Postmodernism and Sociology: From the Epistemological to the Empirical

This article investigates the place of postmodernism in sociology today by making a distinction between its epistemological and empirical forms. During the 1980s and early 1990s, sociologists exposited, appropriated, and normalized an epistemological postmodernism that thematizes the tentative, reflective, and possibly shifting nature of knowledge. More recently, however, sociologists have recognized the potential of a postmodern theory that turns its attention to empirical concerns. Empirical postmodernists challenge classical modern concepts to develop research programs based on new concepts like time-space reorganization, risk society, consumer capitalism, and postmodern ethics. But they do so with an appreciation for the uncertainty of the social world, ourselves, our concepts, and our commitment to our concepts that results from the encounter with postmodern epistemology. Ultimately, this article suggests that understanding postmodernism as a combination of these two moments can lead to a sociology whose epistemological modesty and empirical sensitivity encourage a deeper and broader approach to the contemporary social world.     

Corporate governance and performance of microfinance institutions: recent global evidences

Journal of Management and Governance - Using a global data set of 456 MFIs, this study investigates whether a MFI’s ownership structure and corporate governance influences its social...     

The impact of autonomy on information systems planning effectiveness

Autonomy for information systems planning may have an impact on the effectiveness of that planning. Theory Y suggests that when managers have more autonomy, they have greater feelings of ownership, commitment, and responsibility, and thus perform better. A postal survey of 131 chief information officers of US subsidiaries of multinational firms collected data to test hypotheses based on the theory. Data analysis revealed that autonomy for IS planning in general and the strategy selection planning activity in particular significantly predicted IS planning effectiveness. These findings thus extend the theory to a new domain, namely IS planning in multinational firms, and thereby facilitate a better understanding of the management of IS planning. They further suggest that parent managers consider delegating greater autonomy to the managers of their foreign subsidiaries.     

Legitimizing Work: Telework and the Gendered Reification of the Work-Nonwork Dichotomy*

L'intérêt principal de cet article est de savoir pourquoi les télé-travailleuses et travailleurs (individus ?uvrant à la maison) ont besoin de séparer leur vie publique de leur vie privée. Au moyen d'entrevues qualitatives avec des télétravailleurs des deux sexes, on étudie les différences dans la manière d'organiser la vie selon la dichotomie public/travail et privé/non-travail. Les mécanismes qui rendent nécessaire le renforcement de cette dichotomie sont aussi explorés. This paper focusses on why employees who telework (do professional work at home) continue to need to maintain a boundary between their public and private lives. Through qualitative interviews with female and male teleworkers, gender differences in the ways in which they organize their lives in terms of the public/work—private/ nonwork dichotomy are considered. The mechanisms which necessitate the reification of this dichotomy are explored.     

Truck scheduling for solid waste collection in the City of Porto Alegre, Brazil

This paper considers a truck scheduling problem in the context of solid waste collection in the City of Porto Alegre, Brazil. The problem consists of designing “good” daily truck schedules over a set of previously defined collection trips, on which the trucks collect solid waste in fixed routes and empty loads in one of several operational recycling facilities in the system. These facilities are managed by cooperatives whose members are poor and not part of the mainstream economy. The main objective is to minimize the total operating and fixed truck costs. We show that the problem can be modeled as a special case of the single-depot vehicle scheduling problem, which is polynomially solvable. However, due to the social benefits of the solid waste program, it is desirable to obtain balanced assignments of collection trips unloading their cargo at the recycling facilities. We prove that the truck scheduling problem considering balanced unloading is NP-hard. A heuristic approach, incorporating an auction algorithm and a dynamic penalty method, is designed to acquire a good solution. Finally, computational experiments are conducted on real data. The results show that the heuristic approach simultaneously reduces total costs and balances the number of trips assigned to each recycling facility.     

“The Best of Both Worlds” and “Cutting My Own Throat”: Contradictory Images of Home-Based Work

This article documents the existence of two contradictory depictions of computer-aided home-based work found in the popular press and the academic literature. Working at home is sometimes said to allow individuals to gain a full and successful integration of their paid and family work. At other times the physical proximity of home and work activities accompanying homework is portrayed as the cause of great anxiety and stress. Through case studies of women and men who do professional work at home in Canada, I explore the ways in which these two contradictory images are in fact simultaneously reflected in individuals' experiences of working at home.     

Complaints‐Based Entrepreneurialism: Worker Experiences of the Employment Standards Complaints Process in Ontario,Canada

In Ontario, workers who face unfair working conditions have the option of filing an official complaint with the Ministry of Labour. Complaints making is characterized as a widely available, easily accessible, and free‐of‐cost avenue for workers who may have experienced a violation of the law. However, interviews with Ontario workers who have filed complaints tell a different story. This paper is based on a community‐university project on the enforcement of the Employment Standards Act in Ontario. We draw on 36 interviews with workers employed in precarious jobs in Sudbury, Toronto, and Windsor, who filed complaints to the Ministry. Workers characterize the complaints process as rife with bureaucratic complexity, risk, and unsuccessful payouts. Their experiences shed light on the efficacy of complaint‐based approaches that are often promoted as a form of “bottom‐up” enforcement of employment standards (ES). We demonstrate that the current ES complaints system requires workers to enact neoliberal entrepreneurialism (rather than agentic or collective entrepreneurialism) creating a highly stressful, enormously time‐consuming, and demoralizing experience. We document the increasingly individualized and contradictory avenues through which workers must act as entrepreneurs to navigate and self‐advocate when their rights have been violated. We argue that the current complaint processes limit the potentially empowering impact of this strategy.     

Feminist Insight on Gendered Work: New Directions in Research on Women and Entrepreneurship

This paper discusses research on female entrepreneurs in conjunction with feminist theory on gendered work. I explore the ways in which much of the research on women's experiences of entrepreneurship focuses on identifying similarities and differences between female and male business owners, and on providing explanations for the differences identified. While such an approach is useful in compensating for the exclusion of women in earlier studies of business ownership, it does not illuminate how and why entrepreneurship came to be defined and understood vis-à-vis the behaviour of only men. I argue that existing knowledge on women business owners could be enhanced through reflection on two issues — first, on the essentialism in the very construction of the category of ‘the female entrepreneur’ (which prioritizes sex over other dimensions of stratification) and second, on the ways in which the connections between gender, occupation and organizational structure differently affect female and male business owners.