Overcoming hopelessness and social isolation: the ENGAGE model for working with neglecting families toward permanence

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) mandates policies designed to increase the frequency and speed with which permanency is achieved for children in the child welfare system. ASFA's focus is on child safety, permanency, and well-being. The expectation that parents correct neglectful conditions within specified time frames places an increased ethical responsibility on child welfare staff. Carrying out this responsibility requires vigorous and innovative approaches to engaging and working with neglectful families. Drawing on a well-established conceptual framework for understanding the determinants of effective parenting, the authors derive the ENGAGE (Engagement, Needs assessment, Goal setting, Assessment of progress, Goal achievement, Ending work) model for achieving permanency within the policy structure. The model incorporates creative client engagement, assessment of family needs, mutual goal setting, the goal achievement process, termination, and aftercare.     

Energy and the economy -a global and national analysis

When energy-GDP relationship is analyzed on a global scale for any one-time period the correlations derived are always very high. Yet these results are deceiving-and of lattle practical value-because of regional and income differences and the dynamic and highly individual behavior of the various countries. Consequently, the only meaningful approach is to analyze energy-GDP patterns over a long time on an individual country basis and to do so by defining GDP in terms of national currency.Correlations obtained by the latter method are uniformly and extremely high enabling a planner who can forecast the GDP levels of a country with some confidence to derive energy consumption from an appropriate regression equation with almost a pinpoint precision.Needless to say that these results, reflecting the developmentsduring a highly stable period of economic growth and low-and fairly stable-energy prices, should be applied with caution, especially as far as long-range projections are concerned. Each country's energy-GDP pattern is determined predominantly by climate, orientation of the economy, efficiency of industrial and household conversions and the share of non-productive energy uses.     

Participatory research: Three models and an analysis

This article examines three models of participatory research: what we call the parallel process model, the mutual engagement model, and the University of Central America (UCA) model. These models represent successively greater degrees of academic engagement with outside communities—from complementary, though not necessarily uncommitted, engagement by academic(s); to compromised full engagement between the academic(s) and the community; to institutional engagement between the entire university and the community. Our analysis outlines the tensions that may arise within participatory research between service and scholarship. We conclude that for participatory research to capture the attention and involvement of the broader discipline, it must provide a spectrum of theory, methods, and substance that sociologists find of importance independent of the participatory way in which such contributions are generated. This article is based on a paper presented at the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, D.L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 20–24, 1992.     

Harvesting the biosphere: the human impact

The human species has evolved to dominate the biosphere: global anthropomass is now an order of magnitude greater than the mass of all wild terrestrial mammals. As a result, our dependence on harvesting the products of photosynthesis for food, animal feed, raw materials, and energy has grown to make substantial global impacts. During the past two millennia these harvests, and changes of land use due to deforestation and conversions of grasslands and wetlands, have reduced the stock of global terrestrial plant mass by as much as 45 percent, with the twentieth-century reduction amounting to more than 15 percent. Current annual harvests of phytomass have been a significant share of the global net primary productivity (NPP, the total amount of new plant tissues created by photosynthesis). Some studies put the human appropriation of NPP (the ratio of these two variables) as high as 40 percent but the measure itself is problematic. Future population growth and improved quality of life will result in additional claims on the biosphere, but options to accommodate these demands exist without severely compromising the irreplaceable biospheric services.     

Max Weber Today: Notes on the Problem of Objectivity in the Social Sciences

Abstract

Weber demonstrated that the conception of objective scientific knowledge in any sense of any empirical subject matter, is indissoluably bound up with the reality both of the normative aspect of action and of obstacles to the realization of norms. Science itself cannot be methodologically grounded without reference to the value element in the relation of wertbeziehung (Parsons, 1949:683).     

Limits to Growth Revisited: A Review Essay*

Robert William Fogel The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World E. A. Wrigley Poverty, Progress, and Population Tomas Frejka and Jean ‐Paul Sardon Childbearing Trends and Prospects in Low‐Fertility Countries: A Cohort Analysis Roderic Beaujot and Don Kerr Population Change in Canada (second edition) Wolfgang Lutz , Warren C. Sanderson , and Sergei Scherbov (eds. ) The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century: New Challenges for Human Capital Formation and Sustainable Development Emmanuel Todd After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, translated by C. Jon Delogu     

Eating Meat: Evolution,Patterns, and Consequences

Carnivorousness is a part of human evolutionary heritage, but typical meat intakes were limited in virtually all preindustrial societies. Rising meat consumption has been a key marker of the universal dietary transition that has accompanied economic modernization. Meat is now the largest source of high‐quality animal proteins, and in some countries its annual supply is as high as 100 kg or more per capita. At the same time, high average intakes of red meat and poultry have had a number of undesirable agronomic, economic, nutritional, and environmental consequences. Fortunately, most of these negative effects can be alleviated by reducing excessively high meat consumption and by managing better both the production of feeds and the feeding of animals.     

The Social Dynamics of Brazil's Rural Landless Workers' Movement: Ten Hypotheses on Successful Leadership*

Cet article met l'accent sur le caractere social ainsi que sur la dynamique sociale de l'autorité politique dans ce qui est générale‐ment considéré comme les caractéristiques de classe ainsi que les caracteristiques sociales du leadership, à l'intérieur d'un mouvement que nous et d'autres auteurs considérons comme le mouvement social le plus dynamique de nos jours en Amérique latine, le Mouvement des Sans Terre (MST) au Brésil. Nous fonderons notre discussion de cette dynamique sociale sur dix hypothèses qui tracent, en effet, un portrait sociologique du leadership du mouvement. This paper focusses on the social character and dynamics of political leadership in what is widely regarded as the class and social character of the leadership of a movement that we and others regard as the most dynamic social movement in Latin America today—the Rural Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil. Discussion of these social dynamics is made with reference to ten hypotheses that provide, in effect, a sociological portrait of this movement's leadership.     

The Next 50 Years: Fatal Discontinuities

Modern civilization is subject to gradual environmental, social, economic, and political transformations as well as to sudden changes that can fundamentally alter its prospects. This article examines a key set of such fatal discontinuities by quantifying the likelihood of three classes of sudden, and potentially catastrophic, events—natural disasters (the Earth's collision with nearby asteroids, massive volcanic eruptions and mega‐tsunami generated by these events, as well as by huge landslides); viral pandemics; and transformational wars—and by comparing their likelihood with other involuntary risks (including terrorism) and voluntary actions and exposures.