Adversarial View Research Articles

The Predictive and Discriminant Validity of Masculinity Ideology

Masculinity ideology is the extent to which an individual endorses traditional male-role norms. The present study examined the discriminant validity of this construct relative to other gender-related constructs. The subjects were 269 male participants who completed measures of masculinity ideology, sex-role orientation, gender-relation attitudes, and several outcome variables (e.g., homophobia) potentially related to these gender-related constructs. Masculinity ideology demonstrated substantial predictive validity and good discriminant validity by accounting for unique variance in several outcome variables such as homophobia, hostility, adversarial views of sexual relationships, and reported sexual activity. In addition, confirmatory factor analysis of Male Role Norms Scale (Thompson & Pleck, 1986) replicated itsa priori,three-factor structure. The results suggest that masculinity ideology offers a useful perspective for understanding the relation between male-role norms and important outcome variables.

Arrest and Detention; Adversary View

Arrest and Detention; Adversary View

Maternal-fetal conflicts: Ethical and legal implications for nurse-midwives

The problem of maternal-fetal conflict presents both ethical and legal challenges to birth attendants as well as to policymakers. This essay suggests that a crisis intervention approach to such conflicts fosters an adversarial view of the relationship between the pregnant woman and her fetus, which can be divisive and counterproductive. A better approach to maternal-fetal conflicts emphasizes mutually held goals rather than countervailing rights and uses the doctrine of informed consent to enhance the pregnant woman's ability to make responsible choices for both herself and her fetus. Nonphysician birth attendants can take a leading role by employing client-centered professional values to develop and extend this cooperative approach to maternal-fetal conflicts.

Reasoning with cases and hypotheticals in HYPO

HYPO is a case-based reasoning system that evaluates problems by comparing and contrasting them with cases from its Case Knowledge Base (CKB). It generates legal arguments citing the past cases as justifications for legal conclusions about who should win in problem disputes involving trade secret law. HYPO's arguments present competing adversarial views of the problem and it poses hypotheticals to alter the balance of the evaluation. HYPO uses Dimensions as a generalization scheme for accessing and evaluating cases. HYPO's reasoning process and various computational definitions are described and illustrated, including its definitions for computing relevant similarities and differences, the most on point and best cases to cite, four kinds of counter-examples, targets for hypotheticals and the aspects of a case that are salient in various argument roles. These definitions enable HYPO to make contextually sensitive assessments of relevance and salience without relying on either a strong domain theory or a priori weighting schemes.

When Values Collide

The topic of shared values among members of an organization has received significant attention of late from both scholars and practitioners in the business field. The existence of a strong corporate culture (a term used, for our purposes, as synonymous with shared values) has been tied to superior performance, both in a financial (Enz and Schwenk, 1989; Peters and Waterman, 1982) and ethical sense (Waters and Bird, 1987; McCoy, 1985). The notion that value sharing is beneficial to organizations is intuitively appealing; the feasibility of value sharing is also fundamental to basic normative concepts of rational decision-making, which view the organization as a single actor focussed on an accepted set of goals (Allison, 1971). The possibility that values can be shared also presents a potential solution to the age-old dilemma of trading off individual autonomy for corporate control. So long as senior management is convinced that organizational members agree on fundamental guidelines and desired ends as criteria, the latitude that individuals can be given to make their own decisions is considerably enhanced. To the extent that the existence of shared values acts to preserve the freedom of individual action,1 it remains preferable to alternative forms of control that insist on unthinking obedience to corporate directives. Thus, the notion that organizational members can share values serves many useful purposes and sets the stage for a view of the organization as appropriately possessing qualities (such as respect for individual autonomy) that more adversarial views of corporate life exclude. Given this utility, the question of what happens in organizations when fundamental values collide ? when the potential for value sharing, at a meaningful level, appears limited ? is an important one.

