The role of social work in the field of mental health: dual diagnoses as a challenge for social workers

This paper provides a discussion about the relevance of medical terminology within the social work context. The authors use the example of dual diagnoses to argue for less stigmatised attitudes toward people who become, in the process of help, labelled as people with dual diagnoses. It sets out that using medical terminology in the field of social work is more often a strategy to exclude people from the system of help than as a moment of providing adequate help. It is concluded that social workers do not need the knowledge about diagnoses – knowing the diagnosis is important only as information that illustrates users’ specific experience and perception of reality, the available resources and obstacles that people face in their everyday life. The planning of a social work intervention should be based on an operational definition of everyday life, e.g. how people live through the day, what are the important and valued roles they play in life, what are their wishes and needs.     

Factors affecting the sexual arousal value of pictures

This study examines factors that contribute to the sexual arousal value of pictures of a nude model. One male and one female model were photographed separately in an indoor setting. The following dimensions were factorially manipulated across pictures: male or female model, front or back view, standing or reclining position, semi‐nude or nude. Male and female subjects viewed slides of these pictures one at a time and rated the degree of sexual arousal value of each picture. Significant main effects of position, view, and clothing resulted, as well as a significant interaction of sex of subject x sex of model x position x clothing. These results suggest that with so many uncontrolled, extraneous factors in this type of research, studies in which global aspects of erotic stimuli are manipulated should be evaluated with caution. More systematic consideration of the micro‐variables that change from picture to picture is advisable to evaluate clearly what factors truly contribute to changes in sexual arousal value of erotic pictures.     

Channel Strategies for Durable Goods: Coexistence of Selling and Leasing to Individual and Corporate Consumers

In durable goods markets, such as those for automobiles or computers, the coexistence of selling and leasing is common as is the existence of both corporate and individual consumers. Leases to corporate consumers affect the price of used goods on the second‐hand market which in turn affect the buying and leasing behavior of individual consumers. The setting of prices (or volumes) for sale and lease to individual and corporate consumers is a complicated problem for manufacturers. We consider a manufacturer who concurrently sells and leases a finitely durable good to both individual and corporate consumers. The interaction between the manufacturer and consumers is modeled as a dynamic sequential game, where each player seeks to maximize its own payoff over an infinite horizon. We study how the corporate channel substitutability of new goods and used goods and transaction costs in the second‐hand market affect the manufacturer's pricing decisions, consumer behavior, and social welfare in the retail market. Making a number of simplifying assumptions, including two‐period lifetime for the finitely durable goods, we consider Markov Perfect Equilibrium as the solution concept. We show that the manufacturer can maximize her profit by segmenting consumers according to their willingness to pay. Selling and leasing are the mechanisms used for price discrimination in the retail market. We show that as she leases a larger share of her production to the corporate consumer, (1) the manufacturer does not necessarily have to adjust the optimal selling price of new goods to individual consumers, and the volume of sales of new goods to individual consumers can stay the same; (2) the manufacturer does increase the retail lease price, and the number of individual leases decreases; (3) the net supply of used goods on the market increases, leading to a lower market price for used goods; and (4) more individual consumers are able to participate in the market, and their collective welfare or net utility improves. We also show that as production costs increase the manufacturer increases prices, reducing volumes across all channels. When transaction costs increase, the manufacturer reduces leasing in both corporate and retail channels.     

A bus stop shelter evaluated from the user's perspective

This study aims to evaluate the current bus stop shelter model used in Florianópolis, Brazil, through a functional analysis--focused in the relationship between the shelter, the users and their activities--and also to analyse users' perceptions. The methodology consisted of exploratory visits, anthropometric analysis, observation and interviews. The exploratory visit intended to survey the physical characteristics of the shelter (dimensions, materials, colors, displayed information) and its position on the sidewalk. The anthropometric analysis was made to verify whether the dimensions of the shelters were adequate to users' needs. The observation provided data for the analysis of users' behavior, which involved a biomechanical study of their postures, an ownership/occupancy analysis in terms of territoriality and studies about spatial requirements of interpersonal relations (proxemics). The interviews helped to analyze how the user perceives the quality of some of the main functions of the shelter: to provide physical and psychological comfort and to display information about the public transportation system. As a result, the overall conclusion is that shelters do not meet users' needs. Recommendations are provided in order to improve physical and psychological comfort and to display relevant information about the transportation system.     

