The mind of a "member": new bearings for service to home and work relations
"This book is a modest legacy of shared thought which over the years has dwelt on questions of "success" in services to group relations. Its co-authors have long sensed a growing need, in the interest of community thinking about our institutions of work enterprise and home living, of contacts between practitioners in both fields to reach understandings about the kinds of goodness in "good" group relations which each means to help develop. To the immediate receivers of help good comes of it, perhaps quite to their content, if it simply leaves relief of thwarts and strains in difficult situations. To those who bear the expense of professional service, whether in a factory or in a neighborhood of families, results may seem good with relations smoothed in the grooves of accepted forms and feelings, however charged these may be with latent ill. For critical and loyally anxious thinkers about our institutional ways of life, that help brings most good where its receivers become alerted participants in a rethinking of values in their problems for solutions on new levels of relationship. Here the "alerting" is a question of recognizing the dynamics of response between persons in roles which present a complex structure of special sentiments and behaviors. What the community needs is more people who see these in terms of their higher "group-adjustive" possibilities. Otherwise what we get, especially in industry, is stock impulses just to "humanize relations" or to address large complex problems with mere moralizing appeals, as when voices during recent labor-trouble seemed a town-wide choir of earnest barkers-up of wrong trees. With such a background what is here offered is not an informative treatise covering family and factory matters, but illustrative examination of experiences in both fields to demonstrate leads toward the achieving of "good" membership-character. Its appeal lies in its concern with social learning in work-groups and homes; its aim is to stir fresh perceptions for powers of "situational thinking." The main steps in this sequence of chapters are (1) to remark the specific kinds of perceptive competency that qualify anyone to be a real "member"; (2) to illustrate the scope of socially adjustive learnings in the factory, where relationships are between persons as bearers of specialized roles; (3) to develop what a "culture-conscious" and "situational" approach can mean in services to the family, where people learn basic adjustive perceptions in their association as whole personalities; and (4) to enlarge on the nature of "success" in enrichments of individual participation, and in standards of group fulfillment for the community"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).