Specialised Supported Education for Australians with Psychotic Disorders

Australia has a network of Federally funded disability employment and vocational rehabilitation services, including a proportion of outlets that specialise in providing services for persons with psychiatric disabilities. However, neither Federal nor State Governments currently provide or fund disability‐specific education assistance to persons with psychiatric disabilities. To begin considering whether Specialised Supported Education is indicated for persons with psychotic disorders, we examined data collected in a national ‘Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers Australia, 1998’. International studies of the effectiveness of overseas Supported Education programs were also examined to identify the forms of assistance most likely to warrant consideration in Australia. U.S.A. evidence indicates that Specialised Supported Education is emerging as an effective career development option for persons with psychotic disorders. An example of an innovative Specialised Supported Education program is provided to illustrate how this type of program can be implemented in Australia.     

Venture philanthropy and social entrepreneurship in community redevelopment

This article provides a case study of Tom Cousins, a social entrepreneur who used his own venture philanthropic investments and leveraged additional resources through extensive public‐private partnerships for the sole intent of redeveloping an area of disinvestment and poverty. In the process, Cousins also provided the visionary, strategic, and operational leadership often associated with the actions and responsibilities of a social entrepreneur. The limited research to date has investigated social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy as separate and often unrelated concepts. In this study, we analyze the sustained and intensive involvement by Cousins and his foundations and the continued leadership provided in the creation of public‐private partnerships focused on the redevelopment of the East Lake area in Atlanta.     

A manpower planning model for organizational effectiveness

In this article the author argues that micro-manpower planning is finally beginning to emerge as a process for helping individuals and firms to play an active role in developing integrated approaches and facilitating interrelationships within an organization. Additionally, that it is in a unique position where it can relate many of the foundations formulated by many segments of organizational theory and mathematical modeling into a cohesive and practical application format for practicing administrators.Naturally, the developed Markovian model is a stable process and assumes stable probabilities of movement with the system. Additionally, it assumes that movements between the states are dependent solely upon the previous state of location which is usually false in a business organization where movement is also dependent upon length of time in state, previous states occupied, and personal variables. But, the Markovian process can be viewed as a relevant modeling technique even with these constraints.These factors are combined to examine and discuss the organization's effectiveness and its bargaining position in terms of manpower resources. Additionally, policy decisions which would be made based upon the interrelationships of the personnel and industrial relations departments and the firm's technical core are discussed.     

Marital Adjustment and Irrational Ideas*

This study involved an attempt to explore the relationship between irrational ideas and marital discord, as posited in Rational-Emotive-Therapy. The results supported the hypothesis that individuals who experience marital difficulties demonstrate higher degrees of irrational thinking than individuals who do not experience such difficulties. Additional findings were interpreted on the basis of differences between males and females with respect to cognitive and perceptual orientation.     

Lifestyles and identity maintenance among gay Japanese-American males

An exploratory study of thirteen Japanese-American gay men residing in the Los Angeles area found that those men who had disclosed their sexual orientation to family members were more likely to express more positive attitudes concerning a variety of issues. Detailed personal accounts of these patterns are presented along with discussions of how Asian homosexuals maintain their “double-minority” identities as both Japanese and gay.     

Marital Therapy: Beyond Evaluation

This discussion on the use of evaluation research by policy makers was stimulated by Hartin's article Evaluating Marital Therapy (this issue). Problems arise because evaluation research and accountability reporting are often confused, and because evaluation researchers tend to communicate with each other rather than with policy makers and program managers.     

MODERN SCIENCE: Institutionalization of Knowledge and Rationalization of Power

This essay explores the relationship of scientific knowledge to political and economic power. By comparing intellectual production to economic production, the author identifies three preconditions for a knowledge discourse to achieve monopoly domination or hegemony in its market sector or cognitive domain. First, the knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized; that is, as a unique product or service. Second, it must be credently represented as useful to dominant groups. Finally, it must achieve institutionalization. Ethnographies of scientific discourse and practice, as well as social histories of science, provide data relevant to this model. Such studies reveal the rhetorically constructed character of scientific knowledge, and hence its openness to social and political influence. But these studies also show how scientists strive to standardization; that is, they seek to render their somewhat ad hoc activities in the laboratory into replicable and reputable public accounts. The norms and techniques of this locally created standardization emerged historically, mainly in the form of objectivity and numeracy. These standards in turn serve politically to demarcate legitimate scientists from amateurs and quacks, thereby satisfying the first precondition of the model—that to be successful a knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized. Cognitive boundaries enabled social boundaries-chiefly the marking of distinctions between disciplines and the organization of their practitioners into professional guilds. Through the creation and enforcement of such distinctions, product identification, market allocation, and oligopolization were secured. These processes also required investment capital to sustain intellectual production. Thus, to institutionalize their disciplines and themselves in research universities and specialized scientific-administrative centers, practitioners sought to demonstrate their utility to potential clients and patrons. Along the way, the disciplines became more instrumentally oriented, their concepts, methods, and topics shaped to conform to the requirements of professionalization and institutionalization. The very language of science also changed in accordance with its new emphases. The close institutionalized affinity of cognitive, political, and economic interests was largely established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new, institutionalized, scientific knowledge and the new, rationalized, statist and corporate     

"Homo Sociologicus" and Personality Theory

L'image que la sociologie peint de l'homme en théorie contemporaine a été l'objet de critiques qui se groupent autour des deux thèmes suivants: 1 les modéles actuels de l'univers social Agent l'homme dans un moule, en en faisant le prisonnier de ses rôles afin d'expliquer ses comportements; 2 une théorie explicite de la personnalité est un indispensable élément de toute théorie sociologique valable, puisque l'action individuelle est un passage obligatoire pour que se manifeste toute disposition commune au niveau de la collectivité. L'auteur est d'opinion que si, afin d'expliquer l'harmonie sociale, on appuie trop sur l'intériorisation des valeurs collectives, on appauvrit la notion de personnalité en plus de rabaisser, parmi les mécanismes qui produisent l'accord, ceux qui sont de caractère social plutôt que psychologique.