On Dutch windows

In The Netherlands, living room windows are big, left uncovered day and night, and elaborately decorated. This pattern, which is widespread in all urban and rural regions in this country, disappears abruptly as soon as the border into Germany is crossed where windows are generally smaller, consistently covered, and more sparsely decorated. Going south into Flanders, the disappearance of open and decorated windows is gradual but noticeable.The cognitive and sensory meaning of a single object in material culture, the Dutch window, is examined as a concrete articulation of the boundary between the public and private realms by thinking it with successive conceptual frames in sociology. Assuming that material objects are embodiments of ideas, the study focuses on (a) the norms for looking and for looking out of the windows, (b) the territorial boundary being established and, (c) the information game played through the windows in a context of the notion of privacy. Photographs of the cultural objects under consideration, i.e., Dutch windows, are presented throughout the text as reminders that the cultural and material realms are sensually linked. The study concludes that objects in material culture must be examined in terms of the active, purposive acts we accomplish by adapting the objects to our practical and expressive needs.The author thanks Frank Bovenkerk, Sjoerd Groenman, Jaber Gubrium, Sidney Homan, Joseph Vandiver, William and Helga Woodruff and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.An earlier version was presented in session a-125 of the XIth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences, held in Quebec in August, 1983.An important part of this research was completed while the author was Visiting Senior Lecturer at the State University at Utrecht, The Netherlands in 1978.     

Conflicting visions in American art museums

Conclusion By their nature, American art museums are pluralistic institutions. They cannot be simply characterized as the hobbies of affluent amateurs, or ivory towers for research or, despite appearances, playgrounds for the people. To some extent they are all of these together, but with more or less emphasis on each, depending upon the support which each of the principal sets of actors is capable of mustering. Trustees, curators, and managers each possess a legitimacy which they have used to effect the pursuit of their unofficial goals, some of which converge with those of the institution itself. The level of success they attained is modified by trends external to the institution, including scholarly and professional developments, art market activity, pressure from aspiring elites, and the emergence of new funding sources.Collecting involves the transformation of material into symbolic capital and is, therefore, a process in which museums play a pivotal role. Since trustees and prospective donors are continuing and even increasing their involvement in art collecting, whether from aesthetic interest or for speculative purposes, external processes of elite formation will continue to affect the art museum. Its aesthetic policies will result in gains and losses for particular individuals or groups, whether in the museum, or aspiring to enter. As repositories of art, museums are, therefore, willy-nilly linked to an external market whose speculations impinge upon their collections and exhibitions. Since principal actors are never totally insulated from it, and are even recruited in part because of their knowledge of it, a position in a museum itself may advance the interests of the parties involved. This lack of insulation from markets and the relative accessibility of non-professionals to its information helps to explain why the parallels between museums and other institutions, such as universities and hospitals, are not more striking. Museum professionalism diverges from that found in educational or medical institutions, where laymen have a difficult time justifying their intervention in abstruse scientific decisions. Yet, in spite of their lack of expertise, occasions when they do intervene still occur. If there is lay interference even where professionalism and scientifically validated criteria are entrenched, then it is all the more understandable that it would arise where external disciplinary canons are relatively less established, and the gap between laymen and experts is not so great. Though development of scientific scholarship created new reference groups for curators, they are still more closely tied to wealthy collectors than are their European counterparts who may be more research-oriented and have existing collections with little likelihood of donations, since structural supports for altruism (e.g., tax deductions for donations) are minimal or lacking. Thus in spite of the existence of structures to isolate curators from trustees, they still compete among themselves for each other's support; the trustees for inclusion, the curators for pre-selection of works. But curator-trustee relations are not the only sensitive spots in art museums. With the growth of external public subsidies from federal and state governments and with the likelihood of their continuation into the future, although not necessarily at as rapid a rate of increase as in recent years, the balance of forces within the institution is likely to be shaken. Public support entails two requirements: organizational accountability and greater accessibility to large publics. Both of these demands emphasize the rising importance of bureaucratic managers. Like curators of the past, they have been the servants of the Board. But just as curators grasped at external developments in scholarship and professional organizations on which to base their legitimation, bureaucratic managers are following an analogous path. Eschewing aesthetic expertise, they try to run museums as rationally as they claim modern firms function: introducing methods of membership development (including advertisement), gaining control of local patronage markets, and lobbying for and trying to monopolize governmental funding sources. On the whole they have no power base within the museum, since they are resented by curatorial personnel, and are viewed as mere technicians by trustees. But the expertise that they bring to bear on organizational functioning is becoming a necessity for efficient operations and justification of the public funds received. Not surprisingly, schools of business administration and universities are offering specialized training in arts management. But the newly trained managers are likely to differ from the older. Since they are largely self-selected rather than drifting into cultural organizations, they may be more committed to the arts from the outset than their predecessors. Impressionistic evidence suggests that they are more likely to include women than is true in other bureaucracies.While it is impossible to predict precisely what the outcome of their entry into museums will be, it is likely that new alliances may emerge. If at the moment curatorial professionals are suspicious of administrators, preferring to cajole their friendly trustee to act on their behalf, they may find it in their interest to forge new alliances with managers, especially as managers gain influence through their ability to solicit government and foundation funding. Furthermore, managers are less tied to an institution than are curators, since their skills are more easily convertible to other organizations or government agencies, while curators face an overcrowded market in museums and universities. The post-professional era is shaped by their growing importance, but is not wholly determined by it. Rather, their presence heightens the perpetual state of tension inherent in the multi-purpose institution the art museum.

