A special section for correspondence and controversy

With thanks in this issue to Joel E. Cohen of Rockefeller University, who agreed to the reprinting of his book review and suggested publishing the response it inspired; also to Victor R. Fuchs of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Paul A. Samuelson of MIT, and Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who consented to the publication of their correspondence. ED.Review of The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Democratic Countries Don't Have Enough Babies?Ben Wattenberg. New York: Pharos Books, 1987. Reprinted with permission from theWall Street Journal, August 6, 1987.     

Perceived importance of “social goals” in business organizations

Business organizations operate within a complex socio-technical environment. Interactions between these socio-technical dimensions and the managers' personal value systems are thought to influence managerial role patterns and decisions. This paper investigates shifts in perceived importance of “social goals” from a set of organizational goals. The research concludes that there has been no significant changes occurring in either the ordering or the clustering of organizational goals.     

Children's reactions to sibling loss

Loss of a child is a severe trauma to the members of any family. Although the reactions of parents to the loss of a child has received a considerable amount of attention in the literature, relatively little has been written about the impact of such a loss on the remaining sibling(s). The effect of sibling loss on a child is complicated by many factors; among them are the tendency of children to deny the reality of death and the feelings associated with this experience, as well as the manner in which the parents are able to cope with the loss. This article reviews the available literature and calls for more research dealing with the impact of the loss of a child on the entire family system.     

Fear of people with mental illnesses: the role of personal and impersonal contact and exposure to threat or harm

Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior. Focusing on perceived danger, we use a large national survey to test the "behavior hypothesis" in the general population. We reason that, if this hypothesis is correct, contact with people with mental illnesses should be associated with more perceived danger, and exposure to threat or harm should mediate this association. On the contrary, respondents with more personal and impersonal contact perceive people with mental illness to be less dangerous. Exposure to threat is more common among people with more contact, but this exposure explains very little of the variance in perceived danger. These findings do not support the conclusion that public fear of people with mental illness is due to the observation of violent behavior.     

The production of understanding

While there is little doubt that sociological theory and research has had an important impact on the way people think about health and health care, mental health and medical sociologists are often confronted with challenges concerning the utility of the work that they do. Among the doubters are deans, funding agencies and family members. We are challenged by the ascendency of biological interpretations of human behaviors, by the incompatibility between the contextual view we prefer and the very strong individualistic orientation of our culture, and by the fact that we do not have an applied arm that trains the professionals who treat health and mental-health conditions. How do we respond to this challenge? The title of this paper gives a short answer: "The Production of Understanding." I propose that a powerful but under-recognized value of our work is the generation of explanations about health and mental health matters that help people understand the other side of an "us"/"them" divide. We produce understanding in a context in which misunderstanding is regularly constructed by powerful people who offer victim-blaming explanations for the circumstances experienced by people with less power. The production of understanding serves as an important counterbalance to this tendency. Our work shapes the way people think about problems related to health and mental health, limits the power of inaccurate victim-blaming accounts and provides understanding about why health and mental health are mal-distributed among people from different social circumstances.     

Leadership efficacy: Review and future directions

The concept of leader efficacy has received relatively little attention in the leadership literature. This is somewhat surprising given that effective leadership requires high levels of agency (i.e., deliberately or intentionally exerting positive influence) and confidence. This review uses existing theory and research on leader efficacy as a point of departure for proposing an expanded and multi-level framework for understanding the domain of leadership efficacy that includes leader, follower, and collective efficacies. The primary goals are to provide a conceptual framework to stimulate future theory and research on building efficacious leadership and to understand how such leadership develops and has implications for effective performance.     

A Decision Framework for Managing Risk to Airports from Terrorist Attack

This article presents an asset‐level security risk management framework to assist stakeholders of critical assets with allocating limited budgets for enhancing their safety and security against terrorist attack. The proposed framework models the security system of an asset, considers various threat scenarios, and models the sequential decision framework of attackers during the attack. Its novel contributions are the introduction of the notion of partial neutralization of attackers by defenders, estimation of total loss from successful, partially successful, and unsuccessful actions of attackers at various stages of an attack, and inclusion of the effects of these losses on the choices made by terrorists at various stages of the attack. The application of the proposed method is demonstrated in an example dealing with security risk management of a U.S. commercial airport, in which a set of plausible threat scenarios and risk mitigation options are considered. It is found that a combination of providing blast‐resistant cargo containers and a video surveillance system on the airport perimeter fence is the best option based on minimum expected life‐cycle cost considering a 10‐year service period.