A Behavioral Examination of Mead's View of Role-Taking

According to Mead, self appears as individuals take the role of others toward their own gestures. In two investigations, the hand movements of subjects were observed as they verbalized different commands specifying hand or head movement to another person. The first investigation explored the possibility of directly observing and recording instances of role-taking. In the second, the visual accessibility between experimental subjects was varied in order to assess its effect on the frequency of overt role-taking. Results indicate that the process of role-taking is amenable to direct observation; and, furthermore, that overt role-taking decreases as visual accessibility increases.     

Sponsored Social Change in a Public Housing Project

Federal and local pressures have given rise to a hybrid organization that brings together disparate groups from the public and non-profit sectors to address complex social problems. This article examines one such organizational emergence of state-affiliated sponsorship. Based on data from a multi-method case study, we find that not only do members of the sponsoring organization use legitimate authority structures, existing laws, and social norms to reproduce their power, they do so with a state mandate that privileges their expertise and processes.Parts of this paper were prepared while the third author, Beth A. Rubin, was on leave to serve as Director, Sociology Program, National Science Foundation. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation. P. Denise Cobb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. This research reflects one part of Cobb's dissertation research that addresses how organizational actors from unequal social positions define a collective agenda and whose interests prevail when there is a lack of consensus. Her current research further examines the emergence of the university-community partnership form. She has published related work in Administration & Society and previously in Qualitative Sociology. Jon Shefner is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Studies Interdisciplinary Program at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is co-editor, with Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, of Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America (2006: Pennsylvania State Press). He is currently working on a book examining the impact of globalization and democratization on the mobilization and well being of Mexico's urban poor. Beth A. Rubin is Professor of Management and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Rubin publishes on economic and workplace transformation, labor unions, homelessness and social policy and social theory in leading academic journals. Her current research is on organizational commitment in the context of the new economy, inequality and industrial restructuring, organizational and workplace restructuring and time in organizations, the latter of which is represented in the forthcoming book, Research in the Sociology of Work: Workplace Temporalities, that Rubin is editing.     

Toward Increasing the Sociological Relevance of Sensitivity Training*

As a means of increasing the theoretical relevance of sensitivity training for sociologists engaged in evaluative pursuits, the concept of role-based sensitivity is suggested for use in an evaluative research perspective. Results of the application of a role-based sensitivity scale, as a pre-training diagnostic device, in a training program for local human relations commissioners, suggest that the area of sensitivity training has potential as an arena for the refinement of sociological role theory and hence is deserving of the increased interest of sociologists.     

Organizations have to grow up.

Organizations progress through a series of growth stages as they mature. How they handle themselves in each stage will determine how well they function within a stage, how rapidly they progress to new stages, and whether they succeed to a new stage at all. Those organizations that adjust to growth most effectively become the standard setters that other organizations follow. Health care organizations, to compete effectively in a changed and changing environment, must seize opportunities to achieve excellence and reach the third stage of organizational development.     

Sources of Variation in Rate of Decline of Applications to MSW Programs

This study identifies factors associated with the extent of decline in applications to MSW programs between 1975 and 1981. Data were gathered in a secondary analysis of three sources of data on all MSW programs accredited by the Council on Social Work Education as of 1975 and in a qualitative follow-up study of eight of these programs. The variables found to be most strongly related to declines in applications as well as the direction of these relationships were unexpected, casting doubt on prevailing assumptions about the causes of the decline and how schools can counteract it.     

Integrating Research and Practice into an Interviewing Skills Project

This paper reports an approach to improving the integration of research and practice instruction by engaging students in a research project. Through the project, the students evaluate an effort to improve their interviewing and relationship-building skills. The skills-development component relies primarily on student role playing and peer feedback, and was implemented as part of a required second-year master of social work research course. Two randomized experimental evaluations of the project’s effectiveness in improving interviewing skills yielded inconsistent results. The authors describe strategies for teaching and assessing interviewing skills and for teaching research.     

Measuring Success in Intentional Communities: A Critical Evaluation of Commitment and Longevity Theories

Abstract

Intentional Communities (ICs) are groups of people that form for a specific agreed-upon purpose and live in close proximity to achieve their desired end. The prevailing scholarship in the study of these communities is that communal processes of commitment, as well as ethnic and linguistic homogeneity, play a strong role in determining a community's success when defined as how long-lived a community was. However, most of these conclusions are based in historical research on communities that no longer exist. In this article, we use survey data collected from present-day ICs to find that those assumptions do not necessarily hold true, and we propose a definition of success that incorporates how well communities report satisfaction fulfilling their intentions. By testing a sample of living ICs, we find that the community decision-making structure is more important than any other factor in determining whether communities reports progress toward this metric of success.     

The Relationship Between Spiritual Well-Being and Health-Related Quality of Life in College Students

Abstract

Objective: This study investigated the relationship between spiritual well-being (SWB) and various aspects of health-related quality of life (HRQL) of college students. Participants and Methods: Two hundred twenty-five participants were surveyed during October 2010 to assess SWB and HRQL using the Spiritual Well-Being Scale and questions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's scale for HRQL, respectively. Hierarchical multiple linear regression analyses tested the relationship between SWB and multiple measures of HRQL while controlling for sex, age, and race. Results: Participants who reported higher SWB scores were more likely to participate in religious-type activities and report better HRQL compared with students who reported a moderate sense of SWB. Jointly, SWB and participation in religious activities explained 18% of the variance in HQRL in this sample. Conclusions: SWB made a significant contribution to HRQL in a sample of college students. Such a relationship should be considered by campus health program planners to improve the quality of life of young adults.     

Emotion recognition and emergent leadership: Unraveling mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions

This study examines the complex connection between individuals' emotion recognition capability and their emergence as leaders. It is hypothesized that emotion recognition and extraversion interactively relate with an individual's task coordination behavior which, in turn, influences the likelihood of emerging as a leader. In other words, we cast task coordination as a mediating mechanism in the joint relationship between emotion recognition and extraversion, on the one hand, and leader emergence, on the other. Study hypotheses were tested using multisource data from two diverse, independent samples. Study 1 supports the hypothesized relationships in a sample of student project teams in the Netherlands, and Study 2 constructively replicates the proposed model using student participants in an assessment center in the United States. These findings were obtained using a performance-based test of emotion recognition and controlling for a battery of known covariates.