From Provocation and Combustibility Toward Mutuality: Once More with Less Rage,Please

This paper presents a summary and excerpts taken from the psychoanalytic treatment, spanning over 16 years, of a highly disturbed and provocative male patient. Prior to referral, the man had been unsuccessfully treated psychopharmacologically for a depressive illness with severe somatic and affective symptoms and behavioral disturbances. A highlight of the case is the emergence of a therapeutic impasse that developed around the patient's attempt to connect intensely with the analyst; the patient attempted to repair his own damaged phallic narcissism by demanding that the analyst participate in a ritualized sexual enactment, which threatened the destruction of the treatment process. The resolution of the impasse was accomplished through the analyst's reaffirming the frame and recovering his own disrupted composure and ref lectiveness, while maintaining a compassionate and caring attitude toward the patient.     

Die Kultur der Macht. Die Macht der Kultur

Acting in organizations is characterized by strategies of “Bemächtigung” (repression) just as “Ermächtigung” (empowerment): Everyone tries to push through its individual interests, legitimate or not. Thereby in every organization specific rules of game and stiles of play are developed. Altogether these rules constitute the specific organizational culture. In unfair games, strategies of repression are dominant. In fair games, all players try to realize over and over again a just balance of legitimate interests of all stakeholders. Supervision aims to strengthen “Spielmächtigkeit” (ability of play and game) so that its addressees are able to change unfair games into fair games. The know-how for this is here called “technology of empowerment”.     

Managing Technology for Competitive Advantage : Editors

The author demonstrates basing on a case study, that the development of a consultation system is a process that requires time and patience of everyone involved. Not a fast decided definition of a consultation method with the corresponding setting is the first step but a clarification of the request. That is what the author is pleading for a phase of detailed analysis with the potential client.     

Auftragsklärung: Interventionen auf dem Wege zur Konstituierung eines Beratungssystems*

The author demonstrates basing on a case study, that the development of a consultation system is a process that requires time and patience of everyone involved. Not a fast decided definition of a consultation method with the corresponding setting is the first step but a clarification of the request. That is what the author is pleading for a phase of detailed analysis with the potential client.     

Keines für alle!

The article is an answer to Hartmut Esser’s “One for All? The Weber Paradigm, the Moderate Methodological Holism Concept and the Sociological Explanation Model”, published earlier in this journal (KZfSS 58: 352–363). It explicates the differences between Essers sociological explanation model and the alternative model of moderate methodological holism. It analyses Esser’s misunderstandings and shows that his model — contrary to Esser’s “official” announcement — doesn’t entail the concept of macrodetermination, which is rightly so, because it doesn’t fit with Essers reductionist approach. The ontological and anthropological conceptions underlying the two explanation models are very different and lead to different methodologies.     

Wer spielt die Musik?

Media play a crucial role in the development of children and young people, together with the influence of parents, family and peer groups. Looking at an important topic in adolescents’ lives, i.e. contemporary music, this pilot study analyzes the relationship between media and interpersonal communication. Its theoretical grounds refer to the notion of a multi-step flow of communication. Based on a snowball sample of 72 pupils, aged between 14 and 16 and coming from different schools in Germany, 687 relations between respondents and their communication partners could be identified. Interviews were conducted face-to-face and by telephone in 2001. The questionnaire included a network generator based on seven items, an assessment of relationship characteristics and communication roles taken with each partner and several controls such as media use patterns or relevance and expertise in the field of music. According to our results, the concept of opinion leadership can be applied to the roles of pupils in the classroom, and the social network approach allows for a distinct view on their communication patterns. The size of pupils’ networks was between seven and 12 persons in average, most of the networks being dense and consisting of strong relationships. Due to the still important role of the parents, the homogeneity in age and education was rather low. The results also indicate the presence of opinion leaders among groups of adolescents, characterized by central positions within the communication network in class. The case study could identify several roles, e.g. stars, bridges, liaisons, structural holes and isolated persons. On the other hand, there is no evidence for a substantially different type of media use by opinion leaders, which challenges the original assumption of a multi-step-flow of communication.     

Goodness-of-fit tests for Pareto distribution based on a characterization and their asymptotics

In this paper we present a new characterization of the Pareto distribution and consider goodness-of-fit tests based on it. We provide an integral and Kolmogorov–Smirnov-type statistics based on U-statistics and we calculate Bahadur efficiency for various alternatives. We find locally optimal alternatives for those tests. For small sample sizes, we compare the power of those tests with some common goodness-of-fit tests.