Adopting a family approach to theory and practice: measuring distress in cancer patient-partner dyads with the distress thermometer

Objective: Significant others are central to patients' experience and management of their cancer illness. Building on our validation of the Distress Thermometer (DT) for family members, this investigation examines individual and collective distress in a sample of cancer patients and their matched partners, accounting for the aspects of gender and role. Method: Questionnaires including the DT were completed by a heterogeneous sample of 224 couples taking part in a multisite study. Results: Our investigation showed that male patients (34.2%), female patients (31.9%), and male partners (29.1%) exhibited very similar levels of distress, while female partners (50.5%) exhibited much higher levels of distress according to the DT. At the dyad level just over half the total sample contained at least one individual reporting significant levels of distress. Among dyads with at least one distressed person, the proportion of dyads where both individuals reported distress was greatest (23.6%). Gender and role analyses revealed that males and females were not equally distributed among the four categories of dyads (i.e. dyads with no distress; dyads where solely the patient or dyads where solely the partner is distressed; dyads where both are distressed). Conclusion: A remarkable number of dyads reported distress in one or both partners. Diverse patterns of distress within dyads suggest varying risks of psychosocial strain. Screening patients' partners in addition to patients themselves may enable earlier identification of risk settings. The support offered to either member of such dyads should account for their role- and gender-specific needs. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley ; Sons, Ltd.

Practice Movements: The Politics of Non-sovereign Power

Practice movements, that is, forms of unorganized collective action, are a central site of politics. Their defining moments are that their goals are expressed in practices rather than in words, and that these “pre-ideological” practices aim at access to or redistribution of goods, whether material or symbolic, rather than at representation. They are transgression rather than resistance in that they transgress restrictions inherent in the material organization of space, property relations, status orders, and normative regulations, be they laws, morals, or customs. Practice movements are above all about access and participation rather than about autonomy, and thus have an ambiguous relation to the transformation of the status quo. Their politics are transformative and they can produce temporary or lasting changes in the material grounds or in the regulation of the everyday life of those who pursue them, and potentially of the normativity and the organization of the wider social order.

Crafting strategy : embodied metaphors in practice

The rationalist approach to strategizing emphasizes analytical and convergent thinking. Without denying the importance of this approach, this book argues that strategists must learn to complement it with a more creative approach to strategizing that emphasizes synthetic and divergent ways of thinking. The theoretical underpinnings of this approach include embodied realism, interpretivism, practice theory, theory of play, design thinking, as well as discursive approaches such as metaphorical analysis, narrative analysis, dialogical analysis and hermeneutics. The book includes in-depth discussions of these theories and shows how they can be put into practice by presenting detailed analyses of embodied metaphors built by groups of agents with step-by-step explanations of how this process can be implemented and facilitated. The link between theory and practice is further supported by the inclusion of several vignettes that describe how this approach has been successfully employed in a number of organizations, including BASF and UNICEF