Antisocial behavior in adoptees: Patterns and dynamics

A recurrent pattern of provocative, antisocial, delinquent behaviors has been found by the senior author and others to be characteristic of clinically referred adopted children and adolescents. Although the parents often defensively insist that adoption is not relevant to the child's problems, the child himself frequently reveals obsessive fantasies about his birth parents. The underlying psychodynamics include the child's inability to integrate two sets of parental images—often one bad and the other good—into a single realistic image, and resultant impairment in the development of the superego. A negative self-image is often mirrored by the adoptive parents' projection of their own unacceptable impulses onto the child and the birth parents. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for post-adoption counseling, clinical treatment, open records, and screening of potential adoptive parents.     

Sexual mate-swapping: A comparison of “normal” and “clinical” populations

While the results of research by sociologists and psychologists indicate that sexual mate-swapping is not a pathological behavior, psychodynamic considerations suggest that mate-swappers may have had difficulty adequately completing the developmental tasks of adolescence. Large scale surveys support this speculation in that mateswappers recall more unhappy childhood experiences and extremes of either parental overprotectiveness or neglect than do matched populations of non-mate-swappers. The researcher hypothesized that mate-swapping may represent an attempted solution to long standing individual and/or marital problems resulting from these earlier difficulties. An exploratory study of six mate-swapping couples in marital therapy supported the researcher's speculation that mate-swapping among a client population should be viewed from both a sociological and psychodynamic perspective. Further studies are needed to ascertain to what extent individual personality factors influence the choice of mate-swapping among the general, non-client population.     

The Benefits and Pitfalls of Social Capital: Empirical Evidence from Two Organizations in the United Kingdom *

Recently, there has been a shift in the way management scholars view the firm, from traditional models that are based on ideas of opportunism and market failure to newer knowledge‐based theories that argue for a more socialized perspective. One of the key components of these theories is the notion of social capital. Social capital is the set of resources that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of their social connections. As such, it is a resource that is jointly owned. Most recent research adopts a more‐is‐better approach to social capital, suggesting that individuals with larger quantity of ties derive more positive benefits. However in this paper, we argue that using social capital has both benefits and drawbacks for organizations, and that these positive and negative aspects of social capital occur simultaneously. To substantiate our claim, we use data collected from sets of interviews with senior and middle managers in two organizations in the United Kingdom. Our findings indicate that while social capital has many beneficial effects with respect to information access and retrieval, community building, and underlying group norms, there are also a number of less‐beneficial aspects, which are under‐explored in the current empirical literature. Furthermore, we suggest that organizations must develop an understanding of the bridging and bonding elements of social capital, as these are critical for its implementation. Implications of the research findings and future research directions are discussed.     

Child abuse in South Africa: rights and wrongs

In a country in which human rights feature prominently in our discourse about who we are, as well as in the South African constitutional and legal framework, so many wrongs continue to be done to children. One category of wrongs is abuse, but it is not the only one. Poverty, patriarchy and gender violence, as well as the socialised obedience, dependency and silence of women and children, create conditions in which abuse can occur, often with few consequences. South Africa has extremely high rates of both physical and sexual abuse of children. Progressive, rights‐based legislation exists to protect children, but it is not adequately supported or resourced by services to fulfil their provisions. Child abuse and neglect will not be significantly reduced in South Africa, without simultaneous improvements in the social and economic conditions in which very large numbers of children live. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

High Performance Work Practices and Firm Performance: A Longitudinal Case Study

Accumulating research suggests that the adoption of high performance work practices (HPWPs) is related to organizations' performance. The evidence base is limited by its reliance on retrospective survey reports. This study uses an intervention, including longitudinal interview and survey reports, of the implementation and outcomes of the introduction of HPWPs alongside time series data of objective performance metrics recorded before and after the intervention. The results showed that the implementation of HPWPs was associated with subsequent and sustained increases in productivity and safety performance. The study suggests that a specifically designed intervention involving HPWPs can have beneficial effects both on productivity and safety, but other intermediary variables associated with the implementation process may be critical in mitigating potentially detrimental worker welfare effects arising from work intensification.     

Portfolio decision-making genres: A case study

This article addresses the portfolio management practices and challenges of contemporary firms. Based on a review of the extant literature on project selection, termination and deletion decisions, we conducted an in-depth interview study with 19 key informants in 11 multinational firms. We identified three genres of portfolio management decision making: formalist-reactive, intuitive, and integrative. Each genre can be described by a unique set of portfolio management practices. For example, formalist-reactive firms rely on quantitative criteria while intuitive firms prefer qualitative criteria. In addition, each genre has to overcome a unique set of challenges. We discuss the three genres in detail and provide several implications for portfolio management decision making.     

The Changing Family and Aging Populations

This is an expanded version of comments on the future of the demography of aging at an invited session of the 2008 annual meeting of the Population Association of America. In an introduction, John Haaga offers reasons for a revival of interest in population aging, including greater realization of plasticity in aging trajectories at both individual and societal levels. Linda Martin proposes that population scientists working in aging emulate those studying fertility and family planning in previous decades, learning from interventions (in this case, aimed at increasing retirement savings and reducing disability at older ages). Changes in family structure will increasingly affect new cohorts of the elderly, and Linda Waite speculates on the ways in which changes in the economy, medicine, and the legal environment could affect the social context for aging. Research on mortality at older ages is “alive and well” asserts James Vaupel, who sets out six large questions on mortality trends and differentials over time and across species. Lastly, Wolfgang Lutz expands the scope of projections, showing the considerable uncertainty about the timing and pace of population aging in the developing world and the effects on future elderly of the increases in educational attainment in much of the world during the second half of the twentieth century.     

Gender, Interpersonal Power, and Social Influence

This article reviews research on gender differences in power and their effect on social influence. Evidence indicates that men generally possess higher levels of expert and legitimate power than women do and that women possess higher levels of referent power than men do. These differences are reflected, to some extent, in the influence strategies used by men and women and, more clearly, in gender differences in social influence. Women generally have greater difficulty exerting influence than men do, particularly when they use influence that conveys competence and authority. These findings indicate that gender differences in influence are mediated by gender differences in power.     

Role Acquisition as a Social Process

A model of the role acquisition process is proposed based on data from 310 first-person written narratives of a single role entrance. Content analysis of data set II ( N = 110) of narratives, which included forty-seven different roles, provides support for the model. The model conceptualizes role acquisition as involving a sequence of four stages, characterized as (1) ambivalence, (2) absorption, (3) commitment, and (4) confidence, in which each stage involves a qualitatively different interaction between the person and the role: a different affective orientation on the part of the person toward the role, and a qualitatively different relationship between the person and role partners. Common features and heterogeneous effects of role type, social context, cognitive processes, and other factors at each stage are discussed.