Assessing Adoptions in Difficulty

Correspondence to Dr David Howe, Lecturer in Social Work, University of East Anglia, School of Economic and Social Studies, Norwich NR4 7TJ. Summary Although most adoptions are judged a success, a small numberof families and their adopted children run into behaviouraland relationship difficulties. The Post-adoption Centre, London,is a specialist agency which works with a number of client groups,including adopters and their families. The assessments madeby the Centre's counsellors of adoptive families were analysed.Two dimensions defined the counsellors' assessments. One recognizeda strong developmental perspective and owed much to the recentwork of David Brodzinsky. The other emphasized the complex emotionalinteractions that can take place between parents and child.Because of its originality and ability to refine the qualityof assessments, the analysis concentrates on the second dimension.When the developmental and interactional perspectives are combined,five assessment themes emerge. These are described and illustratedwith case examples.     

SOME FACTORS AFFECTING MOBILITY IN THE LABOR MARKET FOR ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS

This study examines the effects of publication, geographic preferences, and institutional preferences on the mobility of academic economists during the period 1955-69. Using a sample of 3813 economists who published at least one article during this period, the analysis indicates that publications do promote upward mobility but to a limited extent. The number of publications rather than their quality promotes mobility, but movement occurs primarily within well-defined geographic regions. The market for academic economists appears to be strongly segmented along geographic lines. Moves within geographic regions tend to be to departments of equal or lesser prestige than the department from which the individual has moved.     

Changes in the Canadian Business and Legal Elites, 1870–1970*

Cet article examine les origines sociales et les activités de deux élites canadiennes au dix-neuvième et vingtième siècle, à savoir l'élite des affaires et du droit. Il fournit une explication provisoire des transformations qui ont eu lieu quant à l'aecès à la richesse, à l'autorité, au prestige et à l'influence au cours des cent dernières années. En tant que travail d'exploration, cet essai révèle le besoin d'aborder l'histoire de la stratification au Canada d'une façon jusqu'à maintenant négligée, à savoir par l'analyse historique des institutions jouant un rôle dans la stratification. This paper examines the social origins and activities of two Canadian elites, those of business and law, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It attempts a provisional explanation of the changes in access to wealth, authority, prominence, and influence that have occurred in the last hundred years. As an explanatory study, this paper suggests the need for an approach to the history of stratification in Canada that has not received much attention heretofore; namely, the historical analysis of stratifying institutions.     

ON CAPITAL, TIME AND THE NEOCLASSICAL PARABLES

Many of the paradoxes in capital theory arise from seeking a purely 'physical' measure for the aggregate stock of capital. Several recent papers made it clear that heterogeneous capital outfits cannot be measured by a single aggregate index which is independent of the rate of interest. This paper defines and proves the general properties of an index of capital intensity — the degree of 'roundaboutnes'— which admits both the physical and the time dimensions of capital. A modified form of the neoclassical parables is defined and proved to be universally valid despite reswitching.     

Social anthropology of the central Eskimo

The study of social organization has moved from a peripheral to a central position in the burgeoning literature of the Eskimo. Presentations of Eskimo kinship systems have had an important impact on attempts at classifying kinship terminologies and kinship has become a major preoccupation of field workers in the Central Eskimo regions in recent years.
Less well explored but still significantly represented in the recent literature are such topics as family and local organization, authority structure, alliance mechanisms, and cultural ecological explorations of features of society.
Future work in the social anthropology of the area will be affected strongly and limited by conditions of change and the study of social change itself is rapidly becoming the focus of the social anthropology of the Central Eskimo.