Personal Gratification Research Articles

Lebanese youth narratives: a bleak post-war landscape

To identify the themes that define the lives of a generation living in a conflict-ridden post-war society, I explore the changing views of Lebanese students through an analysis of the personal narrative texts that they created during my creative writing workshops over a 16-year period (1997–2012). Increasingly, young Lebanese feel trapped in a violent past, a threatening present and a hopeless future. As traditional forms of stability and loyalty (family and state) become more dysfunctional, modern alternative sources of education, employment, security and public discourse remain absent, creating an ever-widening disjunction between expectations and disheartening lived realities. Since 1998, student texts have focused on three salient thematic groupings: Idealism (1998–2005), Activism (2005–2008) and, most recently, Disillusionment (2008–present). In an atmosphere of escalating intolerance and hostility, it is hardly surprising that students are currently escaping to spaces of indulgence and personal gratification. As ongoing regional conflicts fuel local sectarian rivalries, I argue that reengaging educated young Lebanese in non-confrontational narratives that challenge dysfunctional systems can play a vital role in disrupting a dangerous sectarian narrative that is fast threatening to entangle Lebanon in yet another brutal war.

Using Structural Equation Modeling to Explore Saudi Consumers’ Intentions Regarding Counterfeit Goods

Although the Saudi Customs Department attempts to prevent the import and/or export of counterfeit goods more than 62 million counterfeit products, with a value of approximately US$50 million, were confiscated at ports in Saudi Arabia over the past year in 2012. This paper focuses on the key antecedents of Saudi consumer attitudes toward counterfeit products, as well as the influence that these attitudes have on the Saudi behavioral intentions regarding these products. A 10 min pen and structured questionnaire was distributed to 520 subjects in Riyadh through a nonprobability, convenience-sampling approach to test the hypothesized relationships using structural equation model (SEM) test with maximum likelihood estimation. The empirical results from the structural model suggest that: Saudi consumer intentions to buy counterfeited products are influenced by perceived risk, subjective norm, price-quality inference, prior purchase of counterfeits, integrity, and personal gratification. The paper reinforces the mediator role that attitude plays in the relationship between these antecedents and behavioral intentions. Furthermore, a consumer’s previous experience with consumption of counterfeits does not have a direct effect on behavioral intentions; only an indirect effect through attitude. This paper informs policy makers and brand managers about the main predictors of consumer’s attitudes toward counterfeits. In this way, advertisements that are intended to discourage the consumption of counterfeits could use the perceived risk as their primary message. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE AR-SA /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:8.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:107%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Significant Life Changes and Changing Lives: Discovering Lived Lives of International Mobile Professionals

Today, there are more and more professionals who will be transitioning into new lives and new realities. Some studies indicate that engaging in multiple transitions is disorienting and can negatively affect a person’s sense of well-being. There is already an extensive body of literature focusing on expatriates working overseas who fail to thrive. This current study attempts to discover if and how multiple transitions may contribute to improving an individuals’ probability to thrive. The individuals report experiencing vitality and progression as well as truly enjoying each opportunity and challenge offered by engaging in multiple transitions. In this study, we seek to better understand what elements contribute to transforming disorienting transitions into springboards to engineer activities towards an engaging and thriving existence. The present work contributes to the growing positive organizational behavior literature. Major themes that emerged from this study include: dialectical cycling of agentic behavior with positive response towards uncertainty; a deeper understanding of oneself which fosters both stronger relationships as well as the transformational power of experiencing multiple transitions that propels one to continue to seek challenge and growth; each of which contribute to performance at the firm level as well as personal gratification for the individual.

Student agency: success, failure, and lessons learned

Students in urban under-resourced schools are often disengaged from the curriculum. Distributing voice (agency) to them would seem an obvious counter to their alienation, allowing them to be co-constructors rather than objects of their education. Beyond being pragmatically sound, student agency is, arguably, a psychological and moral imperative. However, what is imperative is not necessarily doable as we illustrate in two student agency high school projects. We analyze the outcomes using four previously identified factors: school context, project scope, personal gratification, and assumption of genuine authority (rather than teacher delegated power). In conclusion, we raise two issues requiring more reflection and investigation: what is the role of a teacher who is an employee of the school yet wants to help her students protest against injustice? How can agency be developmentally staged so that students become skilled in assuming responsible leadership in their schools?

Introduction: Specifying mothers/motherhoods

The place of mothers and motherhoods in commercial life represents one of the great under-told stories of consumer culture. At once revered and despised as leisure shoppers, women nevertheless have borne the brunt of the labor of consumption for the household and thus have garnered the attention of advertisers and marketers since at least the early decades of the 20th century. During these formative years, the ‘mother’, as conceptual persona, can be found informing the design and staffing of retail spaces of urban department stores in the USA (Benson, 1986; Cook, 2004), completing the ‘family circle’ in depictions of the ‘housewife’ in advertising promotions (Marchand 1985) and occupying center stage in consumer education efforts of the time (Frederick, 1929). A good deal of the story of the mother– consumer – in both historical and contemporary treatments – has until recently remained enfolded into, and perhaps lost in, the general figure of a ‘female’ consumer with all if of its attendant ideologically inflected foibles and presumptions. Indeed, relatively recent key works focusing on women and shopping, such as those by DeVault (1991), Miller (1998) and Zukin (2004), tend to elide the specificities of what women do as mothers and thus of how constructs and understandings of motherhood may inform those of womanhood as well as those regarding consumption. Motherhood remains caught in the tussle between seemingly disparate forms of value and valuation. Abiding cultural norms continue to set expectations for mothers to defer some measure of personal gratification to their children’s ‘needs’, or at least to their wants, both at home and in the marketplace. Yet, it is in the regular handling of children’s desires that the sorting of priorities and the fabricating of value take place on a fundamental, everyday basis. It also is in the handling of such desires that various motherhoods come to be constituted as social practice (cf. Warde, 2005). As Douglas and Isherwood remind us, consumption, in the broad sense, constitutes the way the materials of culture become organized. It is ‘the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape’ (1979: 57). Consumption here includes the sorting of values – of good from bad, of appropriate from

Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders

Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders

‘Making’ our way through: DIY and crafting communities in Toronto

Drawing on an interview-based research project on Do-It-Yourself and crafting culture in Toronto, this essay explores three themes of “why craft”?: the need for personal gratification and identity-building; the desire to build a community with shared values; and the need to connect with a sense of humanity through labour in an increasingly technological and urban world. Though emerging craft communities may appear niche-like and closed off from mainstream forms of knowledge creation, discussion on these particularities provides us with examples of how crafting may benefit learning processes not originally connected to crafters. Examining what it means to craft in Toronto, and in larger independent DIY contexts may also make recognizable new models of learning that are based on communities of practice not typically associated with standards-based education.

Attitudes and perceptions of villagers toward community-based mariculture in Minahasa, North Sulawesi, Indonesia

This study assesses how characteristics of individuals (e.g. preparedness to take risks), households (e.g. employment structure) and communities (e.g. distribution of resources) affect the chances that mariculture is successfully adopted as an alternative to fisheries. An increasing number of coastal households in tropical countries see their livelihoods endangered by declining fisheries catches. Acceptable livelihood alternatives are needed to reduce the pressure on the marine environment. Indonesian coastal communities do not always depend exclusively on fishing but often diversify their livelihood portfolios, which makes livelihood programs a relevant policy intervention for them. Sea cucumber mariculture is increasingly advocated in Indonesian coastal management. Using semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and non-participant observation, current livelihoods and the attitudes toward the possibility of sea cucumber mariculture activities were assessed in two coastal villages in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Respondents stated a high interest in alternative livelihoods. At the same time, non-economic factors such as tradition and personal gratification played an important role in decisions on whether to fish or not. Villagers' attitudes were influenced by fishery-related experiences, perceptions and understandings, as well as by previous experiences with alternative livelihood programs. The results suggest that it is easier to turn people with farming experience into aquaculturists than people who are highly focused on fishing. Moreover, the indications are that sea cucumber mariculture would remain an additional source of income rather than replace fishing. In the study area, mariculture is still an unfamiliar activity, not yet sufficiently trusted to generate willingness to invest. Villagers' general acceptance of non-fishing income alternatives will need to be promoted if livelihood alternatives are to be successful in reducing pressure on marine resources.

