Toward a Post-Representational Politics?: Participation in the 21St Century

Representational democracy has been the main form of government in the West since the English, American, and French revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, there are indications that its ability to frame the relationship between citizen and state has begun to weaken. This weakening can be traced to many factors. One of these is the emergence of new collective actors, such as social movements, and the (re)recognition of the arena of “civil society” just as the articulating power of political parties began to erode. Although these emerged initially under the umbrella of the nation state, toward the end of the 20th century a qualitatively new dynamic of networked social activism illustrated that the nation-state was no longer the only location for political action and the exercise of citizenship. These trends point to a new participatory dynamic, which could not yet be said to offer a serious challenge to representative forms of politics, but that arguably marks the beginning of the decline of that form. However, we are far from understanding how a participatory democracy might replace representational government. This article argues that we should begin now to discuss the uncomfortable gaps in our understanding of what “qualifies” participation, in order to develop a new theory of new practice and strengthen the content and potential of this new political imaginary.     

Evaluation of Crisis Intervention Programs and Personnel: A Summary and Critique*

ABSTRACT: Many of the suicide prevention centers that developed throughout the country during the last decade have evolved into general crisis intervention services. At the same time, they have stimulated the development of a wide variety of agencies that utilize nonprofessional volunteers who, primarily through telephone contact, provide helping services to people in crisis. This paper presents a critique of three particular problem areas relating to the use of volunteer personnel, along with a summary of research aimed at providing new technologies for their solution. Methods have been developed for rating on-the-job performance of crisis intervention workers, based upon criteria that are thought to have general application to crisis intervention centers. Efforts to describe personality characteristics of volunteers are reported, along with suggestions for the direction of additional investigations. Finally, the issue of assessing the outcome of crisis intervention cases is summarized. A four-phase conceptualization of the crisis intervention process is proposed, and appropriate measures of outcome at each point in the process are suggested. The overall significance of this type of research is discussed in terms of the need for standards by which to evaluate crisis intervention services.     

Risky Business: Harlem Pimps’ Work Decisions and Economic Returns

ABSTRACT

In this mixed methods study of 56 entry-level pimps in Harlem, NY, we explore how pimps’ choices to use violence or control differ by where they are selling sex, who their clientele are, and whether these violent and controlling behaviors yield higher returns. First, we qualitatively explore how pimps account for each of these choices, and how each group of choices are related to the other choices. Second, we use bivariate statistical techniques to see whether there are associations in this sample between pimps’ ages and each of those decisions, and between each of those decisions and reported earnings. We find that younger pimps work with clients and sex workers in their social networks because they are easier to hold accountable, which leads younger pimps to bypass the self-reported risks involved with more violent work, but also tends be associated with lower self-reported earnings. Older pimps gravitate toward stranger clients, which involves more risk but higher earnings. Most pimps do not describe regularly using violence either against sex workers or to protect sex workers, but the use of violence is more common among older pimps. The accounts of regularly using violence with workers are not associated with higher earnings. The idea that pimps control most aspects of how sex workers labor and other aspects of their lives such as where they live are not substantiated by the accounts of the pimps themselves, but we do find older pimps describe exerting more control over sex workers than younger pimps. We discuss the implications of our findings, which demonstrate that pimps are a diverse group who see their own violence and control decisions as related to age, location, clientele, and perceived risks and rewards.     

Recollections of parental style and perceptions of current family functioning at age 50

It is hypothesized that recollections of an individual's parental behaviour towards them is associated with their view of their current family functioning. This hypothesis was tested for using data provided by 213 men and 270 women drawn at age 50 from the Newcastle Thousand Families Study. Relationships between retrospective reports of parental behaviour during childhood and perceptions of current family functioning at age 50 were investigated using a univariate regression analysis in order to explore the relationship between scores on the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) and the McMaster Family Assessment Device (FAD). Where a significant association was observed the relationship between subscale scores was further examined using a multivariate regression analysis including gender and self‐reported psychological well‐being (as measured by the General Health Questionnaire‐ GHQ) as covariates. Several statistically significant associations between PBI and FAD subscale scores were observed. Four of these remained statistically significant once gender and self‐reported psychological well‐being were adjusted for. In this population sample, aspects of recalled parental behaviour were associated with the health of current family functioning in several domains as reported by the FAD. These associations appear to be partly mediated by current psychological well‐being.     

The influence of generalization decrement on the outcome of a feature-positive discrimination

In a feature-positive discrimination subjects receive training in which reinforced presentations of a compound, AB⁺, are intermixed among non-reinforced presentations of one element, A^o. The three reported experiments compared the results of this procedure when using a light or a tone as the feature-positive stimulus, B. In all three experiments, the tone elicited a stronger conditioned response than the light when it was presented alone. The main concern of Experiments 2 and 3 was to examine whether this effect was due to training being incomplete for subjects receiving the light as the B element. In Experiment 2 it was found that extended discrimination training did not diminish the difference between the properties of the light and the tone. Experiment 3 revealed that this effect was not due to differences in the asymptotic associative strength of either A or the compound. It is argued that these results are not readily compatible with contemporary theories of learning, and an alternative account is presented.