High School Reunions and the Management of Identity

Organized around an intersection of the past with the present, high school reunions confront those who attend with discontinuities in their own lives as well as the lives of others. Based on observations of and interviews with attendees at five reunions, we argue, contrary to many claims about the contemporary segmentation of the self, that reunion goers are able to construct accounts of coherent lives by reference to “true selves” independent of appearances. Although reunion attendees may attempt to manage impressions by controlling information about themselves, these efforts are limited by attendees efforts to sustain convictions of their own integrity. These convictions, however, also depend on accounts, albeit accounts directed inward. Moreover, the maintenance of this conviction depends on the successful “neutralization” of others' judgments.     

The value of a statistical life: A comparison of two approaches

Using an original data set, this article presents the first effort to compare systematically the values of a statistical life obtained from the two main methodologies existing in the literature—the revealed-preference approach (wage-risk analysis) and the contingent-valuation approach—applied to the same sample of individuals. A survey was conducted in the Montreal area with a questionnaire containing two series of questions: one set of contingent-valuation questions and one set of questions pertaining to the information necessary for performing a wage-risk study. The results show that the values of a statistical life obtained from each method are different from each other.This research was supported by the Fonds F.C.A.R. of the Quebec government, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and by the Fondation Mercure of l'École des Hautes Études Commerciales. The authors want to thank the editor and an anonymous referee for their useful comments.     

Commitment in same-sex love relationships

This study sought to desribe and compare commitment structures among lesbian and gay male living-together relationships, and to develop an instrument which would measure different dimensions of commitment among gay dyads without some heterosexual biases inherent in traditional measures of interpersonal commitment. Questionnaire data collected from 32 lesbians and 50 gay males who had lived together for at least six months were factor analyzed, yielding three factors: (1) intradyadic commitment, (2) extradyadic commitment, and (3) commitment-as-trust. On all three of these indices the lesbians scored somewhat higher than did the gay males, but in fact there were surprisingly few significant differences between the gay men and the lesbians. Suggestions in the data that lesbians report somewhat less social supports and are more concerned with couple boundary maintenance, whereas gay males report somewhat more jealousy and dependency, are discussed in terms of their implications for such relationships.     

Temporality and Social Change: The Case of 19th Century China and Japan

Manifold factors have been identified as causal mechanisms in social change, but an important one–temporality–has been neglected. Temporality is the social time that characterizes any society, and that social time is consequential for the rate and direction of change. The three dimensions of temporality are temporal pattern, temporal orientation, and temporal perspective. The differences between the Japanese and Chinese along these three dimensions help explain their differential responses to the 19th century Western challenge. Specifically, two propositions are examined in the light of the historical data: a society's temporality limits the range of adaptive responses to new circumstances, and the symbols of social time act as a mechanism of social control.