Showing papers on "Dilemma published in 1981"

Common Property Externalities: Isolation, Assurance, and Resource Depletion in a Traditional Grazing Context

Abstract: Institutional alternatives to common property externalities are wider than argued by private exclusive property rights advocates. The "tragedy of the commons" is not a prisoners' dilemma, characterized by the strict dominance of individual strategies. The nonseparable common property externality is an "assurance problem." The assurance problem provides striking perspectives in analytical and policy terms. It redefines the problem of the commons as one of decision making under uncertainty. Institutional rules innovated by the group to reduce uncertainty and coordinate expectations can solve the problem of overexploitation. Rules come in many forms, and private property is only one.

In the Shadow of Organization

Abstract: This book deals with the dilemma of individual autonomy in an organizational society. It argues that the organizations that we established to work for us have instead imprisoned us. Drawing upon critical social theorists like Habermas, depth psychologists like Jung, and phenomenologists like Husserl, author Robert B. Denhardt shows how the "ethic of organization" inhibits the individual's search for meaning and then discusses strategies for enhancing the individual's role. He champions independence, expressiveness, and creativity over discipline, regulation, and obedience. To this first paperback edition, Denhardt has added a new introduction that focuses on leadership's key role in humanizing organizations, as well as a bibliographical update.

The doctors' dilemma: sin, salvation, and the menstrual cycle in medieval thought.

