The Intcractionist Study Of Social Organization: A Note On Method*

A symbolic interactionist approach to the study of social organizations is specified. Materials are drawn from an on-going investigation of the American liquor industry, which is treated as a fragmented organization. The core actors, activities and interactional locales of the industry are identified. The problems of establishing a historical baseline for a case study are discussed, as are the problems of confronting archival data, locating informants, and establishing interactive linkages. The stages in writing a case history of an organization are presented and illustrated with examples drawn from the American liquor industry.     

A Ridge-Regression Sidelight

A useful matrix result is applied in ridge regression to cast light on the form of the ridge-regression residual sum of squares as a power series in the ridge parameter. An example illustrates that the series may diverge or else converge very slowly, depending on the value of the ridge parameter.     

On the exact distribution of the sum of the largest n−k out of n normal random variables with differing mean values

Motivated by an application in Electrical Engineering, we derive the exact distribution of the sum of the largest n?k out of n normally distributed random variables, with differing mean values. Comparisons are made with two normal approximations to this distribution—one arising from the asymptotic negligibility of the omitted order statistics and one from the theory of L-statistics. The latter approximation is found to be in excellent agreement with the exact distribution.     

RACIAL COMPOSITION OF NEIGHBORHOOD AND EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING

The paper briefly reviews the leading theories of female crime causation that surfaced in the twentieth century and proposes an alternative, theoretical orientation using a Marxian approach. This explanation uses existing theoretical and empirical studies to account for: 1) the means by which women are defined as criminal, 2) the class relationship between female criminals and the general population of women, and 3) the system by which control over both the population of female criminals and the general population of women is legitimized. The paper also examines the relationship between the victimization of women and the opportunity structure as class‐based.     

Policy-Practice in Social Work: Models and Issues

Abstract

The emergence of policy—practice is a recent development in social work. In this article, policy—practice is defined as a direct social work practice mode with the potential to strengthen the social work profession's abilities to meet its century-long commitments of providing policy-informed services to those in need of them. At the same time, policy—practice advocates for and participates in policy implementation and change. This article examines policy—practice and places it within the context of the profession's historic cause—function debate and identifies several barriers that have complicated development. Most important, the article reviews five policy-practice models found in the literature: (1) social worker as policy expert, (2) social worker as change agent in external work environments, (3) social worker as change agent in internal work environments, (4) social worker as policy conduit, and (5) social worker as policy itself.