THE NATURAL SYSTEMS INSTITUTE

THE STRUCTURE OF THE ENCOMPASSING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

The Duplex Pyramids

 

TOPICS:

LESSONS:  :

Click hyperlinks above to go to the respective lessons.

FORMAL ROLE STRUCTURES

SENSITIZING TO THE MEANING OF ROLES

MATURITY COACHES WITH RESPECT TO
HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF ROLES
AND HOW TO OPTIMIZE
THE POWER OF THE POSITIVE SOCIAL ROLE
IN STARS AND STRIPES AND RELATED PROGRAMS

A. The Nature of Roles.

  1. The meaning of a Role: Expectancies and Experiences.
  2. A Role as a function of its complement
  3. Identities, styles, and being versus having a role.
  4. Assumption, Learning and Enactment of Roles.

B. Problems in the Correctional/Therapeutic Use of Roles in the Institution
  1. Transitions from prior deviant roles in the home community to socially acceptable roles in the institution.
  2. Multiple, changing, and conflicting roles.
  3. Mistaken inferences from role to person.
  4. Types of roles, role relationships, and their dynamics.
    1. Roles that transform setting-situational specific identities.
    2. Roles in conflict with former setting-situational identities.
    3. The potential conflicts in the interaction between personalities and their former roles.
    4. The potential conflicts in the interaction between personalities and their current assigned or acquired roles.
    5. The potential conflicts in the interaction between an assigned or acquired role and other prior or current relationships.
    6. Roles that generate relationship conflicts between role inhabitants and correctional staff or counselors.
    7. Roles that generate relationship conflicts between role inhabitants and their cohort groups or cliques vis-à-vis staff or outsiders.
  1. The dynamics of role interactions from the point of view of role structures within the structures of settings.
    2.

C. The Correctional/Therapeutic Use of Roles
  1. Role preferences and monadic roles.
  2. Social skill learning and role taking.
  3. Staff correctional/therapeutic roles and relationships vis-à-vis different offender personality types inhabiting assigned or acquired roles
      1. The possibilities for different types of correctional/therapeutic effects.
      2. The limits for different types of correctional/therapeutic effects.
      3. Personal limits and boundaries in relation to role rigidity.
  4. Role levels, method and criteria for progression. and the dynamics and effects of progression through role levels.
  5. Rank, office, roles, and sub roles, the detachable and fluid nature of their functions, changing tasks and role behaviors and their influence in facilitating maturation.
  6. Roles as constraining and channeling individual life-teleological processes.
  7. Memory as organized by roles and role functions and its function in repertoire replacement.
  8. Types of correctional/therapeutic role-relationships, their repertoire of techniques, and their selective effects on healing, education, and maturation of the resident’s will.
  9. Maturity coaches and the empowerment model of the maturation of the will.

D. Problems with Program Roles Making the Transition to the Home Community
  1. Role relationships in institutions versus in communities.
  2. Identifying environments, settings, situations, roles, and relationships as presenting difficulties in making transitions from institutions to home communities.
  3. Preparing a proactive stance to maintain positive roles and behavioral patterns upon returning to the home community
  4. Dealing with altercasting (casting people into the roles that we have an inner need for them to fulfill) in home communities.
  5. Learning conscious, proactive altercasting for transitioning to home community.
 

'Duplex Pyramids' below is the logo of the Natural Systems Institute.  The top inverted pyramid represents layers of  external structures and systems and the bottom pyramid represents layers of internal structures and systems.  The extension of the pyramid to the left represents degrees of distance into the past, while extension to the right represents degrees of projection into the future.  The underlying theoretical assumption is that effective, enduring change in humans and human social systems comes only when these multidimensional relationships of the external, internal, past and future perspectives are all addressed as change efforts are attempted.

  1. Stars and Stripes: A Correctional Program for a Juvenile Institution for Felons

  2. Levels of External and Internal Structures-Processes of Intentionality-and the Art of Restructuring Organizations

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Document created by Edwin L. Young, PhD between 6/1993 and when last edited on 10/28/2009
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