Patent Applications on Representative Sectors of Biotechnology in Brazil: an Analysis of the Last Decade

This study investigated what motivates Brazilian academic researchers to get involved in University-Industry Technology Transfer (UITT) and deterrents to contributing to this process. The research relied on interviews with experienced academic scientists and managers from four universities in Brazil. Determination, persistence and entrepreneurship, related to motivational types Self-direction and Stimulation, were prominent. Hedonism, Achievement and Power - highlighting a shift in their professional identity - were also observed. Universalism type involved opening career opportunities, awakening and maintaining the interest of students. The major motivational goals were: generate resources, solve problems, professional challenge, personal gains, personal gratification, academic prestige, competition, and solving problems of society. Factors that discouraged researchers were: time required for UITT, lack of incentive, innovation environment, and fear of contravening university rules, among others. Knowledge of motivational profiles of academic scientists favors the development of incentive policies and programs for UITT, helping to attract and retain qualified researchers at Brazilian universities.

Career Satisfaction and Burnout in the Reconstructive Microsurgeon

INTRODUCTION: To determine motivating factors, practice patterns and career longevity of surgeons who perform microvascular free flaps (MVFF). To identify modifiable risk factors to reduce MVFF surgeon burnout. METHODS: A cross-sectional observational study was performed using a web-based survey sent to members of the American Society of Reconstructive Microsurgery (ASRM). The survey evaluated demographic variables, practice characteristics, and career satisfaction. Career motivating/demotivating factors were graded from none, mild, moderate, to highly significant. RESULTS: 101 of 412 surveys sent to microsurgeons were completed (24.5%). Sixty-four percent of respondents underwent microsurgery fellowship training. Fifty-seven percent of survey respondents performed >25 flaps/year. Free flaps performed included breast (63.8% of respondents), head and neck (54.3%), chest/trunk/abdominal (33.0%), extremity (77.7%), and vaginal/perineal (19.1%) reconstruction. The greatest significant stressor was reimbursement (23.4%), with moderate stress from lack of time for personal development (44.1%), excessive workload (39.8%), and invasion of family relationships (39.4%). The most significant motivating factors for performing MVFFs were personal gratification from work (66.0%) and patient gratitude (53.8%). The most significant demotivating factor for MVFFs was amount of work to reimbursement ratio (31.2%). Fifty-six percent of microsurgeons expected their microsurgical volume to stay the same, while 24.5% predicted a decrease and 19.1% predicted an increase in the next 5 years. Ninety-five percent said they would pursue microsurgery again as a field of practice. CONCLUSION: Recent literature has demonstrated an increasing level of surgeon dissatisfaction and burnout, particularly amongst those performing microsurgical reconstruction. In contrast, this study demonstrates high career satisfaction amongst reconstructive microsurgeons. However, there remain significant stressors that may decrease motivation for performing MVFFs; of these, work to reimbursement ratio was the most significant stressor and demotivating factor.

WHY CUSTOMERS DO NOT BUY COUNTERFEIT LUXURY BRANDS? UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF PERSONALITY, PERCEIVED QUALITY AND ATTITUDE ON UNWILLIGNESS TO PURCHASE


 
 
 This study aims to examine the underlying reason why consumers do not have the willingness to purchase counterfeit luxury brand by focusing on the effects of personality, perceived quality and attitude towards the behavior of not purchasing counterfeit luxury brands. Personality factor is conceptualized to have six dimensions namely value consciousness, novelty seeking, integrity, personal gratification, status consumption and materialism. A survey on 115 non-purchaser of counterfeit was conducted amongst adults in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. Results revealed that attitude towards counterfeit luxury brands played an important role as it has a positive relationship with intention not to purchase counterfeit luxury brands and value conscious, novelty seeking and integrity. Attitude towards counterfeit luxury brands also has a fully mediation effect on the relationship between novelty seeking and intention not to purchase counterfeit luxury brands. However, novelty seeking consumers do not influence the intention to purchase counterfeit luxury branded product as they have a negative attitude towards the behavior of purchasing the counterfeit brands.
 
