Identity and integration: The roles of relationship and retention in nonprofit mergers

Prior research suggests that nonprofits are flexible and possess multiple identities, although we know less about how transformative changes, such as mergers, shape nonprofit identity. This qualitative study draws upon in‐depth interviews from 13 nonprofit merger cases to explore factors that influence postmerger identity and integration. In particular, we focus on the roles of organizational similarity and relationships, program and personnel retention, and rebranding. Ultimately, we derive a typology of postmerger integration in nonprofits and suggest that postmerger identity may be classified in terms of absorption, preservation, or creation. Implications for nonprofit leaders are discussed.     

Homosexual Discretion and Good Taste: Two Rules That Govern Homosexual Sociability Space in Santiago de Chile

Homosexual sociability space in Santiago is not socially homogenous. Beyond non-heterosexual identities segmentation (gay, lesbian, queer, BDSM, etc.), the present article proposes a reflection observing certain social distinctions or differences that come into play to create a hierarchy among gay and lesbian individuals within that space. Using a qualitative approximation, we analyze the discourse of homosexual men and women about ways to display homosexuality in different places in the city, as well as some sociability practices used in homosexual venues. The resulting social hierarchy is understood through two central subjective rules: discretion and good taste, dynamic mechanisms that perpetuate the distance among groups within the same sociability space, and to some extent reproduce the city’s class structure. Given that material means to privatize and sophisticate homosexual expression are unequally distributed in Santiago, the resulting differentiated social networks end up configuring the visibility strategies of homosexual identity played out in the city in the last years.     

孤独个体与向死而生——多元文化社会中《凡人》的身份认同

美国犹太裔作家菲利普·罗斯的《凡人》讲述了一个关于失去与孤独、疾病与死亡的故事。主人公作为一个犹太裔美国人,因其身份的特殊性与美国主流文化格格不入,显得格外孤独与痛苦,这种孤独个体的特性也贯穿了其一生。与此同时,在他的一生中无时无刻不在与疾病和死亡作斗争,体现了向死而生的特点,即在绝望中蕴含着希望。在美国多元文化社会中,主人公追寻的身份认同正是当代美国人普遍的生存状况,表现了普遍的生存困境。     

Overcoming Old in Age-Friendliness

In this article, we explore views on an age-friendly space in the Netherlands by analysing the responses of older individuals (N = 54) in focus groups and by examining the perspectives around an age-friendly zone in the Netherlands, Parkstad Limburg. We found that a central issue in the wishes for living at a later age are adjustments to envisioned physical limitations that come with the ageing process; this includes adjustments to ensure safety, accessibility and mobility, in order to facilitate older individuals' efforts to stay engaged with the world around them. In their wishes, the older participants constructed ideal dwelling places that closely resembled a senior home, but at the same time they rejected wishing to live in a place that was identified as a senior home. We explain this paradox by the representation of such a space as being for old people, i.e. needy older individuals, which was not how the older participants wished to be identified. We conclude that the conception of age-friendly environments will have to face the difficult challenge of overcoming the association with old age, while simultaneously taking into account adjustments that signify and relate to the ageing process and that seem inescapably tied to oldness.     

Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.     

‘Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood’: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse

This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi–ethnic and multi–class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The writers place themselves and people who share their values in that core, and immigrants at the margins. These strategies serve as a discursive type of spatial purification practice (cf. Sibley 1988) through which the grantwriters set up a moral and spatial order where they and other core community members are deemed to use space ‘appropriately’, and thus inhabit positive moral positions, while immigrant community members’ imputed ‘inappropriate’ use of space is used to construct negative moral positions for them.     

Linguists and other animals

Book reviewed in this article:
Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation     

浅析库利"意象"论对歌唱学习的影响

歌唱学习者成长的道路问题是一个认知能力的把握问题,这种认知能力把握水平的高低决定了他们的定位。在歌唱学习过程中合理把握自我知觉与群体评价的和谐关系,全面参照现实形象与角色形象,保持同一性,度衡自尊性,是自我意象在当前的歌唱学习大潮中所衍生的重要要求,更是歌唱学习健康发展的必要保障。     

Generations,Identities, and the Collective Memory of Che Guevara1

Has the image of Che Guevara lost its power to evoke radical politics in the face of pervasive commodification? The commercialization of this 1960s political icon has called into question the power of the market to shape collective memories. Meanwhile, antisystemic movements of the left continue to erect his image at protest events. In light of this contest over how Che Guevara is remembered, we investigate, using data from a survey of Spanish citizens, who is most likely to recall him. We find qualified support for the theory of generational imprinting—Che is more often recalled by those generations who saw him rise to prominence during their formative years, although prominent as a collective symbol rather than as a living person. Our results also corroborate the claim that historical figures or events are more salient for, and therefore more likely to be remembered by, some subgenerational units than others. Thus, although the younger generations are in general more likely than their elders to recall Che, he is most frequently remembered by the highly educated leftists who espouse postmaterialist and posttraditionalist values and identify more with their local regions than with the nation of Spain. These patterns suggest that, in contrast to the dire predictions of mass culture theorists, the memory of Che Guevara has become increasingly tied to markers of social, ethnic‐regional, and political identity.     

The organizational shaping of collective identity: The case of lesbian and gay film festivals in New York

Using information gathered during fieldwork on New York lesbian and gay film festival organizations, this paper argues that scholarship on identity has not paid sufficient attention to the organizational mediation of collective identity. The shape of collective identity—how internal instabilities and diversities are accommodated, in this case—depends not only on the emergent characteristics of the “collective,” but also on the resolution of challenges particular to organizational fields. Two very differently conceived lesbian and gay festival organizations, sites at which decision making about collective identity is ongoing and self-conscious, are examined. The analysis traces how each responds to two related tasks: maintaining community legitimacy, which requires racial diversification, and surviving within an altered institutional environment. Rather than imposition from “above” or construction from “below,” the adaptive responses by organizations (to changes in both community expectations and the resource environment) transform the collective identity formulations reaching public visibility. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Colloquium Series of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York, 1995, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, DC, 1995.