Using logic programming to facilitate qualitative data analysis

Conventional word-processing programs and LOGLISP, a system which integrates logic programming with LISP, form the basis for QUALOG, a set of computer programs which facilitates the qualitative data analysis process. These programs aid the researcher's conceptual work in data analysis in four areas: 1) formatting the data as text files; 2) creating, organizing, and storing a knowledge base of information about the data; 3) testing knowledge-base queries relevant to working hypotheses for confirming and for disconfirming information; and 4) creating, organizing, and storing files for the researcher's memoranda.     

Union effects on employment stability: A comparison of panel versus cross-sectional data

In analyzing the impact of unions on employment stability, we introduce two innovations to correct for previous overestimates of the union effect: (1) a different approach to measure employment stability (although we use traditional measures for comparisons) and (2) panel data to obtain estimates uncontaminated by unmeasurable person differences between union and nonunion workers. Using common cross-sectional techniques, the new measures of employment stability indicate that unions account for 15 to 20 percent of employment stability variance rather than the 40 to 60 percent indicated in previous findings. Using panel techniques further reduces these measured union effects to no more than 11 percent. This research emanates from an undergraduate honors thesis written by McCutcheon, under the direction of Polachek. The authors wish to thank Thomas Kniesner, H. Gregg Lewis, and W. Stanley Siebert for valuable comments; Paul Jellinek and Lynn Igoe for superb editorial assistance; and the editor and a referee of this journal for valuable comments. The research was supported by the Carolina Population Center and the NICHD. All errors are the responsibility of the authors.     

Organizational Learning in Global Purchasing: A Model and Test of Internal Users and Corporate Buyers*

This research examines a model centered on organizational learning in purchasing. Two different studies are conducted to test the hypotheses among purchasing users (Study 1) and buyers (Study 2). The user sample consists of users representing 355 strategic business units of a Fortune 500 multinational corporation. The buyer sample consists of corporate buyers of 200 multinational corporations drawn from the membership directory of the National Association of Purchasing Management (NAPM). In each study, the focus is on the learning relationships between corporate buyers and internal users in the purchasing organization. Based on the two studies, the results suggest that organizational learning in the purchasing process is influenced by the organizational culture factors of localness, transformational leadership, and openness. Organizational learning has a positive effect on information processing in the purchasing system, which, in turn, has a positive influence on the cycle time of the purchasing process.     

“Disagreeable Echoes … Reached Me for Many Years After”: (An Excerpt from Free Associations)

This essay offers a comment on Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis from the perspective of British object-relations psychoanalysis. It reviews the different histories of psychoanalysis in Britain and the United States, noting the continuing clinical focus of the field in Britain, in both the public sector and in private practice, as a source of continuing strength. Psychoanalysis does not face the scale of crisis in the United Kingdom that it now does in the United States, possibly because it has never achieved the same degree of influence. I argue that a more important difference than that between “modernist” and “postmodernist” approaches to psychoanalysis lies between all psychoanalytic psychotherapies and the behavioural and pharmacological approaches to psychic distress that are becoming so invasive. A positive aspect of psychoanalytic modernism was its assertion of a shared human nature and of the right of all individuals to be treated as autonomous subjects.     

Citizenship for Some: Heteronormativity as Cloaked Bullying

SUMMARY

The average student of diverse sexuality hears eight homophobic insults per day with one third from faculty and staff. Through a lens of citizenship education, we elucidate heteronormative undercurrents obstructing the acceptance of sexual diversity; in-depth analysis of two such barriers, the public man and the ethics of marriage, are provided and suggest that heteronormativity, with roots in the Enlightenment discourse, is overpowering instrumental curricula promoting the acceptance of sexual diversity. Further, the perpetuation of such heteronormative undercurrents can and should be seen as a form of violence: cloaked bullying. The article challenges the use of “It's Ok to be Gay” kits and other modes of essentializing sexual diversity, and petitions educators to remain cognizant of heteronormative undercurrents in their teaching practice. By laboring to dislodge heteronormative underpinnings educators are enabled to model genuine open-minded and accepting citizenship and effect meaningful progress in the acceptance of sexual diversity.