 

Five Years Later: Resiliency Among Older Adult Survivors of Hurricane Katrina

The purpose of this study was to examine the resilience of older adult survivors of Hurricane Katrina in light of their traumatic experiences and multiple losses. Ten Mississippi Gulf Coast residents who have survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath were interviewed. The participants were 65 years old or older. Their responses were audiotaped and transcribed. The transcripts were analyzed using phenomenological methodology and NVivo 2.5 software. Three major themes emerged. Participants described finding personal gratification, realizing their ability to cope, and developing a new interest in life through their novel experiences.

Build It, and They Will Recompense: North Korea's Nuclear Strategy

Build It, and They Will Recompense:North Korea's Nuclear Strategy Sung-Yoon Lee (bio) Rare is the moment when three or more North Korea watchers come together and see eye-to-eye on the North Korean nuclear problem. Jonathan Pollack, with his latest book No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security, may have achieved that rarest of feats: creating a consensus among those interested in this deeply polarizing issue. The consensus here may not necessarily be Pollack's main conclusion, which, using the author's own words, can be summarized thus: "North Korea does not treat nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip, and instead views these weapons as central to its identity and security planning....The leadership thus remains locked in a nuclear mindset; it is unprepared to envisage longer-term survival of the extant system without retention and enhancement of its nuclear capabilities" (p. 207). The consensus would instead be that Pollack's No Exit is the most comprehensive and detailed account of the decades-old North Korean nuclear issue in any language—in other words, the best. Pollack begins with the formation of the North Korean state under Kim Il-sung in the 1940s and ends with a first-rate analysis of the current strategic environment in which the key players—North Korea, South Korea, China, and the United States—find themselves. He traces the historical, ideological, and political backdrop against which Kim Il-sung built his unique and defiant regime; presents the major milestones in Kim's political dealings with his patrons and adversaries alike; and guides the reader through the tortuous cycles of North Korean provocations and compensatory nuclear negotiations over the past two decades. The result is a tantalizing array of original analysis and rich detail. The generalist will find North Korea's defiant edge and success in building a nuclear arsenal at the cost of a dysfunctional economy curiously fascinating. The specialist will find that the book's cogently presented historical details and insights make it a must-read for both personal gratification and research. And [End Page 178] for anyone teaching a college-level course on Korean politics or U.S.-East Asia relations, the book should be required reading. In chronicling the North Korean leadership's dogged pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities over nearly four decades, Pollack accomplishes something he may not have intended, which is implicitly to undermine the "negotiationist" school of thought—that is, those who believe that negotiations would effect North Korea's denuclearization. Pollack explicitly endorses neither the "collapsist" nor the "reformist" school thinkers—those who believe, respectively, in the eventual collapse of the North Korean regime and in the possibility of the regime adopting genuine economic reform and opening. With his analysis of North Korea's past actions and strategic imperatives, Pollack effectively buries the notion that the United States and its partners, with the right mix of incentives and coercion, could achieve the complete dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Given the ample evidence presented, it would be folly to argue against Pollack's assessment of the current state of nuclear negotiations or his reading of the North Korean regime's intentions: "Despite pursuit of nearly every imaginable approach to denuclearisation by the U.S. and others, this goal is now farther from realization than at any point since the signing of the Agreed Framework" (p. 190). He further explains: "The leadership...posits a 'no landing' scenario—that is, the perpetuation of the existing system based on the unquestioned power and authority of the Kim family and of the ruling elites that support it, retention of its nuclear weapons capabilities, and a measure of economic recovery" (p. 192). Pollack ends the book with a sober call for efforts to contain North Korea's existing nuclear weapons capabilities: "The ultimate goal remains nuclear abandonment by the North, but a more practicable objective is risk minimisation, both in relation to the DPRK's extant weapons and in any potential transfer of technology and materials beyond North Korea's borders" (p. 209). Some may find Pollack's prescription a bit too passive and ultimately unsatisfactory. Yet it is hard to argue against the historical...

