SOCIAL CLASS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND GENDER

This article explores the implications of social class background in the lives of women who attended Radcliffe College in the late 1940s and in the early 1960s. Viewing social classes as cultures with implications for how individuals understand their worlds, we examined social class background and cohort differences in women's experiences at Radcliffe, their adult life patterns, their constructions of women's roles, and the influence of the women's movement in their lives. Results indicated that women from working-class backgrounds in both cohorts felt alienated at Radcliffe. Cohort differences, across social class, reflected broad social changes in women's roles in terms of the rates of divorce, childbearing, level of education, and career activity. There were few social class-specific social changes, but there were a number of social class differences among the women in the Class of 1964. These differences suggested that women from working-class backgrounds viewed women's marital role with some suspicion, whereas women from middle- and upper-class backgrounds had a more positive view. Perhaps for this reason, working-class women reported that the women's movement confirmed and supported their skeptical view of middle-class gender norms.     

POWER, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND THE PROCESS OF FEMINIST RESEARCH

The dismantling of a male-dominated power-over social structure and its manifestations in human activities and relationships lies at the center of feminist thought. For many feminist psychologists, this has meant challenging the privileged, all-knowing, objective position of the researcher; viewing the naive subject of study as a participant in the process of creating knowledge; and using research methods aimed at transforming an oppressive culture (Burman, 1992; Crawford & Marecek, 1989; Hollway, 1989). These goals are at the center of the Community Education Team's (this issue) article: Fostering Relationality When Implementing and Evaluating a Collective Drama Approach to Preventing Violence Against Women. The authors use the concept of relationality to describe the process of developing interdependence and an egalitarian, democratic research relationship among those involved in the study. Although sharing power is a goal of feminist research and pedagogy, detailed accounts of the process of incorporating feminist ideas regarding power relations in U.S. psychological research are rare. The Community Education Team reminds us that those ideas most central to feminist thought—power, process, and social change—are often the very ideas that still elude U.S. feminist psychological research.     

SOCIAL INFORMATION AND EMPLOYEE ANXIETY ABOUT ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

Studies of job attitudes have traditionally been conducted on the correspondence between individual needs and objective job characteristics. A recently developed theory, however, suggests that job attitudes may be a function of social information received (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978). This investigation used social information processing theory as the basis for a study of antecedents to employee anxiety about a move to an open office environment. The structural equation model developed from social information processing theory proved to be a good fit to the data, and a revised version of the model provided an even belter accounting for the variance in the data. Anxiety about organizational change was determined by social information, individual needs, and job characteristics, with need for privacy having the largest impact on anxiety. The model is discussed in terms of its support for information processing theory, its individual significant linkages, and the implications for need satisfaction models of job attitudes and other research on outcomes in organizations.     

PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON SOCIAL CHANGE

L'étude psychologique des changements sociaux. ‘Problémes scientifiques et éthiques. — Les recherches psycho-sociologiques peuvent aider à comprendre comment faciliter des changements sociaux constructifs. Pour des raisons à la fois scientifiques et sociales, L'étude du changement social présente un intérêt commun pour les psychologues des pays avancés et de ceux qui le sont moins. De plus, elle requiert, pour être efficace, un haut degré de coopération internationale. s'engager dans de telles études soulève des problèmes fondamentaux tant du point de vue scientifique que du point de vue moral. Les problèmes scientifiques sont relatifs aux implications de telles recherches pour le développement de la discipline et le maintien de L'objectivité scientifique: les études du changement social dans les pays en voie de développement peuvent réellement contribuer, et d'une manière irremplaçable, aux progrès de la psychologie sociale; L'objectivité scientifique dépend, non de L'absence de valeurs préférentielles, mais de la manière dont le chercheur tient compte de ces valeurs. Les problèmes éthiques concernent essentiellement les relations du chercheur qui vient d'une société industrielle pour faire des études dans un pays en voie de développement, avec les membres de la société d'accueil, et particulièrement, avec ses collègues locaux. Quels sont les problèmes moraux qui risquent de se poser? Imposer des valeurs étrangères, envahir des domaines privés, utiliser la recherche à des fins d'espionnage et d'intervention, exploiter le pays d'accueil, détourner à son profit les chercheurs locaux de valeur. Il est essentiel que s'établissent des relations fondées sur la participation et la réciprocité, pour que les recherches interculturelles soient conduites de façon morale et pour que se développe une mutuelle confiance.     

