Narrative Ideas for Consulting with Communities and Organizations: Ripples from the Gatherings

This paper reviews Michael White's early work with communities and extends ideas and practices from that work into the realm of consulting with organizations. We draw on Michael's writing and the records of two specific projects, as well as the recollections of team members in those projects, to describe how ideas and practices that were originally developed in working with individuals and families came to be applied in community settings. Specifically, we show how the central intention of the work is to use narrative ideas and practices in ways that allow communities to articulate, appreciate, document, utilize, and share their own knowledges of life and skills of living. We discuss the basic narrative ideas of stories, double listening, telling and retelling, making documents, and linking lives through shared purposes. For these projects, the teams developed structures that made it possible to use the basic idea with whole communities. We show how this work with communities has offered inspiration and ideas for our work in consulting to organizations. Finally, we describe and illustrate a particular way of working with organizations that carries the spirit of Michael's community work into situations requiring shorter blocks of time and more limited commitments than the original community contexts.     

Counseling Supervisors: Standards for Preparation and Practice

The emergence of counseling supervision as a professional specialty is reviewed, the need for standards of training and practice is explained, and the process by which the “Standards for Counseling Supervisors” came into existence is described. Current and potential options for their implementation are discussed.     

Implications,for Counseling the Unemployed in a Recessionary Economy

Unemployment in a recessionary economy is unique and requires special attention. This article addresses the implications of recessionary unemployment for the field of counseling.     

IS THERE A METHOD TO OUR MADNESS? THE IMPACT OF DATA COLLECTION METHODOLOGY ON ORGANIZATIONAL SURVEY RESULTS

Results from 3 organizational survey efforts were used to explore the impact of data collection method on 5 outcomes: response preference, item completion rate, use of don't know responses, item mean and variability. The first study compared 977 online with 711 opscan responses in a U.S. government agency. The second study compared a Time 2 administration of 893 online with 732 opscan responses. The third study examined 4,654 automated phone (IVR) with 3,587 paper responses in a global pharmaceuticals firm. Although method utilization varied considerably by country, the more technological approaches were preferred in the U.S., and younger employees were significantly more likely to respond online. Overall, survey method accounted for a relatively small percentage of unique variance in the data (0% to 4%). Practitioners may be better off choosing an administration method based on factors such as cultural fit and ease of implementation rather than issues of data quality.     

Personal relationships in late modernity

This article is concerned with the significance of personal relationships in contemporary social life, principally drawing on recent British research. After reviewing traditional sociological theories concerning the impact of economic transformations on family and community ties, the author examines the character of couple and family commitment in the context of the radical demographic changes that have been occurring, particularly in patterns of family formation and dissolution. Relating these changes to theories of “late modernity,” the author assesses their implications for the relevance of personal relationships in general, and friendship in particular, in contemporary social formations. The author's argument is that far from becoming socially marginal as dominant theories generally imply, personal relationships are likely to become increasingly significant as social life becomes more fragmented and less predictable.     

GRICE'S RAZOR

Abstract: Grice's Razor is a principle of parsimony that states a preference for linguistic explanations in terms of conversational implicature, over explanations in terms of semantic context dependence. Here I propose a Gricean theory of knowledge attributions, and contend on the basis of Grice's Razor that it is superior to contextualism about “knows.”     

Daddy,Why are People so Complex?

The implications of Warren McCulloch's 1945 concept of heterarchy are analyzed in terms of human value and motivational systems. The results demonstrate the near-impossibility of predicting behavior on the basis of any hierarchical scheme, or even which among a set of hierarchical schemes will be selected as the basis of a behavioral choice. Thus, for example, people regularly say one thing and do another.