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Dilemma

About: Dilemma is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 16202 publications have been published within this topic receiving 250251 citations. The topic is also known as: Dilemna.


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TL;DR: In Australia, as in other advanced capitalist countries, there is a campaign to end gender stereotypes in career counselling and subject choice, to get more girls into mathematics, science, and traditionally masculine trades and professions.
Abstract: There is abundant evidence that inequality between women and men is a very general feature of Western education systems. Differential treatment and differential outcomes for both staff and students have been extensively documented by research over the past decade.' In the same period, considerable energy has been spent trying to change it. A stock of nonsexist curriculum materials and teaching aids have been produced, and centers have been set up to disseminate them. In Australia, as in other advanced capitalist countries, there is a campaign to end gender stereotypes in career counselling and subject choice, to get more girls into mathematics, science, and traditionally masculine trades and professions. Sexual harassment is being made an issue in schools and colleges. There are equal-opportunity policies in force in some states, and antidiscrimination laws apply, if unevenly, to education. Yet the effect of this activity so far has been slight. The resources devoted to it are, at best, painfully small in comparison to the scale of the problem. In New South Wales, for instance, although the funds for the Non-Sexist Education Unit have been maintained in the last year, only a fraction of one teaching consultant's time per region in the public school system has been allocated for nonsexist curriculum development. Moreover, such slender resources are often under threat, both from ideological attacks by the political Right and from cost-cutting campaigns within the bureaucracy. Furthermore, this work is not always certain of its directions. There is a continuing dilemma about the value of sex-segregated schools or classes. Almost all the educational debate has been about heterosexuals; there is very little serious work on discrimination against homosexuals in the education system. There are problems concerning the mainstream curriculum that are just beginning to emerge; and there are massive, though so far almost undiscussed, problems about how specialists should work with classroom teachers to change sexism in schools. At this point there is a need not only to renew the campaign for resources for countersexist educational work but also to rethink basic ideas. This article is intended as a contribution to that task. It reports research on gender relations in Australian secondary schools and proposes a line of theoretical analysis that bears on some of the dilemmas of current practice.

244 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the wake of dramatic changes in public opinion and social custom over the past 40 years, why do many white Americans continue to oppose efforts to bring about racial equality? as discussed by the authors argues against the first explanation, for the second, and more generally that our understanding of the American dilemma would be enhanced by frequent and vigorous empirical confrontations among an expanded set of alternative explanations.
Abstract: In the wake of dramatic changes in public opinion and social custom over the past 40 years, why do many white Americans continue to oppose efforts to bring about racial equality? One possible explanation centers on self-interest: from this perspective, whites' resistance to racial change reflects their perception that blacks pose real and tangible threats to their personal lives—to their neighborhoods, their jobs, their children's education, and their safety. Another possible explanation centers on “symbolic racism”: from this perspective, whites' opposition to racial change reflects their endorsement of racist sentiments and traditional American values, particularly individualism. This paper argues against the first explanation, for the second, and more generally that our understanding of the American dilemma would be enhanced by frequent and vigorous empirical confrontations among an expanded set of alternative explanations. With this objective in mind, the paper concludes by promoting several such explanations, each of which has a strong claim on the research agenda of the future.

240 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The two-person single career as discussed by the authors is a special combination of roles whereby wives are inducted by the institutions employing their husbands into a pattern of vicarious achievement, which serves as a social control mechanism which derails the occupational aspirations of the highly educated woman into a subsidiary role determined by her husband's career.
Abstract: Women adapt in different ways to the demands of their husbands' occupations. In the United States, the "two-person single career" is a special combination of roles whereby wives are inducted by the institutions employing their husbands into a pattern of vicarious achievement. The two-person career pattern serves as a social control mechanism which derails the occupational aspirations of the highly educated woman into a subsidiary role determined by her husband's career. It is a very American solution to a common American dilemma, in which an explicit ideology of equal opportunity in education conflicts with inequalities in occupational opportunities. Some reflections on the two-person career serve to illustrate the necessity for more determined efforts to include studies of women's lives in modern sociology and anthropology. Some areas are indicated where such studies would contribute to the development of methods and theory. Particular emphasis is placed on the kinds of education women receive: training ...

236 citations

01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: In this paper, the discursive dilemma is defined as a dilemma that arises for any group or grouping that espouses or avows purposes, and that such groups are bound to resolve it by imposing the discipline of reason at the collective rather than the individual level.
Abstract: them into subjects in their own right, giving them a way of being minded that is starkly discontinuous with the mentality of their members. This claim in social ontology is strong enough to ground talk of such collectivities as entities that are psychologically autonomous and that constitute institutional persons. Yet unlike some traditional doctrines (Runciman 1997), it does not spring from a rejection of common sense. This chapter shows that the claim is supported by the implications of a distinctive social paradox—the discursive dilemma—and is consistent with a denial that our minds are subsumed in a higher form of Geist or in any variety of collective consciousness. Although the chapter generates a rich, metaphysical brew, the ingredients it deploys all come from austere and sober analysis. The chapter is in six sections. In the first I introduce the doctrinal paradox, a predicament recently identified in jurisprudence, and in the second I explain how it generalizes to constitute the discursive dilemma. In the third section I show that that dilemma is going to arise for any group or grouping—henceforth I shall just say, group—that espouses or avows purposes, and that such purposive collectivities are bound to resolve it by imposing the discipline of reason at the collective rather than the individual level. In the fourth and fifth sections I argue that groups of this kind— social integrates, as I call them—will constitute intentional and personal subjects. And then in the sixth section I look briefly at how we should think of the relationship between institutional persons of this kind and the natural persons who sustain them.

236 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a person-organization fit perspective to emphasize diversity of individual preferences instead of a managerially prescribed uniformity of spirituality and propose two theoretical contexts that foster "both-and" rather than "either-or" thinking to mitigate the relationships between climate combinations and conflictual aspects of the ethical dilemmas.
Abstract: In a world which can be increasingly described as a “society of organizations,” it is incumbent upon organizational researchers to account for the role of organizations in determining the well-being of societies and the individuals that comprise them. Workplace spirituality is a young area of inquiry with potentially strong relevance to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and societies. Previous literature has not examined ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality that organizations might expect based upon the co-existence of multiple ethical work climates, nor has previous literature accounted for the relevance of the cosmopolitan (external, societal) source of moral reasoning in the ethical treatment of workplace spirituality. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps by articulating two such ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality: the “quiet desperation” dilemma and the instrumentality dilemma. Moreover, I propose two theoretical contexts that foster “both-and” rather than “either-or” thinking, thereby mitigating (moderating) the relationships between climate combinations and conflictual aspects of the ethical dilemmas. For the “quiet desperation” dilemma, I propose a person–organization fit perspective to emphasize diversity of individual preferences instead of a managerially prescribed uniformity of spirituality. For the instrumentality dilemma, I propose a multiparadigm approach to workplace spirituality research to avoid the privileging of one research interest over another (e.g., instrumentality, individual fulfillment, societal good). I conclude with suggestions for future research.

236 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20231,755
20223,399
2021483
2020491
2019527
2018490