Letter from the Editor

Getting help in understanding how to use and interpret a new information system is a crucial organizational and individual resource. Indeed, both informal and formal sources of information technology help are expensive and necessary, but largely unidentified, unmanaged, and underresearched. This study proposes that two types of factors influence the formation of information technology helping relationships: individual and structural. Based on a survey of employees in an organization implementing a new workstation‐based customer database system, the study compares influences on being sought as an informal source of IT help, and on types of help (individual or positional) that one seeks. One individual factor (some forms of computer expertise) and most structural factors (especially measures of employees’ perceived socialization, task interdependence, and communication networks) exerted weak but significant influences on employees’ IT helping relationships.     

The “special topic,” EIΔH,in late Tudor and early Stuart public discussion

The perspective from which a less powerful social group views a “dominant” group—either as another culture or as a co‐culture —influences the structure and function of its strategies for communicating with the “dominant” group. Four recurring patterns of communication between groups with asymmetrical power relationships are analyzed using the theory of the coordinated management of meaning.     

The chairman and his job

Richard Nixon's remarks upon departing the White House are revealingly banal. Confronted by what he took to he shameless leers in his moment of humiliation, he responded by portraying himself as a romantic prince who remains steadfast in the face of personal adversity. To the extent the message was met with cold scrutiny it failed to evoke an image of heroism or a mood of tragic pity. It was instead heard as a fairy tale told by an undignified sulk. The princely allusions only reminded the listener of darker monarchical impulses and confirmed the propriety of victimizing the self‐proclaimed victim with stares.     

What's Meat Got to Do with It? Some Considerations for Ecologizing Education with Respect to Diet

Even in a society of meat‐eaters such as the United States, when diet is addressed in school at all, it is widely treated as matter of personal choice, the consequences of which are borne by individual consumers. Overlooked are myriad connections involved in human diet and the implications of consumption for other entities. In the first part of this essay, Suzanne Rice discusses ways in which diet, particularly meat‐eating, is connected to animal suffering, environmental harms including climate change and pollution, and risks to the health of agricultural workers and consumers. In the second part, she discusses ways in which education might be “ecologized” in efforts to help students gain insight into such connections. There are many ways to ecologize education, but regardless of how teachers proceed, they are likely to encounter not only simple ignorance, relatively unproblematic gaps in students' knowledge linked to youth and inexperience, but also willful ignorance, more problematic gaps linked to avoidance, manipulation, or rejection of evidence perceived as threatening.