New uses of Delphi in strategy formulation

Delphi's traditional use in strategy formulation has been for forecasting the future. A more promising, yet largely unexplored use, is for analysing current problems related to setting objectives, generating alternatives, and evaluating potential strategies. Case examples illustrate the technique's flexibility and advantages. In particular, its two-way flow of anonymous information has important behavioural properties for the formulation of strategy.     

Some Observations on the Use of TA in Marriage Counseling*

Most marital difficulties are seen as a function of childhood problems leading to childhood solutions. This paper emphasizes the symbiotic aspect to marital problems both in terms of the individual's existential position and his racket/ racketeering behavior. The goal of treatment is to have the individual utilize his resources for himself and to negotiate these resources for his mate. A group of spouse and non-spouse members, coupled with a Transactional Analysis orientation, is seen as the most useful approach to effect change in a person, as well as in his relationship to his spouse.     

Rejection of the Mentally Ill: an Experiment in Labeling

Several studies of public rejection of the mentally ill using written vignettes have demonstrated limited support for the societal reaction perspective. Since written vignettes may be inadequate, this investigation used video-taped sequences of individual behavior during a counseling session. The study was a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial experiment with behavior, label, and actor's account as the independent variables. College students served as subjects. Both behavior and label (paranoid, normal) had significant main effects on the social rejection variable, whereas only label had a significant effect on the second dependent variable–perceived social competence. These findings are in contrast to the earlier studies and indicate that labels are likely to more powerfully affect public reaction to mental illness when behavior is directly perceived in a situational context.     

Aesthetic Identity,Race, and American Folk Music

This article uses the concept of aesthetic identity to interrogate the relationship among musical genres, social movements and racial identity. American folk music has at some times subverted and other times reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in twentieth-century United States. Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres represent our or their art, music, and literature. Genre boundaries then become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some other, either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music, American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to predominantly African- influenced, but with most exhibiting both. Before the era of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance. The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural project in the late 1930s and 1940s. Both academic elites and political activists constructed the genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording industry had dubbed race records and hillbilly music. American communists and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era. Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially unified genre, but quickly became whitened. My explanation for why the folk revival was so white revolves around three factors: the continuing legacy of commercial racial categories, the failure of the New Left to control music through a cultural infrastructure as effectively as had the old left, and the cultural momentum of an understanding of folk music as the music of the other at a time when blacks were trying to enter a system that white middle-class youth were rejecting.