Larger Social Implications Research Articles

Providing Cultural Context for ‘Sacrifice of the Social Outcasts’

AbstractIn ‘Sacrifice of the Social Outcasts’, C.L. Kieffer proposes that the disabled formed a socially marginal group that might have been preferentially targeted for human sacrifice in ancient Maya society. Extensive ethnohistoric and iconographic evidence exists that the disabled and deformed held high status in pre‐contact Mesoamerica precisely because of their physical disabilities and played well‐defined social roles. Several incidences of the sacrifice of these individuals are produced, but they are associated with extraordinary events. The actual cultural context suggests that the sacrifice of a disabled individual may have larger social implications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fertile Future? Potential Social Implications of Oncofertility

Fertile Future? Potential Social Implications of Oncofertility

A case study of service desk's performance measurement system

PurposePerformance of service desk is critical to an organization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance measurement system of a technical assistance center at one of the largest semi‐conductor manufacturers in the world. The study examines top performance issues faced by the service desk and provides recommendations to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachA case study approach has been adopted. An analysis is first carried out as to how the performance system has been developed in the organization. A number of employees associated with the service desk have been interviewed, to take into account the employees' views on the performance measurement and the appraisal and reward system of service desk agents. In addition, secondary data as available in public domain have been used. Data from the customer satisfaction survey were analyzed to determine performance issues faced by the service desk and to ascertain the root cause of the performance gap.FindingsThe top performance issues faced by the service desk of the case organization are in areas of poor communication, high time consumption in service delivery, poor trouble shooting, poor knowledge of the agents, and confusing phone menu. The top four areas that need focus and improvement are Resolution Rate (RR), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Total Utilization, and Tickets per Agent per Week (TAW). In addition, there are mismatches between the employees and the management of the service desk regarding the rewards and recognition system.Practical implicationsBoth customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are vital for the survival of an organization. Performance measures as suggested are effective tools to plan initiatives for improvement.Social implicationsSatisfaction of employees is closely linked with a performance measurement system which determines appraisal and incentives. A wrong or inappropriate measurement system can bring down motivation levels, creating low productivity, low earnings, low customer satisfaction, and social tensions. There are larger social implications: ineffective performance measures will bring down employment levels because of attrition.Originality/valuePerformance measurement in service is comparatively new. The study described in the paper should prove to be a valuable addition and the paper offers methods to improve performance and action plans to close performance gaps, to enhance customers' experience in a service organizational setting.

Doing the best for one’s child: satisficing versus optimizing parentalism

The maxim "parents should do what is in the best interests of their child" seems like an unassailable truth, and yet, as I argue here, there are serious problems with it when it is taken seriously. One problem concerns the sort of demands such a principle places on parents; the other concerns its larger social implications when conceived as part of a national policy for the rearing of children. The theory of parenting that creates these problems I call "optimizing parentalism." To avoid them, I define and defend a new and more morally appealing theory, "satisficing parentalism."

Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton ed. by Margo Swiss, David A. Kent

