A Collective Response to Michael White's Passing

The following reflection was written at the Cairns Narrative Therapy Interest Group shortly after Michael White's passing. As a group activity, each individual was interviewed about the effects of Michael White's work on their therapeutic work. Each of the responses were manually recorded and then a member of the group developed the collective document to share back with the whole group. The document was a way to capture the atmosphere that was shared at the interest group that day upon reflection of Michael. The document also enables a way to remember the influence that a collective document can produce for a group of people.     

Salient Beliefs About Earthquake Hazards and Household Preparedness

Prior research has found little or no direct link between beliefs about earthquake risk and household preparedness. Furthermore, only limited work has been conducted on how people's beliefs influence the nature and number of preparedness measures adopted. To address this gap, 48 qualitative interviews were undertaken with residents in three urban locations in New Zealand subject to seismic risk. The study aimed to identify the diverse hazard and preparedness‐related beliefs people hold and to articulate how these are influenced by public education to encourage preparedness. The study also explored how beliefs and competencies at personal, social, and environmental levels interact to influence people's risk management choices. Three main categories of beliefs were found: hazard beliefs; preparedness beliefs; and personal beliefs. Several salient beliefs found previously to influence the preparedness process were confirmed by this study, including beliefs related to earthquakes being an inevitable and imminent threat, self‐efficacy, outcome expectancy, personal responsibility, responsibility for others, and beliefs related to denial, fatalism, normalization bias, and optimistic bias. New salient beliefs were also identified (e.g., preparedness being a “way of life”), as well as insight into how some of these beliefs interact within the wider informational and societal context.     

A process-oriented approach. Selecting a nursing model for psychiatric nursing.

The nursing literature is replete with articles and books that describe nursing conceptual frameworks and models and encourage their use in clinical, education, and research activities. Although much information exists on the content of nursing models, less has been written about how a model is to be chosen and the process that may facilitate the choice of a model. This article reviews potential benefits and limitations of nursing models and conceptual frameworks and describes a three-phase process for selecting a model for psychiatric nursing practice.     

A Descriptive Study of Home Modifications for People with Dementia and Barriers to Implementation

This study describes home environmental features, safety issues, and health-related modifications in a community dwelling sample of 82 elderly people with dementia. Main barriers to the accessibility of the homes were steps, both inside and outside the house. The majority of the caregivers had made home modifications, which pertained mainly to physical limitations. Home modifications to support cognitive deficits were made to a lesser extent. The main barrier to the implementation of home modifications to accommodate the care recipient's memory loss was skepticism about their usefulness. Regarding the removal of physical barriers, financial constraints were most frequently mentioned.     

Marriage,Money, and African American Mothers’ Self‐Esteem

This study examined the effects of marital status and family income on the self‐esteem of 292 African American mothers. Counter to previous studies with European American mothers, family income moderated the effects of marital status. Those mothers with higher family income had higher self‐esteem, regardless of their marital status. For those with less family income, married mothers had much higher self‐esteem than unmarried mothers. Low‐income married mothers had the same levels of self‐esteem as high income mothers. It was concluded that financial resources can buffer the effects of being single, and being married can buffer the effects of being low income. Policy initiatives that focus on reducing the financial hardship on single mothers and increasing the marriage rate among lower income parents were also discussed.     

The citizen-consumer hybrid: ideological tensions and the case of Whole Foods Market

Ethical consumer discourse is organized around the idea that shopping, and particularly food shopping, is a way to create progressive social change. A key component of this discourse is the “citizen-consumer” hybrid, found in both activist and academic writing on ethical consumption. The hybrid concept implies a social practice – “voting with your dollar” – that can satisfy competing ideologies of consumerism (an idea rooted in individual self-interest) and citizenship (an ideal rooted in collective responsibility to a social and ecological commons). While a hopeful sign, this hybrid concept needs to be theoretically unpacked, and empirically explored. This article has two purposes. First, it is a theory-building project that unpacks the citizen-consumer concept, and investigates underlying ideological tensions and contradictions. The second purpose of the paper is to relate theory to an empirical case-study of the citizen-consumer in practice. Using the case-study of Whole Foods Market (WFM), a corporation frequently touted as an ethical market actor, I ask: (1) how does WFM frame the citizen-consumer hybrid, and (2) what ideological tensions between consumer and citizen ideals are present in the framing? Are both ideals coexisting and balanced in the citizen-consumer hybrid, or is this construct used to disguise underlying ideological inconsistencies? Rather than meeting the requirements of consumerism and citizenship equally, the case of WFM suggests that the citizen-consumer hybrid provides superficial attention to citizenship goals in order to serve three consumerist interests better: consumer choice, status distinction, and ecological cornucopianism. I argue that a true “citizen-consumer” hybrid is not only difficult to achieve, but may be internally inconsistent in a growth-oriented corporate setting.     

Social Networks and Stratification in the Urban Chinese Labor Market: The Case of Laid‐Off Textile Workers and Their Officials in the Tianjin Municipality*

By what mechanisms has China's developing capitalist labor market been producing stratification patterns of reemployment and wage differences among laid‐off workers in the late 1990s? Theoretical perspectives delineating state, market, and societal mechanisms are used to guide exploratory analyses of data from a sample of workers who were laid off from state‐owned textile enterprises in the Tianjin municipality. Three findings are reported. First, men with what Portes defined as downward leveling “negative social capital” are less likely to become reemployed. A second, more tenuous, finding is that workers with a higher level of education are more likely to be reemployed. Third, workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a government administrative agency are more likely to be reemployed and, among those reemployed, more likely to earn higher wages, as compared to workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a state‐owned enterprise or workers lacking a social network tie to any official. This third finding, along with reports of analogous findings culled from a review of published literature, stimulates us to go beyond the data to theoretically speculate about how Chinese officialdom has become somewhat more differentiated and consequent ramifications for understanding newly emerging changes in China's stratification order.