Book Reviews

Emergency Room . By Randall S. Sword, M.D.
The Surrogate Mother . By Noel P. Keane, with Dennis L. Breo     

Adolescent room culture: Studying media in the context of everyday life

For the past several years, the authors have been investigating adolescent room culture in order to learn more about the relationship between teens and the media. The bedroom, they have found, is an important haven for most teenagers, a private, personal space often decorated to reflect teens' emerging sense of themselves and where they fit in the larger culture. Teens listen to music, read magazines, watch television, do homework, and consider the events of the day in their rooms. They appropriate and transform media messages and images to help them make sense of their lives. By looking closely at how teens draw from the media as they construct their identities and personal worlds, the authors have come to see adolescent media use as a dialectical process played out through everyday practices. Their Adolescents' Media Practice Model highlights the connections between adolescents' identities and media selection, interaction, and application.An earlier draft was presented at the Society for Research on Adolescence conference in San Diego, California, February 1994.Received M.S. in television-radio from the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. Research focus is on the relationship between the media and public health.Received Ph.D. in mass communication from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research focus is on adolescent health and mass media.     

A seminar room of one's own

The editors have asked for ‘a short synopsis of 150 words in length’. When I wrote this paper uppermost in my mind was the importance of and fusion between content and style: what is said and how it is said. Therefore, no synopsis. Please either skip the article or read it in full.     

Supply creates demands: An organizational process view of administrative expansion

The common explanation for the expansion of bureaus is based on rationalist reasoning. Bureaus grow because it is in the interest of the central decision makers to have them grow. This article presents a different explanation, drawing on the organizational-processes literature. It argues that administrative growth occurs as a byproduct of managers dealing with more immediate concerns, not because it is pursued for its own value. Part of the explanation includes arguments for the highly reactive and highly interactive nature of managerial work. The ways in which the combined behaviors of individual managers translate into organizational expansion are illustrated using data comprised of 29,640 random observations of 52 managers at work.