Sensitizing Mental Hygiene Therapy Aides to the Needs of Patients' Relatives

Over the past decade we have witnessed a paradigmatic shift in our notions about families of chronic mentally ill persons. A number of publications have highlighted the burdens and needs of such families ( 1-4), and innovative programs designed to enhance coping skills have proven useful to both patients and their relatives (5-8). When located in hospital settings, these programs must be integrated within an institutional ethos that fosters respect for relatives as potential allies in treatment rather than one based on an adversarial or pathogenic view of families. As part of an attempt to create such an ethos, the Family Support Project was implemented in the fall of 1985 at the Buffalo (N.Y.) Psychiatric Center (9). In discussions with patients’ relatives it became apparent that the attitudes and behaviors ofmental hygiene therapy aides (known in other states as mental health aides or nurses’ aides) can have enormous impact on relatives who may well have more face-to-face contact with these aides than with any of the professional members of the treatment team. A 1985 survey of250 relatives of

A Yo-Yo Model of Cooperation: Union Participation in Management at the Rath Packing Company

The authors hypothesize that union leaders who enter into union-management cooperative programs alternate between cooperative and adversarial behavior: they agree to cooperate in order to avert corporate ruin or obtain benefits, but revert to their adversarial view of labor-management relations when cooperation incurs costs to the union or threatens their control of union members. Analysis of union-management collaboration at the Rath Packing Company between 1978 and 1985 shows that during the life of that program, the union leaders withdrew from and returned to collaboration three times, in response to changes in the cost to the union of continued participation.

Pigs

To produce for market needs, the pig producer requires a clear view of the market. But in the pig industry, sophisticated as it may be, this is not always the case. Producers have often been reluctant to accept the restraints upon production that the meat trade requires if product quality is to be maintained. Conversely, the trade has sometimes been slow to allow producers to profit from the benefits of new techniques and streamlined production practices. These sorts of problems will remain with the industry while it continues to be based upon adversarial trading at each interface of the production chain. The benefits of integration between breeder, producer, feed compounder, slaughterer and meat trader are self-evident and essential to the future of the industry. The producer needs better communication lines with his market. If that communication is to generate information which is useful, both parties, not one party, must benefit. An environment of opportunistic trading between the various parties within the industry, and an adversarial view where each believes it is exploited at the hand of the other, is counter-productive.

The Young Hamilton, A Biography (review)

