunities of everyday life. This paper reports the findings of an empirical study which demonstrate that in voluntary agencies governed by able-bodied people, disabled people are excluded from positions of power and influence, and they experience the same sorts of barriers and constraints as those with which they are confronted in the wider world. Furthermore, the development of agencies governed by disabled people themselves is constrained by their lack of access to money, staff and other resources.     

Raising the Stakes in Child-at-Risk Cases Eliciting and Maintaining Parents' Motivation

This paper, the third in a series concerned with family therapy in cases involving children at risk of abuse, describes an approach to maximising parents' interest and commitment to therapy. After overviewing the difficulties faced by therapists in working with parents who are notorious for their ‘resistance’, we provide guidelines for minimising the negative consequences of notification and for constructing therapeutic leverage in order to elicit and maintain parents' motivation throughout the course of therapy.