The Systems Psychodynamics of a Joint Venture: Anxiety, Social Defenses, and the Management of Mutual Dependence

Joint ventures, mergers and other forms oforganizational alliances are rapidly becoming a businessnecessity. However, on an almost daily basis, experiencesuggests that such alliances often pose critical dilemmas for those entering into them. Centralamong these are collaborating across differences inorganizational cultures and forging a new organizationalidentity. At a deeper level, there are also often paranoid concerns and fantasies about thelong-term lack of equity in the transfer of knowledgeand capability. This paper, therefore, outlines asystems psychodynamic perspective on intergroup andinterorganizational relationships for developing an in-depthunderstanding of some common irrational and emotionaldifficulties alliance relationships face. It then goeson to describe an illustrative case and concludes with an appraisal of the advantages of a systemspsychodynamic conceptual perspective — taking bothstructure and process into account — which hasbeen neglected or minimized in the literature onorganizational alliances.     

Acknowledging and transcending ‘failure’: lifeworld possibilities and system constraints

In this article, we interrogate the concept of methodological ‘failures’ as they arise during fieldwork, in the process of collecting empirical data. We highlight how the techniques of validity horizon matrices and power analysis can be used as methodological tools to illustrate moments in the fieldwork process where these ‘failures’ occur and to illustrate what makes them ‘failures’ rather than just opportunities for learning. Drawing on examples from our own research, we use validity horizon matrices to suggest that ‘failures’ largely occur as a result of disagreements about backgrounded, implicit normative claims. We distinguish between ‘failures’ where communicative possibilities exist for negotiating norms and those where systemic constraints make critique impossible, though we acknowledge that in practice opportunities for negotiating power are limited.     

Digital Peer Interactions Affect Risk Taking in Young Adults

Digital interactions are an increasingly common communication method among young adults, but little is known about whether such remote exchanges influence riskiness. The current study examined whether observing and interacting with, versus simply observing, a digital peer affect risk taking in young adults aged 18–25. Participants who remotely viewed risky behavior by a peer or computer increased risk taking; however, compared to a control condition, only exposure to risk‐encouraging messages from a digital peer resulted in sustained risk‐taking behavior. These findings suggest that short text‐based messages from a risk‐encouraging digital peer can influence risk‐taking behavior in young adults. Given the rapid proliferation of digital communication among this age group, these results highlight a potentially important source of peer influence on risky behavior.     

Measuring the Effect of Sexual Health Education Training in Professionals: Structure of the Sexual Health Education for Professionals Scale (SHEPS) Among Marriage and Family Therapy Graduate Students

Marriage and family therapists and sexual health therapists are likely to receive training in graduate school that prepares them to encounter sexual concerns among clients, but there are few standard ways to assess the efficacy of this training. The Sexual Health Education for Professionals Scale (SHEPS) was developed to address this deficit. In this preliminary study, 163 marriage and family therapy graduate students completed the SHEPS prior to starting a graduate course in assessing and treating sexual concerns. Exploratory factor analyses indicate that the SHEPS subscales have good psychometric properties. The Skills and Knowledge subscales have factors labeled Typical Clients, Special Clients, Conservative Clients, and Ethically Complicated Clients. The Attitudes subscale had factors called General Sexual Attitudes, Valuing Sexual Health Training, Open to Providing Sexual Help, and Conservatism. This new instrument may be used to assess education and training of sexual health and marriage and family therapists. Larger sample sizes and longitudinal studies are needed in future.     

The volatility of the socially optimal level of investment

In this paper, an annual series for the socially optimal level of investment from 1960–1961 to 1993–1994 for Australia is derived from a vintage production function and compared to the actual series for investment over the same period. The vintage production function can be expected to yield a smoother socially optimal investment series than that derived from a nonvintage, homogenous capital production function. Even so, the resulting series for socially optimal investment is much more volatile than the series for actual investment. Several alternative assumptions are tried in an attempt to further smooth the socially optimal investment series. These include smoothing the assumed values of the exogenous variables, modelling adjustment costs and delivery lags, and changing the form of the production function. While these approaches do succeed in smoothing the investment series, in order for the socially optimal investment series to be as smooth as the actual series the assumed values of the parameters must be quite unrealistic. In the conclusion, we suggest that, in the future research on the socially optimal level of investment, the role of liquidity constraints and of irreversible investment should be investigated.     

A Social Work Perspective on Seclusion and Restraint in Australia’s Public Mental Health System

A social work perspective of the nature of seclusion and restraint in Australia’s public mental health systems is presented. The article suggests a theme of seclusion and restraint as a regulatory mechanism despite evidence of harm and even death. The case that the use of seclusion and restraint constitutes a social justice issue as it can be understood as an abuse of human rights and form of torture is established. An incident of a person dying in an Australian mental health facility after being secluded is presented to substantiate this claim. An over focus on individual expressions of violence or risk can be at the expense of understanding the systemic and cultural nature of violence in mental health systems. It is important to understand the nature of, and perhaps to question the presumed necessity of, seclusion and restraint practices to ensure that social workers are not breaching their professional obligations to people who are mental health clients.     

Predicting treatment efficacy via quantitative magnetic resonance imaging: a Bayesian joint model

The prognosis for patients with high grade gliomas is poor, with a median survival of 1 year. Treatment efficacy assessment is typically unavailable until 5-6 months post diagnosis. Investigators hypothesize that quantitative magnetic resonance imaging can assess treatment efficacy 3 weeks after therapy starts, thereby allowing salvage treatments to begin earlier. The purpose of this work is to build a predictive model of treatment efficacy by using quantitative magnetic resonance imaging data and to assess its performance. The outcome is 1-year survival status. We propose a joint, two-stage Bayesian model. In stage I, we smooth the image data with a multivariate spatiotemporal pairwise difference prior. We propose four summary statistics that are functionals of posterior parameters from the first-stage model. In stage II, these statistics enter a generalized non-linear model as predictors of survival status. We use the probit link and a multivariate adaptive regression spline basis. Gibbs sampling and reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are applied iteratively between the two stages to estimate the posterior distribution. Through both simulation studies and model performance comparisons we find that we can achieve higher overall correct classification rates by accounting for the spatiotemporal correlation in the images and by allowing for a more complex and flexible decision boundary provided by the generalized non-linear model.     

Retail Agglomeration and Competition Externalities: Evidence from Openings and Closings of Multiline Department Stores in the U.S.

From the perspective of an existing retailer, the optimal size of a cluster of retail activity represents a trade-off between the marginal increases in consumer attraction from another store against the depletion of the customer base caused by an additional competitor. We estimate opening and closing probabilities of multi-line department stores (“anchors”) as a function of preexisting anchors by type of anchor store (low-priced, mid-priced, or high-priced) using a bias-corrected probit model with county and year fixed effects. We find strong negative competitive effects of an additional same type but no effect on openings of anchors of another type. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.