Margo Swiss and David A. Kent, eds. Speaking G riefin English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2002. Pp. 365". U.S. $60.00 cloth. This collection of essays complements recent scholarship by such cultural historians as Ralph Houlbrooke and David Cressy in elaborating a more complicated and nuanced representation of early modern grief than the summary picture supplied by Lawrence Stone. It also builds on standard scholarship of literary genres pertaining to grief (most notably G.W. Pigman ill’s study on elegy) to identify important adaptations, resistances, and refinements to tradition and convention in early modern grief-writing. In scholarship that seeks to relate literature to other elements of culture, one of the most interesting questions is how and how adequately the artifice of literature represents and redresses the human experience from which it derives and to which it is addressed. The best essays in the present volume make clear attempts to answer this question in the literature of grief. Three of the best essays discuss female modifications to the generic tradition. Donna J. Long asserts that the maternal elegy (exemplified by Mary Carey, Lucy Hastings, Gertrude Thimelby, and Alice Thornton) should be seen as a mode within the broader genre and one that is shaped by social pressure to restrain grief over the death of a child. In this mode traditional elegiac elements of praise and lament are lost or downplayed and traditional attempts at consolation often fail as the elegist asserts her special role as mother and seeks poetic means to “recuperate” her sense of self. Similarly, W. Scott Howard argues that An Collins finds in the elegy’s traditional progression from private utterance of grief to “a consolation linking the public recognition of loss with universal principles” a pat­ tern for turning her own personal experience of mourning into a call for political action. Most notably, her elegy on the civil war (a poem of public mourning) translates her personal search for redemptive spiritual knowl­ edge into a promise of political reform. Margo Swiss’s essay also makes a connection between the private experience of one woman’s grief and its larger social implications. In a complex argument Swiss asserts that Milton opposes current conventions in depicting Adam’s reasoned but inadequate response to Eve’s “emotionally intelligent” tears which are an appropriate response of grief to her dream in Book 5 of Satan’s temptation. Hers is a “godly sorrow” that prophetically anticipates the universal grief of the Fall and ultimately draws Adam into a union of sorrow and redemption. In their shared grief, Adam and Eve model a “cooperative androgyne” that reflects the affective androgyny in the Father/Son relationship. 280 | Nelson Phillip McCaffrey effectively uses Freud’s distinction between mourn­ ing and melancholy to revisit Andrew Marvell’s problematical depiction of grief in “The Nymph’s complaining for the death of her faun.” McCaffrey augments and refines his theoretical framework with reference to Vamik D. Volkan and Daniel Josephthal’s theory of the “linking object” and his own elaboration of Heinz Kohut’s “self-object” (which he re-styles as “Narcissistic Idol”) to explain the Nymph’s inordinate mourning of her faun as an expression of melancholy that stems from her failure properly to grieve her sense of loss at her betrayal by the unfaithful Sylvio, who gave her the faun but spurned her heart. Michael McClintock’s excellent offering finds in Thomas Heywood’s Apologyfor Actors a theory of “affectivity ” (a character’s ability to project intense emotion) and the role that affective spectacle can play in the reformation of an audience by inciting grief, confession and ultimately reform. He then uses A Woman Killed with Kindness to exemplify Heywood’s contention that the affective force of theatrical representations (of grief in this case) reinforces social order, especially gender roles and familial bonds. Paul Stanwood similarly asserts that John Donne and Jeremy Taylor are able to provide in “artful discourse” an edifying channel for their audiences’s grief, but he does not provide so clear a model of how this artifice works. He shows that Donne followed the practice of his time in dividing his funeral sermons into...

Tarnished Labor: The Home, the Market, and the Boardinghouse in Antebellum America

It is growing late, and the crowd has somewhat thinned although there are still many hundreds in the street-some hurrying home to their wives ... some creeping reluctantly to their cold, narrow, bedrooms in private boardinghouses where they receive 'the comforts of a home' for five dollars a week, with breakfast and tea. So wrote George Foster, journalist and observer of urban life, in one of his best known works, New York by Gas-Light (1850).' Foster may well have rendered an accurate judgment of boardinghouse conditions. But the contrast he invoked between the welcoming conjugal home-to which one hurried-and the grave-like boardinghouse bedroom-to which one crept reluctantly- reflected a wider discourse that chronicled the disappointments, annoyances, and even danvers of boarding life. Foster was not alone. Commentators as diverse as Sarah Josepha Hale (a prolific author of domestic fiction and the editor of the genteel Godey's Lady's Book) and Walt Whitman agreed that boardinghouses were not and condemned them for precisely this reason. Far from being a mere place of residence, the home in antebellum America represented a relatively new but increasingly important cultural ideal. Preferably the private abode of the middle-class nuclear family, it furnished a refuge from a market-driven world, governed proper relations between the sexes, provided moral guidance and emotional support to its inhabitants, and upheld republican government and social order.2 Its antithesis-in theory if not in fact-was the boardinghouse, a public establishment where strangers (of both sexes) mingled freely, fueling crime, licentiousness, and social anarchy. Yet during periods of massive urban growth, city dwellers of all classes more likely lived in boardinghouses than in homes.3 Routinely described even by its detractors as an American institution, the boardinghouse, with its inhabitants and its larger social implications, remains largely unexplored by social and cultural historians. To be sure, boardinghouses show up in urban history monographs, receiving the most insightful treatment (for the antebellum period) in Elizabeth Blackmar's Manhattan for Rent. But no scholar has given boardinghouses exclusive attention, and few have fully appreciated their economic and cultural significance. Numbering in the thousands, providing for rural migrants and European immigrants, boardinghouses literally underwrote the growth of urban industry and commerce. To put it another way, what historians call the revolution could not have been accomplished in the absence of boardinghouses and the labor of those who kept them.4 Boardinghouses also performed important cultural work. As antebellum commentators of various stripes struggled to understand the meaning of home, boardinghouses provided them with a ready contrast, encompassing all that homes were not. Above all, boardinghouses were creatures of the marketplace. If the home furnished a refuge from the market-indeed if its very existence justified the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in the marketplace-what then of the boardinghouse? Paying cash for housekeeping services (and accepting cash for providing them) defied the social logic of an emerging sentimental, social ideal. In the period that enshrined the home as the foundation of moral life and simultaneously embraced the market as the overarching model for economic relations, distinguishing between home and boardinghouse provided Americans with a timely, if ultimately frustrating, lesson in political economy. It offered them one means of determining-to borrow Amy Dru Stanley's words-what was saleable and what was not.5 Women's labor stood at the heart of this social equation, for boardinghouse keeping was women's work. Even when a man owned the house or headed the household, the work of boarding fell to women. That this labor should have provoked hostility is at first surprising. …