THE MIDDLE AGES: CHANGE IN WOMEN'S PERSONALITIES AND SOCIAL ROLES

It has been argued that the predominant focus of midlife personality development is generativity; other research has found that social roles influence both its onset and its expression. In this article, we examine women's midlife personality development and its relationship to career and family commitments. Results for a sample of 90 women indicated that commitment to particular social projects in early midlife was associated with different patterns of identity, intimacy, and generativity levels at age 62. In addition, women who added social projects to existing projects during adulthood expressed similar levels of identity, intimacy, and generativity at age 62 as women whose social project commitments had stayed the same. For smaller subsamples of women in the study, longitudinal analyses assessed changes in personality development within middle age as well as the relationship between personality and the maintenance or addition of social projects. These results highlight important variation among women who followed different adult life paths.     

SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE AND THEISTIC EVOLUTION: INTERSUBJECTIVITY,LOVE, AND THE SOCIAL SPHERE

After providing a brief overview of social neuroscience in the context of strong embodiment and the cognitive sciences, this paper addresses how perspectives from the field may inform how theological anthropology approaches the origins of human persons‐in‐community. An overview of the Social Brain Hypothesis and of simulation theory reveals a simultaneous potential for receptive/projective processes to facilitate social engagement and the need for intentional spontaneity in the form of a spiritual formation that moves beyond simulation to empathy and love. Finally, elements of a virtue science that draws on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's relational imago Dei are shown to be helpful in framing and motivating theological approaches to human origins.     

AGENCY,AUTONOMY, AND SOCIAL INTELLIGIBILITY

Popular Frankfurt‐style theories of autonomy hold that (i) autonomy is motivation in action by psychological attitudes that have ‘authority’ to constitute the agent's perspective, and (ii) attitudes have this authority in virtue of their formal role in the individual's psychological system, rather than their substantive content. I pose a challenge to such ‘psychologistic’ views, taking Frankfurt's and Bratman's theories as my targets. I argue that motivation by attitudes that play the roles picked out by psychologistic theories is compatible with radically unintelligible behavior. Because of this, psychologistic views are committed to classifying certain agents as ‘autonomous’ whom we intuitively find to be dysfunctional. I then argue that a necessary condition for autonomy is that an agent's behavior is intelligible in a particular way: autonomy necessarily involves acting from a subjective practical perspective that is, in principle, minimally comprehensible to others – not simply in a causal sense, but in a substantive, socio‐cultural sense.     

LOVE,JUSTICE, AND SOCIAL ESCHATOLOGY

In this paper, we explore the ontological and theological ground of political institutions in order to then reflect upon the eschatological calling of society. The paper builds on Tillich's ontological insight that love does not simply transcend justice, but that it permeates and drives justice, that justice gives form to love's reunion of the separated. This relation between love and justice is at play in political institutions: these unite human beings under forms of justice that must be transformed ever anew if they are not to lose touch with the dynamic power of love and freeze into increasingly unjust juridicalism. The modern history of Western civilisation bears witness to this ontological tension, and the phenomenon of globalisation is yet another instance of human society's mystical calling. Thus, love heads the dynamic movement that transforms political institutions ever anew. Yet society as a whole must become conscious of its ontology for humanity to truly reach its eschatological potential, and this will require both that theology recovers its ground and that political theory thinks theologically.     

VIRTUES, SOCIAL ROLES, AND CONTEXTUALISM

Abstract: Contextualism in epistemology has been proposed both as a way to avoid skepticism and as an explanation for the variability found in our use of "knows." When we turn to contextualism to perform these two functions, we should ensure that the version we endorse is well suited for these tasks. I compare two versions of epistemic contextualism: attributor contextualism (from Keith DeRose) and methodological contextualism (from Michael Williams). I argue that methodological contextualism is superior both in its response to skepticism and in its mechanism for changing contexts. However, methodological contextualism still faces two challenges: explaining why we are solidly committed to some contexts, and explaining why knowledge within a context is valuable. I propose virtue contextualism as a useful extension of methodological contextualism, focusing on the way that our virtues depend on our social roles. My proposed virtue contextualism retains the benefits of methodological contextualism while explaining both our commitment to particular contexts and the value of knowledge held within those contexts.