The Best Seller as an Indicator of Societal Narcissism: Is There a Trend?

A content analysis of the subject matter of nonfiction bestsellers was performed to assess changes in societal narcissism.A number of content categories were identified, a priori, asindicative of narcissism, conceptually defined in terms of self-absorption:e.g., concern for psychic self-improvement, mysticism, and aninterest in health, physical fitness, diet, and sexuality. Anunobtrusive measure, the Dewey Decimal Classification number,was used to sort best-selling titles into narcissistic and non-narcissisticgroups for the years 1950 through 1979. As hypothesized, societalnarcissism, as reflected in popular reading preferences, increasedover the three-decade period.     

FIRM AND INDUSTRY RESPONSE TO CHANGED MARKET CONDITIONS: AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

This paper describes an evolutionary theory of the response of firms in a competitive industry to changed market conditions. Search and selection replace the more orthodox assumptions of profit maximizing and zero profit long run equilibrium. The particular assumptions needed to assure that the direction of response of such an evolutionary system is the same as that predicted by more orthodox theory are explored. While an evolutionary theory and a more orthodox one yield many of the same positive qualitative predictions, they differ sharply in a number of other respects, and these are considered in detail.     

'The State': A Comment on Abrams, Denis and Sayer

Abstract This paper answers the question,‘what is the state?’as posed in Abrams (1988) and Denis (1989), by examining Sayer's (1987) realist reconception of ‘relations of production’ and their ‘ideal superstructures’. It suggests that Sayer's alternative to ‘traditional’ marxism warrants a reappraisal of the relationship between Marx and Foucault. It concludes that ‘civil society’ and ‘the state’ are Janus-faces of production relations, generated by Foucault's ‘disciplinary practices’.     

THE DIVISION OF LABOR IN THE FIRM

In this paper, Adam Smith's theory of labor specialization is formulated and tested. The restrictions in the theory are explicitly derived, and Smith's Theorem — that specialization will rise with the output rate — is rigorously stated. A simple human capital model is then employed to derive testable implications of the theory. Wage equations are estimated for the U.S. shipbuilding industry during World War II. The peculiarities of the war data notwithstanding, the results are strongly supportive of the theory.     

EDUCATED GUESSES: THE PROCESS OF ANSWERING FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS IN SURVEYS

Responses to autobiographical questions are known to representmore than simply retrieval of information from memory; inference,cuing, and "availability" all play a role. Using responses toitems in four different surveys, we find that respondent motivationand ability, together with contextual cues, help determine howsurvey respondents answer knowledge questions about the worldaround us. Thus, we extend the domain of factual items for whichthe role of inferential processes is recognized, and we specifymore precisely the kinds of factors that respondents use inanswering such questions. We also find suggestive evidence thatattitudes influence answers to information questions, thus extendingas well the kinds of factors seen as likely to affect reportsabout facts.