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This chapter focuses on the psychological mechanisms behind the construction of preference.

Explores how new information & communication technologies (ICTs) will impact public health in Europe in both positive & negative ways. In terms of the performance of public health authorities & delivery of health services, improvements are expected, but new issues of medical ethics & confidentiality arise. Adverse health-related effects among workers using the new ICTs are also identified, focusing on their ergonomic aspects & the drawbacks of a more sedentary lifestyle among those who must sit in front of a computer for most of their working hours. Specific physiological problems are examined, including dysfunctions in vision, hearing, & cognition. Also addressed are mental health aspects of new virtual environments, information overload, & prolonged exposure to cyber-realities, which may detrimentally affect socialization & communication skills in the "real" world. The potential for increased psychological stress, job dissatisfaction, & feelings of incompetence among ICT workers is discussed. 2 Tables, 2 Figures. K. Hyatt Stewart

This article is dealing with the analysis of main stages and tendencies of social transformations that have been taken place in Ukraine since the well-known Perestroika in the ex-USSR. Transformational processes are studied in very important ways for Ukrainian society aspects, such as: institutional, socio-structural, and socio-psychological. The authors gave special attention on the role of classes — elites and the broad masses in the different stages of this period have been analyzed.

The relevance of Alexis de Tocqueville's assessment of the American media for studying the media in the contemporary US is examined. Tocqueville's assertion that the newspaper media encourages the establishment of collective identity & facilitates collective action is reviewed. Several aspects of Tocqueville's evaluation of the American media that are contradicted by developments since the 1830s are identified; although contemporary newspapers & media outlets generate significant revenues compared to their 19th century counterparts, it is stressed that creating a newspaper or media outlet is much more difficult than during the 1830s. Nevertheless, multiple facets of Tocqueville's treatment of the American press that remain relevant are noted; for instance, Tocqueville correctly noted newspapers' capacity to influence Americans' psychological dispositions. It is subsequently asserted that the amalgamation of popular culture & media commercialization has engendered a form of "soft tyranny" among the present-day American media. Articles that examine additional aspects of political communication are also introduced. J. W. Parker

Concludes an edited Vol of 16 Chpts that analyzes aspects of US organizations using data from the 1991 National Organizations Study. Results generally indicate that larger establishments are more complex than smaller establishments, exhibiting greater differentiation, decentralization, formal job descriptions, & lower administrative intensity. It is suggested that the analyses presented in this Vol may be extended in a variety of ways, eg, there is a need to obtain multiple informants within organizations to better test social psychological theories about employee motives, beliefs, & behaviors. Further, longitudinal research that provides more than a cross-sectional snapshot of organizations would be helpful in identifying large-scale historical changes, institutional development, & ecological dynamics. Finally, future research might map the environments of organizations in greater detail to produce a better picture of interorganizational networks. D. M. Smith

Following a broad overview of ways that changes in the organization of work & organizational cultures in Western postindustrial societies are impacting relations between workers & their jobs, the responses of female customer service representatives at a large telephone company to such changes are explored. Ethnographic interview data from workers, managers, & benefit administrators reveal growing absenteeism & an increasing use of disability or "stress leave" as a response to the pressures of changing work conditions. Two aspects -- instrumental & physical -- of the meaning of pain for women workers are explored & related to the increased psychological pressures they experience as their workloads & "emotional labor" have increased. It is shown how these women have abandoned their former work ethics & begun to use sick leave as a form of resistance to obtain the maximum benefits from a company to which they no longer feel any sense of loyalty. 20 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

An examination of the judicial treatment of migrant criminality focuses on the complex interaction between immigrants & the receiving society. Formal & informal procedures related to migrant crime are described, along with the cognitive & moral dimensions that impact both court life & the social construction of migrant crime. Empirical findings regarding petty crimes & drug-dealing cases in Italy are presented to illustrate the structural weakness of the legal position of migrants, ways in which the judicial system uses its discretionary power to contribute to definitions of what is criminal, & how migrant criminality as a social fact helps to explain various social, legal, psychological, cultural, & political aspects of migrant criminality. Special attention is given to the role played by law enforcement & prosecution practices in defining the boundaries between informal & criminal, as well as how institutional & political decisions involved in the social construction of immigrants' criminality lead to perceptions of immigrant crime as a cause for social insecurity. 4 Tables, 40 References. J. Lindroth

"In many economic models, it is assumed that prices adjust instantaneously to changes of economic conditions (e.g., to shocks in demand or production costs). Since the existence of price rigidities has been frequently documented, more realistic models require that infrequent and lumpy price adjustment have to be taken into account. There are still many unresolved issues in this area, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we show that the dynamics and dispersion of retail prices can be investigated using price data obtained from the GfK Consumer Panel for 1995. Our results document the importance of psychological pricing points for price setting, confirming results from many earlier studies. A new aspect of our analysis that has not been investigated in the literature is the relevance of psychological prices points for price adjustment and aggregation. We interpret our findings as suggestive evidence for the notion that rigidities are relevant for aggregate dynamics in Germany. However, we also confirm that a structural aggregation theory is necessary for a better understanding of the relevance of micro-level rigidities for aggregate dynamics. In such a more comprehensive model, price data obtained from the GfK Consumer Panel might also prove very helpful in the future. Among the three other areas of empirical research that could potentially be explored with price data from the GfK Consumer Panel, the analysis of the relationship between individual price dynamics, price dispersion and aggregate inflation proves particularly fruitful. Moreover, the very disaggregated, high-frequency data contained in this data-set are almost unique. In other research areas which require that prices changes (and not only distributions of prices) are observed over time, empirical tests unfortunately suffer from the fact that time series of individual prices can be constructed only under additional strong assumptions." (author's abstract)