Virtually all studies on the presidential use of metaphor focus on one particular event and speech. These studies look only at speeches that justify military actions after they have already occurred, and these researchers seek to discover a relationship between the use of the metaphor and the public's support of a military action. In order to analyze the persuasive elements of President Franklin Roosevelt's rhetoric in developing popular and Congressional support for war preparation, this study seeks to answer three specific questions. To what extent does Franklin Roosevelt develop a common theme in selected speeches of war preparation immediately prior to World War II? To what extent was Roosevelt's development of this theme persuasive to the American public? What consequences can be anticipated if future presidents or speakers for social movements employ these procedures.

This study proposes a model for the deconstruction of nationalism. Nationalism is a discursive construct. This construct manifests in ideologies and formalizes order. Individuals should question these institutions in order to achieve legitimate societal participation. This criticism can be accomplished through self-reflection. The model demonstrates that sanctioned individual(s) provide interpretations of events. These interpretations recycle authority. The hermeneutic obscures an individual's understanding of the originating fact. Self-reflection allows an individual, such as Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam, to come closer to discovering the original fact. Critiquing the hermeneutic can reveal the imperfections of the message(s). Revealing the imperfections of an ideology is the first step to the liberation of the individual and society.

Missing from extant conflict literature is an examination of both symmetric and asymmetric conflict ties. To address this void, network analysis was utilized to examine the responses (both symmetric and asymmetric conflict ties) of 140 employees and managers in four divisions of a large agency of the Federal Government. The study was limited to conflict over scarce resources. Conflict management methods were examined as well as the perceptions of how respondents both cope with and feel about conflict. The results indicate that when two people in a conflict setting are structurally equivalent they both report actions and feelings that are opposite from those of- the other person. This finding, an inverse contagion effect, has been termed diffusion resistance.