Can Science Be Objective? Longino's Science as Social Knowledge

In Science as Social Knowledge, Helen Longino offers a contextual analysis of evidential relevance. She claims that this “contextual empiricism” reconciles the objectivity of science with the claim that science is socially constructed. I argue that while her account does offer key insights into the role that values play in science, her claim that science is nonetheless objective is problematic.     

Sensational Thinking A Teaching/Learning Model for Creativity

Change, the acknowledged constant: The paradox of two seeming opposites contained as one. In the world today we find ourselves challenged by a multitude of paradoxical problems and our need to resolve these issues drives a change process, the nature of which is dynamic and complex. Dynamic change is recognized as a process of moving from one state or form to another, in ways that appear chaotic, non-linear, and unpredictable (Gleick, 1987). This results from the interactions between and among individual component parts of a system (Gleick, 1987; Bohm & Peat, 1987; Goodwin, 1991), and studies to understand how and why this type of change occurs have found that dynamic change is a creative process that occurs naturally in physical, biological and social systems.     

Characteristics of Guidance and Counseling Services in Canada

Canadian guidance and counseling services are considered in terms of societal influences, philosophical and theoretical biases, counselor role, functions, training, and current trends.     

Openness in processing social information among attachment types

Previous empirical and theoretical work suggests differences among attachment types with regard to their openness in perceiving and organizing social information. To examine these hypothesized differences, participants were given two sets of information characterizing the same target person, one set depicting an insecurely attached person, the other portraying a securely attached person. Proposed differences in openness to incorporating new information, differentiation in cognitive representations of others, and recall were assessed. As hypothesized, avoidant individuals were less open to new information than were secure subjects, and they differentiated their representations less than did both secure and anxious-ambivalent individuals. Moreover, as expected, there were no significant differences between secure and anxious-ambivalent individuals on the dimensions of openness and differentiation. However, avoidant individuals did not evidence poorer recall of the stimulus material. Theoretical and clinical implications of avoidant individuals’relatively more rigid, simplistic models of others are explored.     

The Concept of Personal Network in Clinical Practice

The practice of clinicians in all the helping professions has undergone wide-ranging change in the past two decades. This change has been uneven and halting, but an essential aspect has been a movement toward a wider arena of practice, including a variety of social network practices. The concept of personal network holds high promise for becoming a major unifying framework in clinical practice: as an analytic viewpoint, as a schema for problem location, and as an arena of practice and research. This paper will review the developing strands of network practice, examine some of the forms and characteristics of personal networks, and consider several theoretical and practice issues.     

Losing a self‐expanding relationship: Implications for the self‐concept

Previous research suggests that new relationships expand the self‐concept. The present research applies concepts from the self‐expansion model to examine the conditions under which relationship dissolution may influence the self‐concept. We hypothesized that the more expansion provided by a relationship predissolution, the greater the contraction of the working self‐concept postdissolution, and that this pattern would remain when controlling for predissolution closeness. These hypotheses were tested using recall of relationship qualities for recently dissolved relationships (Studies 1 and 2), as well as with a priming experiment (Study 3). The findings over the 3 studies supported both hypotheses. Those with higher levels of self‐expansion in predissolution relationships showed more detrimental impact on their working self‐concept postdissolution, even after controlling for predissolution closeness.     

Models and Reality: When Science Tackles Sex

Through a discussion of the way science has been used to address intersexuality, I explore an idea about how to understand science as objective and yet influenced by social, historical, and cultural factors. I propose that the Semantic View of theories provides a means of understanding how science describes reality, and I look at the way science has been used to distinguish the sexes to provide an illustration.     

A Framework for the Study of Relationships Between Organizational Characteristics and Organizational Innovation

This paper presents a taxonomy of organizational characteristics that was developed as part of a large scale job analysis project conducted for the Department of Labor (DOL). Based on research and theory related to organizations, a hierarchical taxonomy of organizational characteristics was developed with six construct domains at the highest level: organizational structure, leadership, human resources (HR) systems and practices, goals, and organizational values. The taxonomy has been empirically tested using data from over 300 organizations, and a summary of these results is presented. This taxonomy is then used to organize and review research on the relationships between organizational variables and innovation. Implications of the taxonomy for understanding relationships between organizational size, industry type, “high-performance” practices, and innovation are discussed.