Search results

Imperial College in 1969 looked like a man's world; it was certainly difficult to locate a ladies’ room which was not apparently hastily constructed in a tight space as an afterthought to a great design. Yet I joined a powerhouse of women. Joan Woodward had already tempted Dorothy Wedderburn from Cambridge and together they had secured large sums of research monies from the Research Councils, Fords, Pilkingtons, ICI, the Post Office, the Coal Board, government departments, and other supporters who were each captivated by the promise of the work and rare combination of intellectual strength and practical concerns of its leader. With research funds flowing in abundance, driving passions to explore further the relationship between structure, technology, and performance, and very few specific commitments, Joan and Dorothy set about recruiting what was to be one of the largest groups of young researchers in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s.

When Joan Woodward died in 1971 at the age of 54, she left behind an enormous professional and personal legacy. This volume is a tribute to her work and life, to the profound effect she had on those she worked with, and to the important impact her work has had on how we think about organizations. It is also a tribute to a woman who succeeded in what was, at the time, overwhelmingly a man's world. That she was only the second woman appointed as a full professor at Imperial College London provides ample evidence of her success in the unlikely and very masculine setting of post-war Britain.

Joan undertook the ground-breaking project originally reported in the 1958 pamphlet, Management and Technology, not at one of Britain's great universities, but at the unfashionable address of the South East Essex Technical College (then in the county of Essex but now part of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham). The Human Relations Research Unit had been set up at the college, which is now part of the University of East London, in 1953 with support from a number of agencies including funding ultimately derived from the Marshall Plan. Its express purpose was to enhance the performance of industry and commerce through the application of social science. Those readers familiar with the area will know that, at the time, it was economically and culturally dominated by the Ford assembly plant in nearby Dagenham, but it was also home to a diverse range of small- and medium-sized industrial workshops that were typical of the pre-war Greater London economy (Woodward, 1965; Massey & Meegan, 1982). It was into this diverse industrial milieu that Joan and her research team ventured (Fig. 1), completing their main study in 1958.

Purpose – The present research seeks insights into the consumer socialization process of both children and adults in a developing country, Peru. The role played by two socialization agents, media and church, has been explored in terms of how each is related to an important facet of consumer attitudes, level of materialism.

Methodology/approach – Male students attending a faith-based high school in Peru, as well as one of their parents, completed a survey in Spanish seeking information on their television viewing, their faith, and their views regarding possessions.

Findings – The more traditional socialization institution, church, appears to be less important to younger consumers than to their parents; but it has a greater influence on materialism for youth than their parents. The power of media as a socialization agent for both groups is seen not only via television advertising, but also through television programming.

Research implications – As one considers how consumers learn to be consumers, both from a purely theoretical standpoint as well as from a strategic marketing perspective, one should take into account both avenues for information transmission. The role played by both seems to change people's lives, both in terms of perceived importance, as well as actual consumer decision making.

Estimates of the prevalence of AS in children throughout the entire population of the United States are highly limited and greatly variable. Ozonoff, Dawson, and McPartland (2002) stated that estimates of AS range from 0.2 to 0.5% (or 2–5 individuals in 1,000), while Volkmar and Klin (2000) cited studies reporting rates of 36 in 1,000 to approximately 1 in 10,000. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (2000), fourth edition (DSM-IV-TR), states that “definitive data about the prevalence of Asperger Syndrome does not exist.”

According to current estimates, the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) ranges from 1 in 500 children to 1 in 150 children (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/CDC, 2007; Desmon, 2007). In the past such disorders usually were not identified until a child was school-aged, but these disorders are now more likely to be diagnosed in affected individuals during the preschool years (McConachie, Le Couteur, & Honey, 2005; Rutter, 2006). For example, Mandell, Novak, and Zubritsky (2005) surveyed over 900 caregivers of children with ASDs and learned that on an average, children with autistic disorder were diagnosed at 3.1 years of age. These researchers also reported that children who exhibited such characteristics as severe language impairment, toe walking, hand flapping, and sustained unusual play behaviors were diagnosed earlier than children without these features.

The 1993 UN Declaration on Violence Against Women prepared the grounds for the elimination of violence against women and girls (VAWG) as a key ambition of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 with Target 5.2 specifically turning attention towards the elimination of all forms of VAWG in the public and private spheres. In this chapter, we take as given the pressing need to reduce VAWG globally. We also acknowledge that measuring VAW is fraught with difficulties, even where criminal justice system responses exist, and that these difficulties can be magnified in countries which have no domestic laws that criminalise common forms of male VAW, including domestic violence. Thus the realisation of Target 5.2 is faced with specific problems of measurement when what constitutes ‘violence against women’ is contested and when there may be no commonly agreed legal indicators between different jurisdictions to act as a proxy for goal achievement. In light of these challenges, we consider how indicators can be best mobilised to provide useful measurements of progress and success for different communities, and for different types of violence(s) against women in the light of Target 5.2.

A common charge against qualitative researchers in general and interactionist researchers in particular is that they produce descriptive, a-theoretical accounts of group life. We consider the problem of “analytic interruptus” in contemporary symbolic interactionism – that is, a failure to move beyond analyses of individual cases – and offer a potential to a solution via the pursuit of a generic social process (GSP) research agenda. A GSP approach involves developing, assessing, and revising concepts from the close scrutiny of empirical instances across diverse contexts. By considering criticisms of GSPs from feminist and postmodernist scholars, a more informed, qualified, and better-situated approach to the framework becomes possible. We argue that GSPs remain a quintessential analytical tool to explore subcultural realities and build formal theories of the social world.