Prioritizing professional practice models for nurses in low-income countries

The persistent crisis facing human resources for health in low-income countries demands innovative solutions to relieve constraints that include severe shortages, an inappropriate skill mix and maldistribution of personnel. The global response to focus on nurses, who form the greatest proportion of the health workforce, is the right step towards easing the urgent shortage of health workers. In the most affected regions of sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia, the responsibilities of nurses have increased in line with expanding health services to meet local, national and global health targets, including the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Studies evaluating health outcomes where this task-shifting approach is used have shown that nurses can provide high quality care safely, but only with adequate training and proper organizational support.1,2 Unfortunately, without a comprehensive model for professional nursing practice, nurses cannot reach their potential in transforming health services delivery where it is most needed. Professional practice models are systems (structures, processes and values) that support giving nurses more control over the delivery of care and their working environment.3 These models encompass five essential building blocks: (i) professional values, (ii) patient care delivery systems, (iii) professional relationships, (iv) management approach, and (v) remuneration. Professional values refer to a nurses’ duty to promote and restore the health of individuals, families and communities while upholding fundamental human rights, respect and dignity for all.4 Without a firmly embedded regard for basic human rights, the patient is no longer central to all care-related decisions. A patient care delivery system includes the process of assigning responsibility for patient care; coordinating the nursing unit; delegating clinical decision-making authority; and communicating patient-related information. A clear definition of roles and functions is central to establishing nurses’ professional identity. Professional relationships are the inter- and intra-professional exchanges that occur within multidisciplinary health-care teams. Patient care is improved when nurses are granted full status to collaborate on an equal platform with other members of a multidisciplinary team. The management approach includes support for organizational decision-making. Lastly, compensation schemes include tangible remuneration, such as salaries and bonuses, as well as intangible acknowledgement, for example recognition for achievement. Structuring an environment in which nurses derive benefit from both extrinsic factors, such as financial incentives, and intrinsic factors, such as personal gratification from delivering patient care, is essential for sustaining retention and enhancing recruitment, particularly in underserved areas.5,6 Endorsing a professional practice model requires providing all nurses with autonomy over their own practice and a single standard of education for entry into practice. These traits, along with possession of a robust body of knowledge, recognition as a science, pursuit of education at the highest academic levels, dedication to the service of others and subscription to a code of ethics, constitute the hallmarks of a profession.7 Aspiring towards these qualities enhances nurses’ identification with and commitment to the profession.8 There is evidence that there is a significant positive relationship between commitment to nursing as a profession and patient outcomes.9 To date, nurses have failed to universally achieve the characteristics of a profession as enumerated by Flexner a century ago.10,11 Furthermore, besides uneven attainment of the characteristics of a profession among nurses in the same country, there is even greater variation in their professional status from country to country. Nurses in Europe and North America are much closer to reaching professional status than their counterparts in less-developed countries.11 Nurse leaders in low-income countries must determine the best way for nurses to make an impact on the delivery of health services. Professional practice models should be supported as a strategy to harness the collective capacity of nurses and maximize the full scope of the nursing role. Advancement towards professionalization for nurses in developing countries is crucial to the health of their populations. When nurses don’t have supportive mechanisms that encourage them to fulfil their professional obligations, their ability to improve health outcomes is seriously inhibited. According to the Joint Learning Initiative, an independent network of more than 100 experts on global health, “the promise [to sustain advances in health] will be realized only when the global community mobilizes and strengthens the power of the health worker”.12 We propose that professional practice models can strengthen the power of nurses to help attain the Millennium Development Goals.

Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Af rica after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper. Charles Piot's landmark 1999 ethnography, Remotely Global, showed that societies of the savanna region of northern Togo, far from being static, insular polities on the margins of the nation-state, lying history and isolated from global forces, have always been influenced and preoccupied by the outside world. In this new book, Piot argues that the ending of the Cold War brought about a decrease in the power of both the state and local chieftaincy in Togo, the emergence of a radically new political economy centered on NGOs and Pentecostal churches, and new, future-oriented social imaginaries, modes of subjectivity, sovereignty, and storytelling. Piot's tide indexes Togolese longing for a future that replaces untoward pasts, both political and cultural. Such longing is represented not only in Christian End Times narratives and die universal quest for exit visas but also in the embrace of a thousand development initiatives that hail youth and leave elders behind (20). Utopian yearnings find expression in a passion for playing the green card lottery, fantasies of fictitious marriages with foreigners, membership in churches that promise supernatural abundance, Internet searches for exit strategies, and a turn to the transient pleasures of sex, drugs, and music for an instantaneous sense of affective power and presence. This emphasis on inwardness and self-fulfillment stands in dramatic contrast to the prevailing ethos of a traditional culture, where duty, forebearance, and respect for elders imply a stoic acceptance of life as one finds it and the suppression of thoughts and feelings that challenge the status quo. Traditionally, lip service was paid to the idea that one must sacrifice personal gratification and spontaneous self-expression to make sociality viable (the implication being that what is good for the many will prove good for die individual). Collective rituals and everyday practices of commensality, neighborliness, and mutuality reinforced the common weal. Modernity reverses these assumptions. Personal development through education, travel, and purchasing power becomes the royal road to social development, a precondition for the wider social good. This revolutionary change in worldview does not occur adventitiously. It follows radical disruptions to the social fabric - civil war, famine, epidemic illness, mass migration or displacement, and urbanization. Piot paints a grim picture of the anomic background against which the new social imaginarles emerged in the 1990s. These changes burst onto this socio-cosmological stage like a comet from the sky. Disconcerted by the violence against Kabre in the cities of the south, puzzled by those strange new keywords democratie and droits de l'homme, attacked by the Pentecostal churches, stung by currency devaluation and state withdrawal, and increasingly neglected by cash-strapped diasporics, this authority system was shaken to its roots (99). …

The American Investment in Marriage

The American Investment in Marriage Kristin Celello (bio) Rebecca L. Davis . More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 336 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. That Americans are more attached to the institution of marriage than many of their counterparts elsewhere in the world is evident both statistically and anecdotally, if the number of magazine articles, memoirs, and advice books published about the subject each year is any indication. The irony, of course, is that men and women living in the United States have consistently demonstrated a faith in marriage and its purported personal and economic rewards at the same time that they have divorced at what experts and government officials have identified as alarming rates. In her compelling new book, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss, Rebecca L. Davis seeks to uncover how twentieth-century Americans developed and maintained their attachment to marriage, while also seeking to strengthen this seemingly fragile institution. What is not evident from the book's title is that it is, at its heart, a history of marriage counseling in the United States. A number of historians have made forays into this area of study over the past decade, establishing the pivotal role that Paul Popenoe (a founder and public face of the profession through mid-century) played in the propagation of the American eugenics movement and in marriage counseling's more general ties to the development of a national therapeutic culture. 1 What Davis offers, however, is a systematic look at the profession from its origins—which are more complex than accounts focused primarily on Popenoe would lead one to believe—to its current iterations in both secular and religious contexts. She ably demonstrates that an investment in marriage was not only a personal decision but also one with far greater consequences for the well-being of the nation. Her contribution is all the more impressive given the paucity of easily accessible sources on the topic. For instance, the papers of marriage counseling's first professional organization, the American Association of Marriage Counselors (later the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy) were lost in a fire in the early 1980s. Left only with the personal papers of individual counselors (secular and religious), social work agencies, and other marital advice givers, Davis [End Page 517] nevertheless constructs an authoritative account of the profession's development, reach, and appeal. The book's organization is primarily chronological, although it does retrace its steps on occasion in the more thematically based closing chapters. Opening her analysis in the early twentieth century, Davis convincingly establishes the "tension between personal satisfaction and communal obligations" as resting at the "heart of the modern marriage dilemma" (p. 21). In other words, while many young Americans in the 1920s embraced Judge Ben B. Lindsey's call for companionate marriage—defined by relatively easy access to birth control and to divorce—others continued to hold that marriage was too important to the community and the nation to exist exclusively as a site for personal gratification. Marriage and marital roles were nevertheless in the process of a fundamental transformation in the 1920s, especially for women. But anxiety—not only about changing gender roles but also about the dangers of "race suicide," immigration, and other social problems and how they might negatively affect the institution of marriage—inevitably followed. Rather than turning to family, neighbors, or religious leaders for help in solving the marital "puzzle," husbands and wives began to look to the growing ranks of sociologists, psychoanalysts, and social workers instead. Davis argues that it was no coincidence that the marriage counseling profession originated in the tumultuous years of the Great Depression. The growing number of married women entering the paid labor force, especially as their husbands struggled to find work, led to fears about declining male authority in the home. Galvanized by the troubled times, noted eugenicist Paul Popenoe opened the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles in 1930. Popenoe soon became the public face of the marriage counseling profession, broadly selling his particular interpretation of marital woes, downplaying the strains that mass unemployment placed on relationships, and focusing on the...