Black men in the medical education pipeline

The authors discuss the decline in the numbers of black men enrolling in medical school over the last two decades and assess possible reasons for it, including the smaller numbers of men from nearly all races and ethnic groups now applying to medical school, the declining popularity of the undergraduate biology degree among men in general, the falling number of black students who go on to college, and, underlying all these, the pervasive effects of poverty on educational achievement, the dwindling employment opportunities for black men of limited education (brought on by dramatic changes in the American economy), and the rising indices of stress and alienation among black men. The authors review the larger social implications of the growing educational gap between black men and other segments of society, pose questions about some of the trends that have been mentioned, indicate lines for further research, and propose potential solutions to the problem of the deepening underrepresentation of black men in medical schools.

Proprietary hospital chains and academic medical centers.

This article examines the reasons why proprietary hospital chains have become interested in buying or managing academic health center hospitals. Among the explanations that are discussed are such factors as vertical integration of health care, chain legitimation, integration of finance and delivery systems, and short-term profit potential. These factors are further examined through the use of a structured analysis of the interpenetration of proprietary chain hospitals and academic medical centers. We also discuss the consequences of these linkages in terms of such issues as continued educational mission, types of sponsored research programs, degree of indigent care provision, and changes in the nature of physician and other health worker training. The larger social implications of the movement of proprietary chains into tertiary medical care are evaluated.

The Tory in a Time of Change: Social Aspects of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

Toward the end of his life, Ford Madox Ford grew fond of describing himself as an old man mad about writing; but years earlier, in study of Henry James first published on New Year's Day, 1914, he had cast himself also in the role of a Tory mad about historic continuity.2 Ford believed always that the novelist's proudest function was to serve as the historian of his own time, and his own greatest challenge in this regard was supplied by the immense and complex historical discontinuities of the First World War. His response to the war is set down most immediately and personally in quasi-autobiographical memoirs with reassuring titles like No Enemy (1929) and It Was the Nightingale (1933). But the four volumes of the saga now known as Parade's End (Some Do Not ..., 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man Could Stand Up-, 1926; and The Last Post, 1928) stand as his most comprehensive and broadly social attempt to restore lost sense of continuity by salvaging what was demonstrably valid from the halcyon days before Armageddon. Ford's critics have always hailed Parade's End and The Good Soldier (1915) as his two greatest achievements; but critical studies of the Tietjens volumes have usually been written in the spirit-if not under the shadow-of The Good Soldier, emphasizing the psychological and technical aspects of the tetralogy while treating its larger social implications only in terms of suggestive allegory, parable, or fairy tale.3