“Life isn't yet over”: Older heroines in American popular cinema of the 1930s and 1970s/80s

This article analyzes the evolution of a significant undercurrent within American culture challenging the dominance of the cult of youth and masculinity, through the interpretation of selected American popular films of the 1930s and 1970s/80s featuring heroines over 60 years of age. These two eras, which witnessed the impact of elder advocacy on national legislation and social policy, generated films such asIf I Had A Million (1932),Make Way for Tomorrow (1937),Harold and Maude (1971) andThe Trip to Bountiful (1985). Through analyzing these films as well as related media trends, psychoanalytic approaches to the study of female representation in cinema are critiqued. While psychoanalytic approaches often stress the cultural dominance of an ahistorical patriarchy, a sociological model conceptualizes culture as a process constituted by communication and negotiation, resistance and rebellion as well as oppression and domination.This study was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Clark University Faculty Development Fund and the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College. I wish to thank the staff members of the Theatre Arts Library, University of California at Los Angeles and the Division of Film, Television and Recorded Sound, Library of Congress for their help in locating films and materials. Thanks also to Lois Banner, Ruth Jacobs, Elizabeth Markson, Carmen Sirianni, the members of my Aging and Society course (Clark University, Fall, 1987) and two anonymous reviewers who offered helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.     

Going to Pieces: Paul Monette and the Fragments of the Tribe

Author of the highly acclaimed Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and winner of the 1992 National Book Award for his autobiography Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette died of complications from AIDS in Los Angeles on February 12, 1995. His most recent work, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994), is his third volume in a trilogy of autobiographical writing on growing up gay, coming-out, and living with AIDS. A graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale University, Monette received a number of awards for his writing and his work as an outspoken voice in the battle against AIDS, including the National Book Award, three Lambda Literary awards, the PEN Center West Freedom to Write Award, and three honorary doctorate degrees, from Wesleyan University, the City University of New York, and the State University of New York at Oswego. A memorial service was held for Monette on Sunday, February 19, 1995, at the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Paul Monette was 49.     

Buchbesprechungen

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Dual Career Couples als eine Variante von Work-Life-Integration

Dual Career Couples as a form of work-life-integrationThe author discusses the situation of dual career couples, when both are university graduates following an own career. Basing on a respective publication she delineates the current, mostly American research and reports on several German research projects, which endeavour to analyse the relation between gender and inequality in dual career couples.     

Von der Supervision zur Mediation und zurück

From supervision to mediation and vice versaMediation in organizations becomes more and more important because of increasing conflicts. The question is, which competencies of the counsellor are necessary, and above all, whether mediation is a particular method. The author explains the method of mediation and illustrates his concept of “patchwork-mediation”. This procedure allows to build a bridge between supervision and mediation.     

Ebert. Wolfgang (2001): Systemtheorien in der Supervision — Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The Evolution of Knowledge and the Dynamics of an Industry Network

The paper moves a step forward in the direction of establishing a connection between the structure and evolution of knowledge bases and the structure and evolution of organizational forms in innovative activities in a science-intensive industry. The paper has an explicit focus on the dynamics of the network of collaborative agreements in R&D in the pharma/biotech industry after the “molecular biology revolution”. Using a comprehensive dataset, built by the authors integrating several sources in the industry, the dynamics of the network over time is extensively analyzed. With regards to network structure, it is found that, while the size of the network increases over time due to net flows of entry, its topological properties remain relatively unchanged. The evolution of the network has occurred without relevant deformations in the core-periphery profile. With regards to age-dependent propensity to collaborate, the paper finds that the extent of inter-generational collaboration is much more significant than intra-generational collaboration. In addition, the propensity of firms of a given generation to enter into collaboration with firms of a different generation increases with the distance between the two, while the total number of intra-generational collaborations decreases over time and, moreover, tends to decrease for most recent generations. In the paper a unitary and coherent explanation of the evidence is developed, coming to reveal the existence of a striking isomorphism between structural properties of the dynamics of knowledge and of the evolution of network structure. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.