A Framework to Guide Thinking and Analysis Regarding Climate Change Policies

The potential impacts from climate change, and climate change policies, are massive. Careful thinking about what we want climate change policies to achieve is a crucial first step for analysts to help governments make wise policy choices to address these concerns. This article presents an adaptive framework to help guide comparative analysis of climate change policies. The framework recognizes the inability to forecast long-term impacts (due in part to path dependance) as a constraint on the use of standard policy analysis, and stresses learning over time as a fundamental concern. The framework focuses on the objectives relevant for climate change policy in North America over the near term (e.g., the next 20 years). For planning and evaluating current climate policy alternatives, a combination of fundamental objectives for the near term and proxy objectives for characterizing the state of the climate problem and the ability to address it at the end of that term is suggested. Broad uses of the framework are discussed, along with some concrete examples. The framework is intended to provide a basis for policy analysis that explicitly considers the benefits of learning over time to improve climate change policies.     

THE AGE ONSET OF PERSONAL AUTHORITY IN THE FAMILY SYSTEM

The present research explored Williamson's position that relational patterns indicative of Personal Authority in the Family System (PAFS) occur during the fourth and early fifth decades of life. Participants were 232 university student volunteers. Individuals age 30 and above reported less triangulation with their nuclear families and less intimidation and less intimacy with their parents than the under age 30 group. These results provide some support for the view that differentiation is more clearly discernible in the fourth and fifth decades of life than in earlier years. Canonical correlations revealed that as age increases, the amount of variance accounted for by nuclear family triangulation, intergenerational intimidation, and integenerational intimacy increases, supporting Williamson's position that age is a significant factor in achieving several relational patterns indicative of PAFS.     

Neighborhood responses to disorder and local attachments: The systemic model of attachment,social disorganization,and neighborhood use value

This paper investigates neighborhood-level connections between ecological structure, responses to disorder, and local attachment and social involvement. We develop predictions integrating the systemic model of community attachment, neighborhood use value, and the social disorganization perspective. The systemic model predicts neighborhood stability will deepen attachment and local involvement; the social disorganization perspective anticipates effects of stability on responses to disorder; and neighborhood use value suggests effects of status, racial composition, and problems such as crime and deterioration on attachment. We further propose, building on earlier work, that attachment may influence responses to disorder, or vice versa. Data include resident surveys, census information, on-site assessments, and crime rates from 66 randomly selected Baltimore, Maryland, neighborhoods. In support, respectively, of the systemic and neighborhood use value models, we find strong impacts of stability and class on neighborhood attachment/involvement. Neighborhood fear and perceived informal social control depend upon emotional investment and social integration. We see no overall impacts of deterioration on responses to disorder, calling into question some key aspects of the incivilities thesis. Earlier investigations of deterioration and responses to disorder that excluded person-place transactions may have been misspecified. Results underscore the strong relationship between person-environment transactions and responses to disorder. Asking how to encourage citizens to resist disorder is questioning, in part, how to increase the bonds residents have with the locale and with one another. Portions of an earlier version of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles, August 1994.     

Corporate planning—a conceptual critique

Corporate planning is accepted by some as being an effective, efficient, and feasible means of charting the path an enterprise takes through the future. In this paper the author questions both the concept and the contribution of corporate planning. The author examines not only the problem of budgetary analysis within a planning process but also questions the ability of corporate planning to provide the necessary perspective of the future in any identifiable or probabilistic sense. The author postulates ‘the guts of corporate planning’. In the author's own word conceptual critiques ‘may be defined as setting up your own straw man in place of the other fellow's sawdust totem’. However, this paper presents some controversial yet fundamental criticisms of the current concepts of corporate planning. It is for the reader to judge whether the straw or the sawdust is deepest.     

A piece of lost history: Max Weber and Lowell L. Bennion

This article discussesMax Weber’s Methodology, Lowell L. Bennion’s (1933) published doctoral dissertation from the University of Strasbourg, France. This book is important because it is the first systematic English language treatment of Weber’s work. It also suggests an early link between Weberian and Durkheimian scholarship and foreshadows later debates regarding Talcott Parsons’ interpretation of Weber. Additionally the book provides a unique contribution by applying Weber’s “Calvinism-Capitalism” thesis to the development of Mormonism. We explore the academic context in which the book was written and its reception by American sociologists at the time. After summarizing the text, we examine its perspective on the issues later raised about Parsons’ account of Weber. We conclude by looking at Lowell Bennion as a sociologist and a devout Mormon, and the unique connection that he forged between his religion and Max Weber’s ideas. Her field is organizational behavior and theory; her primary area of research is the relationship between organizational hierarchy and managerial leadership. He is currently investigating the modes of white collar resistance in public bureaucracies.     

Race Riots Past and Present: A Cultural-Collective Behavior Approach

Four essential themes in a cultural-collective behavior approach to race riots are developed. First is the historical shift in patterns of race rioting. Second is the application of a general collective behavior model accounting for extrainstitutionality, conversion of feelings into overt action, and acting collectively rather than individually. Third is process, stressing contingent developments during a period of testing. Fourth is the nullification of customary meanings of action, with clues to understanding drawn from anthropological study of “rituals of rebellion” and psychological studies of “obedience to authority.”