External Dialogue Research Articles

Careers guidance and ethnic minorities in Holland and Britain: Confronting fear and anger

Abstract The development of equal opportunities for ethnic minorities through careers guidance is discussed. The provision of careers guidance services in Holland and Britain are described in relation to a model of organisational development. The emotional barriers of fear and anger are discussed in a structural context, both in relation to face-to-face client work, and in relation to service development. The concept of ‘career negotiation’ is presented to reflect the processes of internal and external dialogue needed to empower clients.

Reflections on Religion: Aging, Belief Orthodoxy, and Interpersonal Conflict in the Complexity of Adult Thinking about Religious Issues

In this study, the integrative complexity of reasoning about three different types of religious issues was examined in a sample of 60 adults across the lifespan. Men and women, aged 18-26, 27-45, and 60-85, were asked about their current beliefs, justifications, and views on alternative positions regarding a personally conflictful religious issue of their own report, a personally nonconflictful issue, and a standard dilemma involving evolutionist versus creationist accounts of human origins. Results showed that older adults reasoned less complexly than did their younger counterparts in all three types of religious dilemmas. As predicted, personally conflictful dilemmas were discussed in a more complex fashion than were other types of dilemmas across age groups, suggesting that external dialogue about issues is linked to more sophisticated mental structures of argumentation. A summary regression analysis showed that those who were older, more orthodox, reported less religious reflection, and had poorer verbal skills, displayed less complex religious reasoning overall.

ASYNCHRONOUS DIALOGUE CONTROL IN A MEDICAL GRAPHIC INTERFACE

Abstract Graphic interfaces facilitate the implementation of asynchronous dialogue between human and computer. This paper presents a graphic interface for an application in medicine, based on the declarative definition of graphic templates. The templates are specified from predefined types, and the introduction of data into a template produces a graphic object on the screen. The representational model we have used for the specification of behavior corresponds to finite state automata. Each template has an associated transition table. The control of the interaction process is distributed among the templates. There are an external dialogue between the user and the graphic objects and an internal dialogue between the application programs and the templates. The approach we present is flexible enough to permit the design of an interaction module for real use in a fast and simple way and facilitates iterative design, attaching more importance to the consideration of human factors than to programming.

Diálogo de voces en el prólogo de la Segunda Parte del Quijote

Using the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin in his The Dialogic Imagination as a point of departure, this study explores the Prologue of the second book of Don Quixote, focusing on the diversity of voices present therein. Despite the absence of external dialogue in this prologue, the dialogic relation between the Reader, the Author, and Avellaneda, all developed as independent characters, is examined. Finally, we analyze how the interaction between the voices of these characters forms the nucleus of this Prologue, and suggest other types of discourse which also find their way into these prefatory pages.

Mind Over Mead: Collins' Theory of Thought

In his Neo-Meadian article, Collins has offered a number of highly tenable and even testable notions that extend central Meadian concepts. He proposes, for instance, that in theorizing thought we should “take seriously the conception of internalized conversation’’ and, further, that “what we think about is a reflection of what we talk about with other people (or what we communicate with them on paper).” I should basically like to applaud such a stance and offer two simple extensions, both intended to elaborate the main discussion on the microsociology of language and cognition. One proposal is to suggest that if we think about what we talk about, the reverse may well also be true; namely that talk can reasonably be assumed to give some direct handle on the hidden process of thought itself. That is to say that while we may not say aLl we think nor even have consciously thought out all we say, what we say and, more specifically, how the micromoments of talk’s production unfold in interaction may, in distinctly observable ways, locate certain thought processes in action. My second proposal is more speculative. It will be best explored later in this short article but, briefly, I shall want to suggest that thought processes are themselves part of interactive and real-time realization. Whether in external or internal dialogue, my thoughts on a particular subject, person, decision, or even fantasy are not now what they were a day or week or year ago. Fundamental aspects of sociation have changed them and continue to do so. My thoughts, in Meadian terms, are social. I may hold the same opinion, plan the same activity, or wish certain events might or might not happen, but my views on themin Garfinkel’s world of indexicality and reflexivity-are forever changing relative to each other along a distinctly forward-moving trajectory. Moreover, my internal sense of what I believe, plan, or wish has emerged in just that Meadian process of internal conversation and rehearsal that Collins has highlighted. Let me return to these points shortly. First, it will be useful to examine and critique a set of issues basic both to Collins’ discussion and to the traditions on which he has chosen to build. My focus here will be on what I see as the perils of ritual or, more precisely, the analytic if convenient cul de sac that overdependence on ritual or routine behavior can create.

Metaphors in a Land of Unlikeness

I begin this too-brief response to Milner Ball's exciting lecture with my favorite From W. H. Auden's concluding chorus in For the Time Being: He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts, and have adventures.1 Spending the 7th to the 9th of November on the campus of Washington and Lee University in colloquium on the theology of law (my notion of what it was all about), was a unique adventure. I owe both Professors Ball and Shaffer, as well as our colleagues in the colloquium, a great thanks redeeming my life from the ordinary, during those days. My hope would be that Prof. Ball's lecture and his subsequent completed and published work may set off the kind of external dialogue and internal growth in other lawyers and politicians as it did in me. I hope that many will argue at length whether law is basically a medium or a bulwark, but there is no argument that the work of Milner Ball is a catalyst of conversation much needed by the inert solutions of today's legal profession. My comments beyond appreciation are brief. Auden has rightly described the world I know as The Land of Unlikeness. Metaphors, analogies, myths, idiom, paradigm all are in jeopardy in a world without likeness. Language itself is certainly at risk. And law. What Milner Ball has done is to suggest a bridge from our unlikely place in time toward a future of possible new communities of meaning. Only metaphors can do this law, or, that matter, any other discipline. Law as medium is such a dynamic metaphor. To play off Auden, for the time being, we must think in such transitional concepts (as medium). Nothing that is fixed can help us. Nothing that assumes stability, or continuity, or community of mean-