Abstract: religious thought. Thus it is that even today, at the Church of the 32 Samuel E. Thorne, ed. and tr., Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England (Cambridge, Mass., 1968-), 2:33. With the exception of the first sentence here quoted, Thorne reports that the rest of the quotation represents \"Bracton's interlinear additions or supplementary passages, later taken into the text by his editor or redactor.\" Authorship is thus technically in doubt, though for present purposes, content alone is what matters. 33 Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., and R. McL. Wilson, tr., The Protevangelium of James, New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia, 1963), 1:378-379. Interestingly enough, when Jacobus de Voragine retold the story in the second half of the thirteenth century, he advanced Mary's age at the time of this crisis from twelve to fourteen: apparently the age of menarche that seemed reasonable in the third century was so no longer by the thirteenth: The Golden Legend, tr. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (London, 1941), 2:523-524. 34 That such continues to be the case, and that the Marian cult continues to employ analogies with Christ, are suggested by an informal poll of convent-educated friends that the author found himself unexpectedly taking in the course of his research. The data base is too small for meaningful quantification here, but the results indicate that when these women were having their first periods, a high percentage were privately taken aside by nuns who wished to present them with the consoling exemplum of Mary. Usually it was urged that just as her Son had taken on the sins of the world even though He Himself was without sin, so, too, had the Virgin taken on the burden of menstruation although not herself under Eve's curse. Whether this bit of piety goes back to the Middle Ages is impossible to say, though Mary \"did not refuse,\" as Bracton says, \"to be subjected to established laws.\" The Doctors' Dilemma 723 Annunciation in Nazareth, pilgrims and tourists alike can still visit the site of Mary's mikveh, where French Franciscans stand ready to show them the tub in which she washed away the ritual defilement periodically caused by her quite normal physiology.35 In much the same way, religious doctrine and the presumed physiology of menstruation also proved useful in reconciling the scientific conclusions of the Philosopher himself with the nature of observed reality when those two came into conflict. Aristotle had held, as was undoubtedly true in his day, that men lived longer than women, and he saw this difference as a natural one, explaining that men were inherently the \"warmer\" sex. By the thirteenth century, however, life expectancies had changed, and it had become increasingly apparent that women on the whole were now living longer than men.36 Did this mean, then, that Aristotle had been wrong? The task of answering that question fell to Albertus Magnus, unquestionably the leading scientist of his day and, next to his pupil St. Thomas Aquinas, probably the greatest Aristotelian thinker of the age. Admittedly Albert's solution is in some respects incomplete, but at the same time, the near-universal assumptions of his century allow one to reconstruct the full scope of his thought with more than the usual scholarly diffidence.37 And once that is done, it becomes clear that Albert's approach, like that of those favoring a normal physiology for Mary, was not one to be content with conclusions based purely on authority as buttressed by syllogistic reasoning uninformed by empirical data. In Albert's mind there was undoubtedly a predisposition to assume that Aristotle had at one time been right. If so, though, it was very likely that the Greek sage had been referring not to men and women as they existed in the thirteenth century, but rather as they had been in their perfect natures before the fall. Under conditions such as had prevailed in the Garden of Eden, Eve had clearly not been the equal of Adam, for, as Gregory the Great had taught, Adam was mind and spirit whereas Eve was mere flesh. Thus, by the process of hierarchical reasoning so characteristic of medieval thought, 35 For a full description of a visit to the site, not to mention photographs of the relic in question, I am grateful to Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., who reports that his attending Friar was a bit startled to have explained to him the real purpose of the \"Jewish bath\" he was exhibiting. Insofar as Franciscans, notably Duns Scotus, were among the leading medieval proponents of the Immaculate Conception, whereas Dominicans had used Marian physiology precisely to argue against its acceptance, there is a certain irony, perhaps, in Franciscan guardianship of the mikveh, but such are the ways of history. For a presentation of Franciscan views, remarkable in their range though irrelevant to the purposes of the present article, see Graef, Mary, 1:281-294, 298-305, 315-318, 320-322. 36 David Herlihy, Women in Medieval Society (Houston, 1971), pp. 4-7; and \"The Natural History of Medieval Women,\" Natural History 87,3 (March 1978), 56-67. 37 Herlihy, Women, p. 16, n. 13, reprints the crucial passage from Quaestiones super de animalibus 15, qu. 8, in Opera Omnia (Monasterium Westfalorum, 1955), p. 262, but does not himself speculate on the context within which Albert appears to have viewed the problem. 724 The Doctors' Dilemma Albert appears to have arrived at the conclusion that Adam's had naturaliter to be the stronger read \"warmer\" and longer-lived sex. Be that as it may, inexorable change came with expulsion from the Garden. In particular, Eve and all her female descendants began to menstruate. On the one hand, of course, this was her and their curse, God's punishment of our first mother for having listened to the serpent in the first place and thus for having got the human race into its present sinful predicament. Yet on the other, just as Gregory the Great had argued that in this punishment there was also a secondary benefit insofar as God \"in his loving-kindness and mercy . .. [had] preserved nman's power of propagating the race after him,\" so, too, Albert argues that in the curse of Eve there is another hidden mercy. For, he says, not only is the sexual act more fatiguing for males (and hence more injurious to their health); but also, because of menstruation consequence of the fall though it may be women alone are enabled periodically to purge the poisons from their humors in a monthly effusion of blood. Therefore the curse now allows them per accidens to live longer than men. In this way, Aristotle thus becomes both right and wrong; and reason is neatly reconciled with revelation, reality with authority, in a perfect thirteenth-century synthesis.38 As medievalists well know, first encounters with medieval thought can frequently prove a disconcerting experience. Many of its premises are totally foreign to a modern sensibility, and the process by which it wends its way from first principles to final conclusions can appear bizarrely arcane. Yet medieval thinkers doctors of medicine and theology alike lived in a universe far removed from our own, and precisely because it encompassed both this world and the next, the framework within which issues were viewed was understandably apt to include aspects of time and eternity in proportions notably different from those governing the typically scientific and secular assumptions of the twentieth century. 38 The question at issue was \"whether the male or the female is of longer life,\" to which Albert responded in part: \"Per accidens tamen longioris vitae est femina, tum quia minus laborant, propter quod tantum consumuntur, et magis mundificantur, per fluxum menstruorum et etiam minus debitantur per coitum; ideo magis conservantur. Et istae causae accidentales sunt.\" Because the first sin was voluntary, not predestined or a necessary consequence of human nature as first created, all results of that sin, including menstruation, could therefore be considered accidental, as Albert does here. Nevertheless, to have granted Aristotle a knowledge of what nature had been like in its uncorrupted state was to see in him even greater powers of intellect than were normally assumed. Moreover, the approach is unusual since, as mentioned in footnote 11 above, the accepted convention was always to think of nature in its sinful state. At the same time, though, one should note that the idea of menstruation as yet another form of purgative bleeding was not original with Albert, but appears to derive from Greek medicine, especially of the Hippocratic school. Indeed, his fellow German Hildegard of Bingen had already argued in a work probably known to him that menstruation provided a necessary cleansing of a woman's blood and humors, necessary because a woman's body contains more humors than does a man's: Causae et Curae, ed. Kaiser, pp. 77-78, 102-108, 121 (passages, incidentally, where discussion of the full range of traditional menstrual complaints will be found). Still, whatever the debt to others, the uses to which Albert put this theory are highly original. The Doctors' Dilemma 725 Nevertheless, alien though the world of the Middle Ages may often appear, one should never allow that fact to obscure the extent to which those doctors wrestled faithfully with alternate forms of recognizable reality. Logic might tell them that a Virgin with an Immaculate Conception ought not to menstruate, but Christology, observation, and common sense told them she must have. So menstruate she did. Similarly, if experience suggested that women lived longer than men whereas Aristotle had held the contrary view, ways were found to vindicate the Philosopher's judgment without in any way denying the validity of their own more immediate data. It may be a commonplace among non-medievalists that the Middle Ages was a period in which empirical evidence always gave way to the forces of Authority and blind superstition, but that in itself is a blind superstition