Reviews J. T. Flexner, The Young Hamilton, A Biography. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1978. 497pp. $15.00. Biography has, in the last decade, enjoyed a resurgence as a form for the innovative investigation of colonial and revolutionary America. Building on the great tradition exemplified in the previous generation by Flexner's own Washington, by Malone's Jefferson, Mitchell's Hamilton and Brant's Madison, scholars have joined biographical form to non-narrative and inter-disciplinary material, techniques and insights. Biographers have used a life or a career to reveal a state of mind, a predicament ; to probe agonies as much as actions. I think of Bernard Bailyn's The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Life, most recently of Peter Shaw's The Character of John Adams. Family and group biography has also attracted attention —Waters on the Otises, Klein on the Shippens. And a corollary has been the investigation of a group, a generational profile, of the kind essayed by Kenneth Lynn in his A Divided People. Lynn concluded (p. 68) that the revolutionary generation was, in terms of relationships with their fathers, the most contented of any in American history: leading a revolution came easily to them. Although Lynn admits to Hamilton's exceptional childhood, he argues that it had the effect of early "preparing Alexander Hamilton to take care of himself ' (p. 79). Thus Hamilton is squeezed into Lynn's "patriot backgrounds ": he was ready to take decisions, to assume responsibility. The implication is that Hamilton fitted well into American and revolutionary society. This is not the Hamilton presented by J. T. Flexner. For Flexner, 360 biography Vol. 2, No. 4 Hamilton "was by far the most psychologically troubled of the founding fathers." His spirit was cankered: "the great mind, so precocious at the start, never matured." His view was "always from the outside." Nor was his thought seamless: "the accomplished, smooth and brilliant man of the world could at any moment change hysterically, invisibly , for the time being decisively into an imperiled, anguished child" (pp. 3-7). From his fraught, West Indian childhood, Hamilton acquired a contempt for man and an adversary view of human relations. And these determined his own adult relationships and public policies. Having examined the impact of Hamilton's disturbing early years, Mr. Flexner shows how it produced the finished—or rather unfinished —Alexander Hamilton. The career is followed up to 1783. A summary chapter deals with the final two decades. Flexner makes four major points about Hamilton's character and his career: (1) that Hamilton was an outsider; (2) that he was psychologically unstable; (3) that his family background (or lack of it) prompted his views on private and public life; and (4) that, in a very direct way, the travails of the young American republic stem from his own troubles. So far, so good. But I find the textual demonstration and elaboration of these arguments unsatisfactory. The last point is fragile. Attempting to contain it, Mr. Flexner resorts to undue personalization. In treating the "siege" of Congress (1893) and Hamilton's part in the removal ofthat body from Philadelphia , for example, Flexner asserts: "It is amazing to consider that the District of Columbia might never have been established, the capital of Washington never built, had it not been for tiny scenes enacted years before on the faraway shores of the Leeward Islands. Hamilton, in whose mature body the wounded child still lived, had reacted according to an old pattern" (p. 428). Serious concern for the way in which character confronts and molds events gives way to spurious surprise and speculation: "Had Hamilton 's communication fallen into British hands, the history of the war and perhaps of the world would have been changed. ..." (p. 352). Frequent "but ifs," "surelys" and other such hypothetical constructions jar against the psychological interpretation and force the reader to view skeptically Flexner's claims. Mr. Flexner's style does not help matters. It is frequently breathless and often downright vulgar: metaphorical bombshells explode; explosions occur when headquarters is "a-boil"; the army comes "roaring in"; Congress tries "desperately to slug out something that might ameliorate the situation." So I do not...

Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus

(Stanley Kubrick, 1964) is one of the most fascinating and important American films of the 1960s. As a sensitive artistic response to its age, the film presents a moral protest of revulsion against the dominant cultural paradigm in America-what Geoffrey Hodgson has termed the Ideology of Liberal Consensus.' Appearing at roughly the same time as other works critical of the dominant paradigm-Catch 22 is a good literary example of the stance-Dr. Strangelove presented an adversary view of society which was to become much more widely shared among some Americans in the late 1960s. This essay will examine the Ideology of Liberal Consensus, demonstrate how Dr. Strangelove serves as a response to it (especially to its approach to nuclear strategy and weapons), and look at how American culture responded to its radical reassessment of the American nuclear policy in the early 1960s. The American consensus to which Dr. Strangelove responds was rooted in the late 1930s and in the war years. When Americans in the late 1930s began to feel more threatened by the rise of foreign totalitarianism than by the economic insecurities fostered by the stock market crash, a previously fragmented American culture began to unify. A common sys-

An Adversary View of Sociobiology: The Use and Abuse of Biology . An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. Marshall Sahlins. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1976. xvi, 120 pp. Cloth, $8; paper, $3.95.

An Adversary View of Sociobiology: <i>The Use and Abuse of Biology</i> . An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. Marshall Sahlins. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1976. xvi, 120 pp. Cloth, $8; paper, $3.95.

Nuclear Power and Ecocide: An Adversary View of New Technology

With his Lawrence Radiation Laboratory colleague, Arthur R. Tamplin, John W. Gofman, M.D., is a leading critic of the Atomic Energy Commission's radiation safety standards. In this article, he relates the radiation controversy to the broader issue of technological motivations in American society. He proposes an adversary method of controlling ecologically unsound or dangerous technical innovations. He suggests that the development of a sustaining body of technological criticism and challenge is incumbent on the scientific community. Dr. Gofman is professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former head of the Biomedical Division at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Liver-more, where he now conducts research.