Lack Of Concern For Others Research Articles

Preferred Styles of Conflict Resolution

This study examined cultural differences in preferences for conflict resolution styles using the dual-concern model. It was found that students in a collectivistic culture (Mexico) preferred conflict resolution styles that emphasized concern for the outcomes of others (accommodation and collaboration) to a greater degree than did students from an individualistic culture (United States). Consistent with this greater display of concern for others, the Mexican students scored significantly higher than the U.S. students on scales measuring interdependence of the self. However, they also scored higher on a scale measuring the independence of the self, suggesting that independence of the self and interdependence of the self may be separate dimensions, rather than representing a continuum. Correlational findings suggested that for interpersonal conflicts, avoidance may reflect a concern for others, rather than a lack of concern for others, as postulated by the dual-concern model.

Book Review: Land of Opportunity: One Family's Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack

Land of Opportunity: One Family's Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack, by William M. Adler (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), xvi + 415 pp., $22.00 U.S. REVIEWED BY David T. Courtwright, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL 32224-2645. Land of Opportunity traces the rise and fall of Billy Joe and Larry Chambers, fraternal drug dealers who each ran a string of crack houses in Detroit in the mid-1980s. The brothers were refugees from Lee (as in Robert E. Lee) County, an Arkansas backwater where blacks were stuck with secondclass education and third-class job opportunities. Billy Joe, semiliterate when he arrived in Detroit in 1978, prospered for several years as a marijuana dealer until he hit the big time with crack in 1984. His brother Larry was an ex-con who decided that dealing crack was less risky than burglary. He was wrong. In 1989 Larry was sentenced to life in prison. Billy Joe got 45 years. The brothers enjoyed a spectacular if brief run as crack retailers through a combination of hard work and business acumen. Larry in particular had a genius for rationalization. His major outlet was an apartment building converted into a department store of illicit pleasure. Three-dollar rocks were sold on the ground floor, five- and eight-dollar rocks on the second, ten on the third, and twenty-dollar boulders on the fourth. Regulars who recruited new customers were rewarded with an amount of crack equal to the first-timer's purchase. An onthe-premises smokehouse was available on the first floor. Crack pipes and shots of rum were on the house. Customers who wanted sex were escorted to the pussy house, staffed by crack-hungry women. Men would offer sex with their teenage daughters in exchange for rocks. Although Larry privately regarded his customers with contempt, he instructed his staff to treat them with respect. When a crackhead comes to you and his woman is on his back, his babies don't have no Pampers, he hasn't eaten in two days, and he's about to spend his last five dollars on crack, you have to make him feel good about spending his money. Larry and Billy also took pains with their workers, mostly kin, friends of kin, or acquaintances from back home in Arkansas. They earned from several hundred to two thousand tax-free dollars a week, though in Larry's organization they had to put in 12-hour shifts and endure midnight sobriety checks. Workers who disregarded rules were fined or faced the wrecking crew. Larry was Ben Franklin with a baseball bat. Work hard and get rich; cheat the company and it's your ass. The idea that cocaine dealers are energetic junior businessmen has been explored in such works as Terry Williams's The Cocaine Kids (1989). Adler, however, is much taken with the Chamberses' drive. His point is that it is too bad their talent and enterprise had to go into a criminal enterprise. Had to: Adler thinks the Chamberses had no other way to get ahead. Until there are more attractive opportunities for young people in the ghettos, he cautions, selling drugs and gangbanging will be rational career choices. From the Richard Wright epigraph to the last page, Adler rings the changes on this theme: racism equals deprivation equals the temptation to deal drugs. This idea is not so much wrong as it is incomplete. It is certainly true that Detroit's legitimate economy hit the skids shortly after Billy's arrival, and that there were few good jobs for ambitious black men in Lee County. But a close reading of Land of Opportunity suggests other causes for the plague of teenage crack dealers. One is the lack of concern for others. …

Changing Constructions of Masculinity in a Sepik Society

The last decade has seen increasing interest in effects of colonialism on Melanesian culture and identity. Several excellent collections (Carrier 1992; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; White and Lindstrom 1993) have demonstrated that exposure to Europeans and to their ideas about Pacific Islanders has wrought changes in Melanesian and cultural practices, even those that appear to be most conservative (e.g., Carrier and Carrier 1989; Thomas 1992a, 1992b). Altered self-images and practices almost inevitably have political implications. Keesing (1989) and Babadzan (1988), for example, argue that national elites borrow romantic European images of Island cultures as egalitarian communities to mask inequalities within new Pacific Island nations. Conversely, other local groups draw on negative European images of Pacific Islanders as ignoble savages with moral failings to justify national and international inequalities. Scholars have also suggested that colonization has transformed power relations within rural communities. Subtle alterations in gender (Clark 1989; contributors to Jolly and Macintyre 1989a; Jolly 1992; Kulick 1992; Lattas 1991) and in people's ideas about qualities necessary to be a good person (Gewertz and Errington 1993a, 1993b, 1994; Keesing 1989; Kulick 1992; White 1991) have a profound influence on gender relations and on villagers' attitudes toward local and national leaders (Gewertz and Errington 1993a, 1993b, 1994; Keesing 1989, 1992; Kulick 1992, 1993; White 1980a, 1991). This article examines politics of identity by analyzing changing conceptions of person and community among eastern Kwanga of East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea.(1) It specifically concerned with a set of assumptions that distinguish two components of personality: a stubborn, aggressive autonomy, on one hand; and a sensitivity to concerns of others, on other. Ethnographers working in many areas of Melanesia have reported that ideas about these two personality traits shape attitudes toward gender and leadership (Harrison 1982; Kulick 1992; Read 1959; White 1978, 1980a, 1980b, 1991). Harrison (1982), for example, reports Avatip villagers of East Sepik Province as saying that people are born with and understanding. Spirit the individual's life-force, an elan vital conceived as source of growth and health, of self-assertion and self-will and, in time, of mystical powers over others (Harrison 1982:117). When enhanced in males through initiation, spirit leads to the development by individual of autonomy from constraints imposed by others, with a kind of transcendence of moral conditions of existence (Harrison 1982:117) and allows men to be effective warriors who strike fear into hearts of their opponents. Understanding, on other hand, is means by which an individual aware of social conventions and apprehends them as having moral force. It source of sociability, compassion, respect, `amity' in Fortes's sense, and all `Apollonian' virtues involved in ethos of secular equality (Harrison 1982:117). Harrison argues that these assumptions about personality shape gender relations and leadership patterns. Women, who are thought to have an abundance of understanding, are valued for their nurturing and co-operative natures. But they are also viewed as somewhat lacking in spirit and, therefore, as weak and dependent (Harrison 1982:125). Many men, on other hand, have an excess of spirit that enables them to defend village; but same personality trait generates a selfish lack of concern for others' autonomy and wishes (Harrison 1982:120). But some men have a special kind of understanding that allows them to curb their aggressive spirit in interest of communal needs and this makes them good leaders, a characteristic seldom found in women. Read (1959) says that similar ideas about character shape attitudes toward leaders among Gabuku-Gama of Eastern Highlands. …