“They put you on your toes”: Physical Therapists' Perceived Benefits from and Barriers to Supervising Students in the Clinical Setting

To identify the perceived benefits of and barriers to clinical supervision of physical therapy (PT) students. In this qualitative descriptive study, three focus groups and six key-informant interviews were conducted with clinical physical therapists or administrators working in acute care, orthopaedic rehabilitation, or complex continuing care. Data were coded and analyzed for common ideas using a constant comparison approach. Perceived barriers to supervising students tended to be extrinsic: time and space constraints, challenging or difficult students, and decreased autonomy or flexibility for the clinical physical therapists. Benefits tended to be intrinsic: teaching provided personal gratification by promoting reflective practice and exposing clinical educators to current knowledge. The culture of different health care institutions was an important factor in therapists' perceptions of student supervision. Despite different disciplines and models of supervision, there is considerable synchronicity in the issues reported by physical therapists and other disciplines. Embedding the value of clinical teaching in the institution, along with strong communication links among academic partners, institutions, and potential clinical faculty, may mitigate barriers and increase the commitment and satisfaction of teaching staff.

Confessions of a Superhero Junkie

Confessions of a Superhero Junkie

THE FACTORS IMPACTING ON CONSUMERS’ BEHAVIORAL INTENSION TOWARDS COUNTERFEITS

The paper focuses on the factors impacting on the customer’s behavioral intentions toward counterfeits. The factors include PQ – Price-quality inference, RA – Risk Avereness, SN – Subjective Norm, PR – Received Risk, IN – Integrity, PG – Personal Gratification, and AT – Attitude Toward Counterfeits; PE – Past Experience. The study surveyed 293 questionnaires from consumers in Ho Chi Minh city. The results indicate 5 factors impacting on consumers’ behavioral intentions: subjective norm, received risk, personal gratification, attitude toward counterfeits, and past experience.

What Does Answering the Phone Mean? A Sociology of the Phone Ring and Musical Ringtones

I provide here an analysis of how users choose and design personalized ringtones as an example of subjects’ current concerns with the management of social accessibility. As a result of the growing demands of ‘connected presence’ mobile phone users are faced with the proliferation of ringing phones in their soundscapes. They therefore exploit the new resources for customizing their ringtones with an orientation towards the management of the interactional problems which the development of ‘ubiquitous summoning’ may entail. Musical ringtones are chosen or designed by users, so that the shaping of the summons becomes a personal project of the recipients. They are shaped as ambiguous cues inviting two kinds of responsive actions, that is, treating them as a summons (inviting their being answered to) or as a music (inviting their being listened to). Their design becomes the locus of diverging rationales, with some users trying to exacerbate the summoning power of their phone ring and others to maximize their ambiguousness. Moreover musical ringtones are selected so as to constitute a personal gratification that the user addresses to himself (and sometimes also to potential bystanders). They become a ‘treat’ that users juxtapose and contrast with the obligation to answer that the ringtone incarnates. This provides evidence for a more general ‘crisis of the summons’ occurring as a collateral effect of increased availability requirements, which reshapes the ways we experience and perform the normative social order which underlies all social encounters.