Building a reputation along the value chain at Levi Strauss

The authors identify the value chain as a valuable management tool in building a corporate reputation. Examples of beneficial effects of value chain links on the company's reputation are presented using programmes from Levi Strauss.     

Media manipulation of adolescents' personal level judgements regarding consequences of smokeless tobacco use

Videotapes were developed to try to impact on personal level judgements of concern and risk in the context of smokeless tobacco use, a growing substance use problem in adolescents. In a within-and-between-subjects design, convincingness (i.e., dramatic portrayal) of the videotaped message (high and low) and perceived probability of consequences portrayed in the message (high and low) were manipulated.     

Agency,Structure, and Com parat ive Con texts: Toward a Synthetic lnteractionism

Recent sociological theorizing has addressed the relationship between agency and structure. Although this issue has not frequently been discussed by interactionists, it is implicitly critical to the perspective. As I argue, an interactionist approach can capture both the objective and subjective components of structures, settings, and events, while reminding us that contexts can be defined at all levels of generality and should be understood in reference to other contexts (a comparative contextapproach). I raise the core concepts of obdurateness, constraint, negotiation, sedimentation, symbolization, identification, and ritualization, attempting to generalize these concepts into a synthetic interactionism based on the grounding of action in the comparison of contexts. My goal is to develop an understanding of the “interaction order” that does justice to both order and interaction.     

An application of a multi‐stage strategy involving confidence intervals to evaluate whether a response rate is favourable or not

In early clinical development of new medicines, a single‐arm study with a limited number of patients is often used to provide a preliminary assessment of a response rate. A multi‐stage design may be indicated, especially when the first stage should only include very few patients so as to enable rapid identification of an ineffective drug. We used decision rules based on several types of nominal confidence intervals to evaluate a three‐stage design for a study that includes at most 30 patients. For each decision rule, we used exact binomial calculations to determine the probability of continuing to further stages as well as to evaluate Type I and Type II error rates. Examples are provided to illustrate the methods for evaluating alternative decision rules and to provide guidance on how to extend the methods to situations with modifications to the number of stages or number of patients per stage in the study design. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Acclimation Effects on the Supreme Court of Canada: A Cross‐Cultural Examination of Judicial Folklore*

Objective. Few public law theories developed to understand the decision making of U.S. courts have been examined in different cultural settings. This study examines the applicability of the “freshman effects” theory in the context of the Canadian Supreme Court. Methods. The article uses analysis of variance tests to examine changes in the voting and authorship patterns of 15 Canadian Supreme Court Justices during the Laskin, Dickson, and Lamer Court periods (1973–1999). Results. We find very little evidence of acclimation effects on the Canadian Supreme Court. However, through the Chief Justice's power to compose decision panels, Canadian justices in their first full year of service are assigned significantly fewer cases than in subsequent years of their career. Thus, Canadian justices are given time to acclimate to the high court through a lower workload, a luxury not afforded to U.S. justices. Conclusions. Theories of public law adopted to understand U.S. courts may be limited in their generalizability beyond the U.S. setting because of the institutional and political forces that shape judicial decision making in other courts.     

Nocturnal Omissions: Steps Toward a Sociology of Dreams

The examination of dreams should properly be a legitimate topic of sociological investigation. We argue that there are four basic principles of dream-life that suggest that dreams are external to the individual mind and are collective enterprises: 1) dreams are not willed by the individual self; 2) dreams reflect social reality; 3) dreams are public rhetoric; and 4) dreams are collectively interpretable. With the development of sociological approaches that examine topics previously defined as psychological, such as the sociology of emotion and cognition, the seemingly idiosyncratic components of these nocturnal productions should not exclude them from social analysis.     

23rd Family Therapy Conference; A Student's Perspective

Greetings! I am a family worker in regional Victoria, and a post grad student in Family Centred Practice. Being relatively new to the field I was pleasantly surprised to be asked to review the 23rd Family Therapy Conference, Hobart 2002. This was my first Family Therapy conference, and these are my impressions.