Models of Pluralism: The New American Dilemma

Abstract: Controversies over recent events in the area of racial and ethnic relations in the United States, including heightened group consciousness, government-mandated af firmative action in employment and education, court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration in public schools, and demands for bilingual education in public school systems, indicate that our society faces a new "American dilemma"— in this case a choice between two types of racial and ethnic pluralism. The nature of this choice is clarified by the use of six analytical dimensions, and the importance of the choice for the future of racial and ethnic relations in America is emphasized.

Thinking Disputes: An Essay on the Origins of the Dispute Industry

Abstract: ion called power as an explanation will not wash. It leads, however, to the same cycle of problems as dispute theorizing itself-indeed, as all inductive theorizing does: i.e., is the power of a feudal chief the same as the power of a lawyer, or an international company, or a highly respected village woman. .. ? So while the techniques reveal the need for theoretical elaboration, the methodology itself, caught on the idealist horns of the induction vs. deduction dilemma, and incapable of transcending it, cannot yield a way out. For both approaches, as we have seen, start with a concept of dispute, and a concern about these "disputes," rather than with a concept of the social formation, and a concern about social structures and social orders. The attempt to work from the dispute to the social formation is doomed to failure, for the concept of dispute itself is not and cannot be, if so formulated, an integral part of a social theory, a theory which should have itself created the space for such a concept. Thus to substitute the study of disputes for the study of law, as Roberts (1979) for example encourages us to do, simply replaces one problem with another

The ethnic dilemma in social services

Abstract: What do you do to start reading ethnic dilemma in social services? Searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book. Actuary, reading habit must be from earlier. Many people may be love to read, but not a book. It's not fault. Someone will be bored to open the thick book with small words to read. In more, this is the real condition. So do happen probably with this ethnic dilemma in social services.

Encounters with Palestinian Women under Occupation

Abstract: At the beginning, anyone setting out to examine the situation of Palestinian women confronts a dilemma, both practical and ideological: the need to decide whether or not there is a problem of woman independent of the collective national problem, and what is the correct relation between the two. Any attempt to escape this dilemma leads either to a feminism that ignores the effects of Ottoman/British/Israeli oppression on Palestinian social/family structures; or to a sterile nationalism without social content. Current interest in the situation of Third World women has naturally had its effects in the Palestinian arena. After decades of media-starvation, Palestinians are suddenly being bombarded by journalists, film-makers, researchers, novelists, conference-conveners, all intersted in one topic: Palestinian women. Torn between their need for international exposure, and their. distrust of singling out any particular category (especially women) for the spotlight, Palestinians have responded with confusion. Invited to attend the Copenhagen Conference of July 1980 (the second in the UN Decade for Women), with Palestinian women tabled on the official agenda, the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) sent a delegation armed with data on the "Case," but little on women. Whether this way out of the dilemma was due to a principled stand, or to insufficient preparation,

Monitoring-of-Understanding Research: Inquiry Directions, Methodological Dilemmas.

Abstract: A study testing poor readers’ facility at detecting informational inconsistency in text given three levels of explicitness in pre-reading direction is discussed. Also discussed are general question and method concerns in the area of monitoring-of-understanding research. Within the study, there appeared to be little reason to reject the error detection method on most grounds. However, experimental materials did present somewhat of a generalizability dilemma. That dilemma, and suggestions for further research in the area, are discussed in some detail.

The Social Contract in Leviathan and the Prisoner's Dilemma Supergame

Abstract: The familiar problem of whether Hobbesian men in the state of nature would ever abide by an agreement to obey a Sovereign is a version of the puzzle now known as ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’. The present paper has the following aims: (1) To establish that the game-theory approach is a legitimate way to study Hobbes. (2) To see whether a proposed ‘solution’ to the paradox of Prisoner's Dilemma applies to this example. The paradox is that individually rational self-interested calculations sum to an outcome that is suboptimal not only for society but also for every single member of it. The solution is the Supergame which consists of indefinitely repeated plays of the simple Prisoner's Dilemma game. (3) To compare the results of the above with the similar conclusions reached by a different route by recent arguments in sociobiology.

