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This essay traces a trajectory between the diminution of the radical objectives of second wave feminism and the rise of postfeminism in two contemporary novels by Scottish writers. Laura Hird's Born Free (1999) and Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2012) illustrate the shrinking of radical feminist ideals to a sexual revolution appropriated by the individualism, consumerism and competitive market-focused ideology which characterises neoliberal postfeminism and sustains misogynist social structures. Informed by critiques of postfeminism by commentators such as Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill, the essay finds Hird's end of century pessimistic vision of female defeat allayed to some extent in Fagan's gothic-tinged narrative of a marginalised outsider evading neo-patriarchal containment. The texts demonstrate a damaging disorientation in contemporary femininity produced by what McRobbie terms the postfeminist gender settlement.

This article builds on Jones’s previous work on masculinity in Scottish fiction, probing the ongoing process of moving beyond dominant paradigms of masculinity in Scottish writing. The analysis explores the haunting power of masculine spectres and their return to centrality in twenty-first century Scottish fiction. The article juxtaposes Emily Mackie’s novels And This is True (2010) and In Search of Solace (2014), which both remain fixated upon masculinity with Ali Smith’s There but for the (2011), which resists the urge to re-centre masculinity despite its central male character, and offers a contrasting alternative to dominant modes of male identity.

This paper delineates a rarely studied but important family process: how a family perceives and understands the relationships in other families it knows. We hypothesize that these perceptions of other families are fundamental components of a family's shared construing of its social world. Families differ in how they perceive other families, specifically, and in their approach to construing or apprehending their social world, generally. We have hypothesized that these general differences also play a crucial role in shaping the style and competence of family problem-solving. A family's approach to any problem depends upon how it construes or interprets the social context of that problem. Using these general concepts of family life, we construct specific hypotheses linking family problem-solving and interfamily perception. We describe methods for measuring both family problem-solving and how a family perceives other families. Findings confirm our major hypothesis: A family that searches for underlying and subtle patterns in a problem-solving situation will develop a more differentiated and organized conception of other families.

This report outlines my attempt to investigate the notion that the Youth Training Scheme curriculum is best understood as an expression of ideology. It is a report of an on-going piece of research and the focus is on the Supporting Studies element of the YTS as the place in the curriculum where ideology is most obviously manifest. To begin with, the curriculum of the Supporting Studies element is being examined in an attempt to discover whether or not it fulfils the (MSC) perceived ‘need’ of enhancing the employability of the trainees. This examination is made from four major perspectives: those of (a) the trainees, (b) the teachers and trainers, (c) the work experience ‘employers’, and (d) MSC personnel directly involved with the schemes as the designated ‘link’ people. Furthermore, some of the ideological notions which rest behind the YTS are being examined, particularly in the area of the ‘core skills’ in which ‘Supporting Studies’ is firmly lodged.

• A family's perception of a treatment program may determine whether it becomes productively engaged or destructively withdrawn. A theory of family types, in conjunction with a standardized laboratory problem solving procedure, was used to predict the nature of families' shared perceptions of a psychiatric ward. The individual and shared perceptions of thirty families were determined by means of a specially designed Q-sort. Two dimensions of problem solving behavior successfully predicted significant differences between families in their shared perceptions. Configuration, or the family's capacity to derive effective solutions in the laboratory, predicted the subtlety of their perception of the ward. Coordination, or the capacity of family members to dovetail their problem solving efforts with one another, predicted the family's sense of comfort and engagement in the ward setting.