The socialogy of football: a research agenda for the 1990s

The paper emphasizes the need for an alternative sociology of football that goes beyond the issue of football hooliganism, which has dominated work in the field. In the light of the Taylor Report and the agenda of modernization of football in the 1990s, research into the football crowd as a whole is required. A positive view of the state of English football in 1990 is presented as a corrective to the negative image of the 1980s. The debate is set in the context of my previous work on the politics of football both in Britain and the new Europe – West and East. In the final section, several topics are placed on the research agenda for the sociology of football in the 1990s. These are the modernization of facilities, the study of fanzines, comparative research and a social demography of the football crowd.     

Art therapy as a modality for crisis intervention: Children express reactions to violence in their community

Ten days after the Symbionese Liberation Army's shoot out in Los Angeles in 1974, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Department of Family Child Psychiatry, Thalians Community Mental Health Center, sent a crisis team of three psychotherapists to a school in the black community. The psychotherapists used an art therapy approach with a third grade classroom of 21 black children. The team's procedure helped the children ventilate their reactions to a frightening event which occurred in their neighborhood. This paper describes the art therapy techniques which were utilized, the children's vivid pictorial and verbal expressions accompanied by the psychological aspects of their responses.     

Revisiting the relationship between public relations and marketing: Encroachment and social media

Although public relations and marketing trade presses regularly discuss the conflict between the functions (e.g., Ecker, 2013; Havartin, 2013), academic researchers focused on the issue primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. The drop in public relations and marketing encroachment research does not parallel a drop in encroachment in practice, especially in light of today’s social media environment. In fact, historic tension between public relations and marketing intensified with the incorporation of social media into communication efforts. This paper updates the study of encroachment by reviewing the historical views of the topic, proposes ways that social media use has intensified issues related to role encroachment between public relations and marketing professionals, and outlines questions to guide future study of these topics.     

Diffusion in the Face of Failure: The Evolution of a Management Innovation

Recent work has questioned the institutional model of management innovation by highlighting interactions between the field‐level actors engaged in diffusing innovations and implementation of the innovation at organization level. Focusing on the adaptation of management innovations to their context, rather than their creation, we review this work and use it to analyse the global diffusion of resource planning (RP), counter posing this case with the widely studied example of total quality management. Both of these innovations experienced a high level of failure when implemented by organizations. Total quality management's diffusion was characterized by a ‘boom and bust’ cycle. RP, however, has continued to spread globally in the form of its variants: MRP, MRPII and ERP. Our analysis seeks to account for the long‐run diffusion of RP through a processual model which highlights the interplay between RP's discursive framing at field level, the affordances of the innovation itself and its adaptation within organizations. This demonstrates how objectifying RP in software not only helped to spread the innovation but also allowed field‐level actors to differentiate its development as a successful innovation from the many failures experienced by organizations attempting to adapt it.     

National Differences in the Diffusion and Design of Technological Innovation: The Role of Inter-Organizational Networks

This paper reports results from a study of the design and diffusion of computer-aided production management (CAPM) technologies across four European countries (UK, France, The Netherlands and Sweden). The study combined surveys of members of professional operations management associations in each of these four countries and interviews with operations managers and technology suppliers (software suppliers and consultants). The findings revealed significant differences across countries in the design and diffusion of CAPM. For example, in the UK and France highly objectified 'best practice' technologies, supported by standardized software, had diffused more widely than in Sweden and The Netherlands, where solutions tended to be developed in-house and customized to the local context. This paper explains these findings in terms of differences in the structure and operation of these four professional association networks. These differences in inter-organizational networking encouraged different types of knowledge-sharing related to the design of CAPM in the four countries.     

The relationship of alcohol problems to the risk for unidirectional and bidirectional intimate partner violence among a sample of blue-collar couples

Understanding how each partner's alcohol problems may contribute to the risk of male-to-female only, female-to-male only, or bidirectional partner violence is important for the prevention and treatment of these problems. Multinomial regression analysis was conducted using data from 848 blue-collar couples. Findings suggest that male alcohol problems are linked to male-to-female and bidirectional partner violence but not with female-to-male partner violence. Female alcohol problems do not appear to be related to any type of partner aggression. Each partner's level of impulsivity was associated with bidirectional partner violence. Male impulsivity was associated with male-to-female violence, and female impulsivity was associated with female-to-male violence. Prevention of male alcohol problems and promotion of nonconfrontational conflict-solving techniques may help reduce partner aggression among couples in the general household population.     

BIG DATA AND BIG CITIES: THE PROMISES AND LIMITATIONS OF IMPROVED MEASURES OF URBAN LIFE

New, “big data” sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables at higher collection frequencies and more granular geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big urban data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar imagery data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services. (JEL R1, C8, C18)     

Perception of Parental Reciprocity Scale (POPRS): Development and Validation with Adolescents and Young Adults

The present paper describes the development of a new scale, the Perception of Parental Reciprocity Scale (POPRS), and research findings obtained with this instrument. Based on Youniss' (1980) theory, this scale assesses the extent of perceived mutual reciprocity in adolescents'/young adults' relations with their parents. An initial pool of 51 items was administered to 141 unmarried undergraduates along with measures of self-esteem, locus of control, and consultant choice to indicate construct validity. Item analyses and reliability procedures produced a 43-item scale. A second study of 1602 students between the ages of 13 and 25 examined further issues: cross-replication, cross-validation, reliability with young adolescents, reliability over time, criterion and construct validity, and age-related differences in scores. In addition to POPRS and the scales used in Study 1, measures included three global statements, attachment to parents, attitude to private personal authority, and scores on an open-ended interview. Results from both studies demonstrated high reliability, and construct and criterion validity. Furthermore, a significant age effect supports Youniss' theory of a developmental transformation in parent-child relations beginning in late adolescence and continuing in early adulthood.