Whither Symbolic Interaction? Reflections on a Personal Odyssey

This essay reflects my experiences over fifty‐five years in the world of sociology and sociologists. It assumes these experiences hold more general meaning and so can illuminate the present and anticipate the future of symbolic interactionism. My views of interactionist theory and methods developed in opposition to widely accepted views stemming from Herbert Blumer's writings, creating a cycle of antagonism that impeded communication and learning across the divide. Recently, antagonism apparently has decreased, and respect and trust have increased commensurately If true, the future of symbolic interactionism is brighter, as respect and trust allow the communication and learning from one another that was missing previously.     

The aftereffects of stress: An attentional interpretation

Two studies were conducted in order to test the hypothesis that the aftereffects of stress on both performance and social behavior are attributable to a depletion of attentional capacity. This depletion, or cognitive fatigue, was predicted to increase with both the attentional load and duration of an activity. A laboratory study demonstrated that aftereffects can be induced (without a stressor such as noise, crowding, or shock) by the performance of an attention-demanding task. Deficits on an aftereffects task increased as principal task demand and task duration increased. A second study, conducted in a field setting, found that after performing a high-load task, subjects were less likely to help a woman search for a contact lens than were their counterparts who performed a low-load task. Similarly, subjects who had been crowded were less likely to help than were those who had not been crowded. The data are interpreted as providing support for the cognitive-fatigue explanation of the aftereffects of stress.The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SOC 75-09224). Study II was part of the second author's Master's thesis.The authors are indebted to Art Ellsworth, manager of Valley River Center; to Ann Lezak and George Hochstetler for serving as experimenters; to Caroline Gredvig and Valerie Kimble for serving as confederates; to Lita Furby for statistical counsel; to Mike Kemp, Al Murphy, and Nick Garshnek for technical assistance; and to David Krantz, Myron Rothbart, and David Mandel for comments on an earlier draft.     

High value manufacturing: Capability,appropriation, and governance

Manufacturing competitiveness is on many policy agendas, born out of a concern for firms in high-cost economies finding themselves outcompeted by low-cost rivals. Government policy makers and manufacturing firm strategists have put their faith in what we label as high value manufacturing (HVM). We see HVM as an incipient phenomenon currently in a situation of prescience, as something that is still “in-the-making,” with manufacturing firms trying to find ways to be able to step away from having to compete on price. This paper consults relevant strategy theories with the purpose to pinpoint the issues and problems that need to be accommodated for bringing HVM into being and for creating the effects that are anticipated. We found that HVM must be seen as a distributed activity, thus realizing complex functionality for a system-of-use, while being subjected to path constitution. For HVM to function, the firms involved need to find solutions to the capability problem, the appropriation problem, and the governance problem. We suggest that further research needs to involve itself in problem-solving activity to assist in bringing HVM about while simultaneously further developing strategy theory geared toward firms that are involved in a distributed activity like HVM.     

Linking Decision Theory and Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment: Tradeoffs Between Compliance and Efficacy for Waterborne Disease Interventions

Achieving health gains from the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals of universal coverage for water and sanitation will require interventions that can be widely adopted and maintained. Effectiveness—how an intervention performs based on actual use—as opposed to efficacy will therefore be central to evaluations of new and existing interventions. Incomplete compliance—when people do not always use the intervention and are therefore exposed to contamination—is thought to be responsible for the lower‐than‐expected risk reductions observed from water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions based on their efficacy at removing pathogens. We explicitly incorporated decision theory into a quantitative microbial risk assessment model. Specifically, we assume that the usability of household water treatment (HWT) devices (filters and chlorine) decreases as they become more efficacious due to issues such as taste or flow rates. Simulations were run to examine the tradeoff between device efficacy and usability. For most situations, HWT interventions that trade lower efficacy (i.e., remove less pathogens) for higher compliance (i.e., better usability) contribute substantial reductions in diarrheal disease risk compared to devices meeting current World Health Organization efficacy guidelines. Recommendations that take into account both the behavioral and microbiological properties of treatment devices are likely to be more effective at reducing the burden of diarrheal disease than current standards that only consider efficacy.     

Custom Epoch Estimation for Surveys

The paper provides a method for generating epoch estimates for time series survey data, allowing for different periods of time (or even point estimates) according to user demand. The method uses a modified kriging estimator, which suppresses the contribution of sampling error variability in order to guarantee that custom epoch estimates have an interpolation property. For the veteran population variable of the American Community Survey, we utilize a simple Brownian Motion model of the population process and derive the modified kriging estimator for this case. The tuning parameters of this population model can be calibrated to the data via simple formulas. We illustrate the application of this method to the generation of point estimates of veteran population, an important objective for Veterans Affairs.     

Scaling Back and Finding Flexibility: Gender Differences in Parents' Strategies to Manage Work–Family Conflict

Studies show that fathers report work–family conflict levels comparable to mothers. The authors examine gender differences in work‐related strategies used to ease such conflicts. The authors also test whether the presence of young children at home shapes parents' use of different strategies. They address these focal questions using panel data from the Canadian Work, Stress, and Health study (N = 306 fathers, 474 mothers). The authors find that mothers with young children are more likely to scale back on work demands when compared with fathers with young children, but mothers and fathers with older children are equally likely to pursue these strategies. Furthermore, women with young children and men with older children are more likely to seek increased schedule control as a result of work–family conflict when compared with their parent counterparts. The authors situate these findings in the vast literature on the consequences of work–family conflict.     

Talking about The Shape of Water: three women dip their toes in

Abstract

This article is about a film called The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro, which was released in 2017 and won the Best Picture award at the 2018 Oscars. The three authors of this article, all friends, had each enjoyed The Shape of Water, so went for a second viewing together. Our enjoyment had been somewhat at odds with criticisms of the film, mostly made by other members of the disabled people’s community/disabled academics. After seeing the film again, we found it to be a ground-breaking portrayal of a disabled woman. This article is a summary of the discussion which ensued. Our discussion of The Shape of Water is a current issue because we found ourselves disagreeing with, and questioning, a number of complaints about the representation of disability and impairment within the film. At a time when the film industry is making noises about inclusion, it is important that we know what we are asking for, and avoid demands which may be counterproductive to the cultural recognition of disabled people. This film is still being shown in cinemas in the UK and elsewhere.     

Filling holes in the safety net? Material hardship and subjective well-being among disability benefit applicants and recipients after the 1996 welfare reform

Some of the rapid recent growth in disability income receipt in the United States is attributable to single mothers post-welfare reform. Yet, we know little about how disability benefit receipt affects the economic well-being of single mother families, or how unsuccessful disability applicants fare. We compare disability recipients to unsuccessful applicants and those who never applied among current and former welfare recipients, and examine how application and receipt affect material hardships and subjective measures of well-being. We then examine whether alternative ways of making ends meet mediate differences in well-being. After controlling for alternative sources of support, no significant differences in overall actual hardships or difficulty living on current income remained between the three groups. However, even after controlling for these strategies, unsuccessful applicants were significantly more likely to report that they expected hardships in the next two months. Our results suggest a pervasive level of economic insecurity among unsuccessful applicants.