Arbiters,Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of Business School Reputations1

How are organizational reputations established? Expanding on recent work that emphasizes the construction of reputations rather than their cultural content, we explore how forces in the organizational environment define organizational reputation. Specifically, we demonstrate how two types of mediators—reputational arbiters and reputational entrepreneurs—influence the development of reputations by organizing and managing the information on which reputations are built. Buttressing our theoretical claims with 30 interviews of business school administrators, we find that these mediators play a central role in determining organizational reputations by engaging in three processes of information manipulation: synthesis, selection, and simplification. In addition to specifying the key role that the manipulation of information by outsiders plays in the development of reputation, this approach suggests the importance of the interrelationships among these mediators in the determination of reputational standing.     

Ethical Practice and Narratives of Resistance to Violence: Becoming Resilient Part 2

This paper is the second part of a previous publication in this journal and is based on a plenary address at the 30th Australian Family Therapy Conference in 2009. It develops the idea of ethical practice in therapy for men and boys with a history of significant violence and abuse. This fosters a connection with resilience that resists or refuses to participate in historical narratives that support violence and its effects. In the paper, I provide several therapeutic examples of working with narratives of violence and present a theory of resilience and ethical practice drawing on the ideas of Deleuze. This helps to understand resilience as a process of ethical agency, creative renewal, and the production of expansive difference.     

Proportional hazards models with discrete frailty

We extend proportional hazards frailty models for lifetime data to allow a negative binomial, Poisson, Geometric or other discrete distribution of the frailty variable. This might represent, for example, the unknown number of flaws in an item under test. Zero frailty corresponds to a limited failure model containing a proportion of units that never fail (long-term survivors). Ways of modifying the model to avoid this are discussed. The models are illustrated on a previously published set of data on failures of printed circuit boards and on new data on breaking strengths of samples of cord.     

Spectacular Youth Cultures and Ageing: Beyond Refusing to Grow Up

For decades, research on the subject of music and style subcultures has presented participation in such groups as a temporary manifestation of adolescence. More recently, sociologists have begun to examine the lives and identities of those who remain involved in so‐called ‘youth’ subcultures beyond their teens and early twenties. This article examines the ways such work has begun to illuminate the role of enduring subcultural identities as part of the developing lives of older participants. Such work, I suggest, rejects simplistic understandings of older participation as a refusal to grow up in favour of a detailed focus on the relationships between continuing participation and other aspects of developing adult life, including career, family and the ageing body. Identifying core themes and debates while identifying areas for further work, I argue that this developing field of research addresses one of the primary criticisms of youth cultural research in the past, which is that such research has tended to examine leisure related affiliations in a fixed period of time and in isolation from the rest of participants’ lives.     

FROM SOCIAL PROBLEM TO PERSONAL ISSUE: THE LANGUAGE OF LIFESTYLE

In this paper the way in which the concept of lifestyle has been mobilized in the debate over healthcare in the last decade is analysed. Has the USA become a more compassionate nation as former President George Bush urged? Or have neo-conservative and right-wing groups continued to impede the democratization of well-being? And, in the absence of full democratization through public provision, how have private sector health and fitness industries capitalized upon the lifestyle concept in the marketing of their wares? These questions are addressed as they pertain to the United States in the time immediately prior to and during the Clinton period.     

Playing by the rules: Restricted endowment assets in colleges and universities

Endowments serve as financial buffers and safety nets for post‐secondary institutions in uncertain financial times. Donor‐restricted gifts and bequests often complicate the management and deployment of endowment assets. Public policy concerns, the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Acts, and related case law are changing approaches used by states to alter the donors' “dead hand” when time and circumstances make carrying out conditions of restricted bequests unworkable.     

The relationship between child disability and living arrangement in child welfare

The influence of disabilities on placement outcomes was examined for 277 children who were removed from their biological parents due to substantiated maltreatment. Results indicated that children with a disability were less likely to reunify and more likely to reside in nonkin foster care two years later than typical children. Children with cognitive, emotional /behavioral, and physical disabilities were over four times more likely to be permanently living in nonkin foster care than to be reunified.     

Effects of method on participants and disclosure rates in research on sensitive topics

This study replicates and extends the research of Rosenbaum, Rabenhorst, Reddy, Fleming, and Howells, which also appears in this special issue. Responses from 398 randomly assigned participants regarding differentially sensitive topics were collected via four methods of data collection: written questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, and an automated telephonic data collection system (ATDC). Several significant differences in data collection methodology and topic area were found, including greater disclosure of sensitive information via the ATDC system than via face-to-face and paper-and-pencil conditions. Participants who were assigned to the ATDC condition felt significantly more comfortable answering questions compared to those in the face-to-face interview condition. Participants in the telephone interview condition reported answering significantly more carefully than participants answering via written questionnaire. Taken together, the results of this study and the previous one it replicates suggest that the ATDC produces disclosure rates that are at least equivalent to, if not greater than, those generated using traditional methods for collecting sensitive data.     

An Exploration of African American Forest Landowners in Mississippi

In Mississippi counties with large African American populations, forest resources constitute one of the most important agricultural outputs. Despite the efforts of natural resources extension personnel to provide educational programming to this group, little is known about their needs, concerns, and meanings of the landscape for them. Research has taken place in the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia; however, forests and African American forest landowners in Mississippi face unique social, historical, and ecological contexts that need to be examined. If forests and forestry programs are to provide an equitable distribution of benefits to diverse populations in Mississippi, a culturally based understanding of landowners is needed with special attention to those populations who have been traditionally underserved because of race and income. We address this need by presenting data from focus groups with African American forest landowners in several rural Mississippi counties. Findings indicate that a complex relationship with the landscape has inculcated much traditional knowledge about forest resources, opportunities and challenges to participation in programs and landowner associations, and concerns over heir property, among other factors. We discuss implications for how forestry can meet the sustainable natural resource goals and rural development needs of African American landowners and communities.     

Early Adolescents' Perceptions of Mothers' and Fathers' Parenting Styles and Problem Behavior

We investigated early adolescents' perceptions of parenting styles in mother–father–adolescent triads along with child self-reported problem behaviors (substance abuse and delinquency). We also examined the various combinations of mothers' and fathers' parenting styles by child gender in relation to problem behavior. Participants included 3,353 children (aged 12 to 14) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—97. Results from our structural equation model indicated that mothers and fathers may use different parenting strategies and that permissive parenting may not be as detrimental as previously assumed. In addition, youth perceptions of each parent were equally important in explaining problem behavior among both daughters and sons, but the perception of an authoritarian mother showed stronger adverse effects on sons, even after controlling for poverty and peer influence.