The Higher Education Dilemma in Developing Countries: Thailand's Two Decades of Reform.

Abstract: Many developing countries are faced with the dilemma of whether to expand their higher education systems rapidly, in the face of demand and regardless of the social and employment consequences, or whether to curtail enrolments by some means of cut off or selection at the end of secondary school. This article discusses the dilemma in the context of Thailand. It discusses a variety of higher education models in use in the Third World countries and then shows how Thailand has modified its closed-access European-style universities through expansion and diversification in the 1960s and how it has experimented with open-access institutions during the 1970s. There have undoubtedly been problems but the experiment has eased some of the social pressures and tensions and it remains to be seen if the government can control an ever expanding pool of university students. Other countries faced with a similar dilemma could well learn from the Thai experience.

Ethical dilemmas for social workers in discharge planning

Abstract: This paper examines the conflicting values inherent in the discharge planning process. A framework for analysis of an ethical dilemma is proposed and applied to a case situation that is common for hospital social workers. Although the framework does not resolve the dilemma, it does provide the social worker with some criteria for explicating the values inherent in the discharge planning process.

The Informant: A Narcotics Enforcement Dilemma

Abstract: (1981) The Informant: A Narcotics Enforcement Dilemma Journal of Psychoactive Drugs: Vol 13, Drugs, Crime and Criminal Justice, pp 235-245

Theories of Social and Educational Inequality: from dichotomy to typology

Abstract: Explanations for social and educational inequality generally revolve around the theoretical poles of a conflict theory/structural‐functional dichotomy. This paper attempts to move beyond the dichotomy through the construction of a typology. The development of the typology is a two‐step process: (1) the elaboration of an additional stratification theory, and (2) the breaking of each of the three comprehensive positions into socialisation/social selection components. These two steps produce six sub‐theories, and when matched against each other on a matrix nine comprehensive theories of social and educational inequality are generated, a gain of seven additional comprehensive theories over the original conflict/structural‐functional dichotomy. In building the typology considerable attention is given to elaborating a comprehensive theoretical alternative, called here the Human Dilemma theories, with constituent sub‐theories, Democratic Dilemma and Social Dilemma. After the construction of the typology...

The systems development dilemma: a programming perspective 1

Abstract: Information Systems (IS) is facing a dilemma: software is absorbing an ever-increasing portion of the total IS budget while maintenance is absorbing an ever increasing proportion of the software budget. In the not too distant future, unless this trend is arrested, or reversed, nearly all software resources may be required for maintenance. There are certain projected developments which give hope for the future ᾢ though not in the short term. In the meantime IS management must use other approaches, approaches that are available today, but that have been adopted very slowly. This article discusses one viable approach ᾢ the use of automated programmer productivity tools. It presents a classification of programmer productivity tools presently on the market and outlines the ways in which each class addresses productivity. It also discusses the important considerations IS management must make when evaluating the adoption of such tools.

Making Professionals into "Persons" Discrepancies in Traditional and Humanistic Expectations of Professional Identity

Abstract: What happens to people who are assuming a master status for which audiences have discrepant expectations, when socializers also emphasize that recruits take the desires of all audiences into account? A participant observation and in-depth interview study of ministry students in a humanistically oriented seminary revealed that these students received discrepant expectations for the professional identity from organizational personnel (the humanistic role) and members of the wider community (the traditional role). By advocating personal and egalitarian involvement with clients, socializers taught recruits to care about outsiders' expectations. As a result, recruits called into question the meaning of the professional identity, effected "double role distance," and took on an "ambivalent" identity. Students in humanistic schools of the personal service professions may experience a similar dilemma.

Monitoring Steam Sterilization of Surgical Instruments: a Dilemma

Abstract: The study of two biological indicators in monitoring “flash” sterilization demonstrated that indicator construction often leads to a false interpretation of spore survival.

For a Revisionist Theory of Human Polygyny

Abstract: fulfilling prophecies. Whenever their selection of independent variables results primarily from their ideological views, their findings cannot but confirm their initial stances. Social science literature on polygyny, notably in Africa, offers a case in point. Until recently, few scholars saw fit to examine empirically the dilemma posed by Bohannan: "One way of viewing a polygynous situation is to say that two matricentric families are attached to the same male; the other, that two nuclear families share the same husband/father."' In other words, does polygyny enhance female autonomy or ensure male dominance? Some authors assert that the usual effect of polygyny "is obviously to depress the position of women"; others, that this kind of arrangement may still "give some women a considerable amount of independence."2 This apparent contradiction