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Female board appointments and firm valuation: short and long-term effects

The presence of women on boards of directors has become a high profile issue in recent years. Several studies, based largely on data from countries with Anglo-Saxon corporate governance systems, have investigated the influence of female board appointments on firm performance. This study focuses on the impact of female directors in Spain, where debate about this topic has been intense for two reasons: the recommendation in 2006 by Spain’s Unified Good Governance Code of positive discrimination in favour of female board appointments and the passing in 2007 of a Gender Equality Act by the Spanish parliament. Our paper analyses the short and long term effect of the appointment of female directors prior to these events. We use an event study to analyze the short term stock market reaction to the appointment of female directors and a multiple regression approach, using the system GMM estimation procedure, to assess the long term influence on firm value of female boardroom appointments. We find that the stock market reacts positively in the short term to the announcement of female board appointments, suggesting that investors on average believe that female directors add value. This belief appears to be confirmed by our regression results which show that female board appointments are positively associated with firm value over a sustained period. These results suggest that the legislative changes in Spain make economic sense as well as advancing the cause of women in Spanish boardrooms.     

Strategic leadership for exploration and exploitation: The moderating role of environmental dynamism

This study advances prior theoretical research by linking transformational and transactional behaviors of strategic leaders to two critical outputs of organizational learning: exploratory and exploitative innovation. Findings indicate that transformational leadership behaviors contribute significantly to adopting generative thinking and pursuing exploratory innovation. Transactional leadership behaviors, on the other hand, facilitate improving and extending existing knowledge and are associated with exploitative innovation. In addition, we argue that environmental dynamism needs to be taken into account to fully understand the effectiveness of strategic leaders. Our study provides new insights that misfits rather than fits between leadership behaviors and innovative outcomes matter in dynamic environments. Hence, we contribute to the debate on the role of strategic leaders in managing exploration and exploitation, not only by examining how specific leadership behaviors impact innovative outcomes, but also by revealing how the impact of leadership is contingent upon dynamic environmental conditions.     

Research of injuries of passengers in city buses as a consequence of non-collision effects

In this study, a research of injuries of passengers in city buses is presented, which are not a consequence of collision of buses with other objects. The number of injured passengers in the territory of Belgrade was registered, during three consecutive years. Most frequently injured body part was the head, while women over the age of 60 are the most vulnerable population of passengers. The most often reason for the appearance of injuries was the effect of acceleration. Also, it is pointed out to the importance of consideration of the problem of multiple injuries. These injuries are more complex than the individual ones, and they may indicate to the existence of greater omissions in the design of the interior of the bus. Proposals for certain system solutions, as well as some recommendations for designing are given, which can improve the safety of passengers who use the city bus as a means of transportation.