Oregon: does physician-assisted suicide work?

Since November 1997, Oregon, a State in the United States of approximately 3.3 million people, has allowed physician-assisted suicide, although not euthanasia, by virtue of the Death with Dignity Act. Before the Act, physician-assisted suicide, as in Australia and other common law jurisdictions, was illegal. Under the Act, the Oregon Department of Human Services is required to collect information and provide an annual report. The Sixth Annual Report on Oregon's Death with Dignity Act was released on 10 March 2004.     

Gardner; Re BWV: resolved and unresolved issues at end of life

The Medical Treatment Act 1988 (Vic) gives statutory recognition to a patient's (or their agent or guardian if incompetent) right to refuse medical treatment. The case of Gardner; Re BWV confirmed that medical treatment as defined under the Act included artificial nutrition and hydration and as such could be withdrawn, notwithstanding that this would result in the patient's death. This article analyses Gardner; Re BWV and argues that, by deliberately dealing narrowly with the issues at hand, both the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal at first instance and the Victorian Supreme Court knowingly left BWV to die from dehydration over a period of weeks. By not addressing these issues, the tribunal, and more particularly the Supreme Court, lost an opportunity for a reform of the law, so urgently needed at end of life, which would have allowed for "mercy killing", thus sparing BWV and her family the lingering death she was given.     

Destructive decision-making in developing countries

In most developing countries strategic decision-making has been largely based on false premises that have led to destructive results. One set of false premises stems from the assumption that development can be dissociated from the destructively exponential growth in developed countries, from the limits on the planet's physical resources and from complex ecological linkages. Another set is grounded on the popular myths of entrenched development economics: particularly, the enshrining of GNP as the overall indicator of progress, and the concomitant withdrawal of attention from poverty and concentrated wealth, unemployment, and the injurious effects of many modern technologies. These destructive premises tend to reinforce the evolving institutions of new-style empire and oligarchy.More successful development requires standing present development policies on their head through development goals calling for (1) a recognition of redistributive and nonmaterial growth possibilities, (2) redistributive, material and nonmaterial growth in developing countries, (3) redistributive, nonmaterial growth in overdeveloped countries, with a major slowing down of material consumption, (4) large-scale employment projects in developing countries, and (5) the fostering and use of more constructive technologies. All such shifts, however, would require—and tend to lead toward—substantial, long-term changes in the sociopolitical structure of developing countries and the world society.This paper is based on and adapted from The Limits of Development Administration, the keynote paper presented in October 1972 at the U.N. Public Administration Division's conference on development administration in Kiev, USSR, and Unemployment: The Snag in Development, prepared at Kiev and published in The Nation, Dec. 11, 1972.     

Management strategy for economic and social development: Part II

The new and rapidly changing environment of development administrators includes (1) the emergence of a world society of interdependent nations, (2) a rapid and confusing technological and scientific revolution, (3) the expansion of service societies in industrialized countries, (4) new major alternatives for war, neocolonialism, despotism and materialism, and (5) development problems of ascending complexity and difficulty.Post-industrial beginnings in modern management arise from a background of management thought and technique in agricultural epochs and the more recent industrial revolution. They encompass computer technology; operations research; systems approaches, including systems engineering, management information systems, and general systems research; cost-effectiveness analysis and PPBS; social indicators; and future-casting. Their development has contributed to a growing gulf between technique and capability, to a triumph of technique over strategy and a retreat from human values.Attention is directed to specific strategies and tactics of introducing modern management techniques in developing nations. The efforts to do this during the 1960 Development Decade are reviewed. The prospects for the 1970's are previewed, and suggestions offered for problem area task forces and the expansion of U.N. activities in advancing, not merely diffusing, the current state of the art.Since the most significant modern management advances have been tactical, a dozen principles of strategic decisionmaking are suggested: (1) responsible decisionmaking, (2) the conflict essence of problems, (3) selectivity, (4) total system appreciation, (5) relative proportions, (6) sequential model-using, (7) problem interrelationships, (8) jointed incrementalism, (9) organized and unorganized interests, (10) the emotional basis of rational action, (11) investment in future capabilities, and (12) power mobilization and use.The paper ends by raising vital questions on the improvement of managerial values. This is done by specific proposals for a code of managerial ethics and the formulation of more humanistic management goals.     

The Psychological World of the Gay Teenager:Social Change,Narrative, and “Normality”

This paper examines the application of concepts of normal adolescence pioneered by Offer and colleagues to the study of gay and lesbian youth. Adolescent development among this population demonstrates remarkable historical variability along the lines of generation-cohort, revealing the utility of a life-course approach to the study of normal adolescence. Concepts of normal adolescence appear to shift with changing narratives of identity for sexual minority youth. We contrast two narratives of gay youth identity development that have emerged since the inception of substantive research programs on gay adolescence: (1) the narrative of struggle and success that came to dominate the literature in the 1980s and 1990s and (2) the narrative of emancipation that has emerged from the work of Savin-Williams and others who argue for a recognition of the diversity of adolescent development for this population. In relating this contrast to Offer’s seminal contributions to the study of adolescence, we suggest that the most normative feature of human development, particularly during adolescence, is its connection to discourses of identity through the formation of personal narratives that anchor the life course and provide meaning to conceptions of self-development. The example of shifting narratives of gay youth identity development is meant to exemplify this characteristic feature of human development. William Rainey Harper Professor of Social Sciences, The College, the Departments of Comparative Human Development, Psychology, Psychiatry and the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, The University of Chicago. For nearly two decades he collaborated with Dan Offer as the director of the University’s component of the Adolescence Training grant shared jointly with Michael Reese Hospital and Directed by Dan Offer. His recent work focuses on the interplay of history and social change in the study of lives over time. Advanced doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Human Development. His work examines the cultural psychology of adolescence and emerging adulthood, with a focus on identity and narrative. His earlier work with former student of Dan Offer, Maryse Richards, focused on the study of ethnicity, context, and normal adolescence. Most recently, he has been studying culture and normal adolescent development among Israeli and Palestinian youth. In 2007 he will be appointed an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz.