Conflict Versus Consensus Strategic Orientations Among Environmental NGOs: An Empirical Evaluation

Israeli environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs) are assessed in light of Resource Mobilization Theory, introducing a new method for dividing ENGOs according to strategic orientation. Based on a national survey, 85 groups are categorized as consensus ENGOs that seek understanding aim at finding common grounds, or as conflict ENGOs working “outside the system.” Results show that conflict ENGOs are more grassroots in orientation and consensus ENGOs are more professionalized. Conflict ENGOs operate primarily in local arenas. Consensus ENGOs appear more stable, with larger annual budgets and paid staff, but with fewer registered members. Consensus ENGOs enjoy a wider variety of income sources; receive more funding from government, foreign, and private donations; and have a broader range of self-generated income sources. Conflict ENGOs depend more on membership fees. Both groups are highly dependent on foundation grants. In general, greater resources are associated with consensus activity than among organizations utilizing conflict tactics.     

From Advocacy to Social Innovation: A Typology of Social Change Efforts by Nonprofits

Literature describing the social change efforts of direct social service nonprofits focuses primarily on their political advocacy role or the ways in which practitioners in organizations address individual service user needs. To elicit a more in-depth understanding of the varying ways that these nonprofits promote social change, this research builds off of the innovation literature in nonprofits. It presents a model of the typology of social innovations based on the empirical findings from survey data from a random sample (n = 241) and interview data (n = 31) of direct social service nonprofits in Alberta, Canada. Exploratory principal factor analysis was used to uncover the underlying structure of the varying types of social innovations undertaken by direct service nonprofits. Results support a three-factor model including socially transformative, product, and process-related social innovations. The qualitative findings provide a conceptual map of the varied foci of social change efforts.     

Helping Dutch Neighborhood Watch Schemes to Survive the Rainy Season: Studying Mutual Perceptions on Citizens’ and Professionals’ Engagement in the Co-Production of Community Safety

Despite the growing research interest in co-production, some important gaps in our knowledge remain. Current literature is mainly concerned with either the citizens or professionals being involved in co-production, leaving unanswered the question how co-producers and professionals perceive each other’s engagement, and how this is reflected in their collaboration. This study aims to answer that question, conducting an exploratory case study on neighborhood watch schemes in a Dutch municipality. Empirical data are collected through group/individual interviews, participant observations, and document analysis. The results show that the perceptions citizens and professionals hold on their co-production partner’s engagement indeed impact on the collaboration. Moreover, for actual collaboration to occur, citizens and professionals not only need to be engaged but also to make this engagement visible to their co-production partner. The article concludes with a discussion of the practical implications of these findings.     

On the Necessity of Re-engaging the Classical Greek and Latin Literatures: Lessons from Emile Durkheim’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Evolution of Educational Thought</Emphasis>

Although much overlooked by both sociologists and educators, Emile Durkheim’s The Evolution of Educational Thought (EET; lectures from 1904–1905) not only provides extended insight into the developmental flows and disjunctures of Western education and scholarship from the classical Greek era to Durkheim’s own time but also indicates the fundamentally sociological nature of these transformations. As well, and in contrast to the more heavily structuralist, Cartesian rationalist approach that Durkheim adopts in his earlier, better known works (especially The Division of Labor in Society, Rules of the Sociological Method, and Suicide), Durkheim’s EET may be better characterized as a historically informed, sociological pragmatist approach to the study of education as a humanly engaged process. Given the extended amount of material covered in EET and the necessity of establishing in some detail Durkheim’s position on the development of educational thought over the preceding 2000 years, it has been necessary to divide this material into smaller packages for the purpose of presentation. In the first six chapters of EET Durkheim addresses (a) the Greek and Latin foundations of educational thought in France, (b) the role that the early Christian church assumed in shaping and preserving education and scholarship, and (c) the nature and emphasis of the Carolingian Renaissance (8^th and 9^th centuries), along with its relevance for the development of universities in Europe. Following (1) an introduction to Durkheim’s EET, (2) a synopsis of the first six chapters of EET, and (3) a highly compacted overview of the remaining 21 chapters of this volume, this paper concludes with (4) a commentary on the necessity of attending to the historical development of Western social thought for a sociological analysis of knowing and acting. An epilogue briefly considers (5) some ways that sociologists, classicists, and other students of the human condition may contribute to this exceptionally consequential venture     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">What do unions do?</Emphasis>—Evaluation and commentary

Most books in the social sciences quietly slip into oblivion soon after publication. Very few remain frequently cited 20 years later and only a handful merit a retrospective symposium. One of these books is Freeman and Medoff’s What Do Unions Do? When it was published, a reviewer (Mitchell, 1985: 253) labeled the book “a landmark in social science research.“ Two decades later this verdict still rings true. The authors of WDUD should be justifiably proud.     

Exploring the Nexus of Nonprofit Financial Stability and Financial Growth

Taking a unified approach to studying nonprofit financial health, this research tackles a key question that has remained unexplored in the literature: “What lies at the intersection of the two key dimensions of financial health–financial stability and financial growth?” Specifically, we identify and compare nonprofits that exhibit high levels of financial stability and growth (high financially performing) to those that exhibit low levels (low financially performing)? Overall, we find that high financial performers (HFPs) tend to be older and larger organizations (in terms of unrestricted net assets and total revenue). HFPs are also more likely to report capital assets, and report high levels of compensation. Finally, HFPs tend to contain their overhead spending by exercising efficiency by investing in talented officers (paying more than the rest), but limiting the share of officer compensation, administrative, and fundraising expenses, as a percentage of total expenses. The results of the study should be informative to stakeholders attempting to understand the profile of an organization that is successfully able to achieve both capacity growth and financial stability.     

Mapping the City: Innovation and Continuity in the Chicago School of Sociology, 1920–1934

This paper examines the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of the maps of the city of Chicago produced by sociologists at the University of Chicago between 1920 and 1934. I argue that the three mapping schemes produced in those years—the concentric zone map of The City (1925), the base map of 75 community areas and the census tract maps published in three volumes of Census Data of the City of Chicago (1920, 1930, 1934)—draw upon distinct historical antecedents and have distinct theoretical implications. The first scheme exhibits the strong influence of Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s location theory and maps produced by early Chicago city boosters, the second most clearly exhibits the influence of the Social Survey Movement and of pragmatist philosophy and the third, the influence of the financial and governmental interests of the organizations that made up the Chicago Census Committee. Literature on early urban sociology and mapping in Chicago has hitherto not adequately differentiated these three mapping schemes or problematized the implications of their differences for our understanding of the theoretical commitments of the “Chicago School.”     

Evil Tidings: Are Reorganizations more Successful if Employees are Informed Early?

Organizations represent deliberately designed social contexts that are characterized by multi-level hierarchies. Interests and opportunity structures at each level usually do not overlap. We suggest that one of the reasons why intentional change efforts often fail to reach their objectives is because they are likely to trigger competing social mechanisms at different levels of the hierarchy. In order to illustrate this argument, we analyze the consequences of timely communication of planned organizational changes on perceived success of reorganizations. Two competing mechanisms are derived and tested with data from a telephone survey (carried out in 2003), among a sample of n = 412 Dutch business organizations that performed a reorganization. The commitment perspective predicts that early announcement of reorganization plans to middle management increases the likelihood of reorganization success, since it increases commitment and empowers middle management. The influence mechanism predicts that early information of non-managerial employees decreases the likelihood of reorganization success, because it enables employees to use the information to their own advantage, anticipate on the strategies of management, and organize opposition against the plans. We found that timely communication with middle management indeed increases chances for success, whereas timely communication with employees correlates with reorganization failure. However, not communicating with employees has an even stronger negative effect on reorganization success. No evidence could be found for our argument that the severity of the reorganization’s expected negative effects on the workforce moderates both mechanisms.     

Mindful leadership: mindfulness as a new antecedent of destructive and transformational leadership behavior

Purpose: While previous research has well-examined the stress reducing effects of mindfulness, much less is known, evidentially, about the impact that it might have on working behavior, particularly in the context of leadership. Against this background, the goal of our study was to examine whether mindfulness influences leadership behavior.Design: To answer this question, we used a two-source survey study consisting of 60 teams, examining trait mindfulness of leaders via self-evaluation and their leadership behavior through the eyes of their subordinates. To analyze the given data, we conducted regression analyses.Results: Our findings confirmed the hypothesized relationships. We found a negative relationship between leaders’ mindfulness and destructive leadership, as well as a positive one between leaders’ mindfulness and transformational leadership.Implications: The results of our study underline the importance of mindfulness as a potential tool to optimize leadership quality. In order to prevent destructive and promote transformational leadership, organizations should help to develop leaders’ mindfulness capacities.     

On Desmond: the limits of spontaneous sociology

Matthew Desmond’s “Relational ethnography,” is a manifesto for a relational turn in ethnography, liberating it from the “substantialism” of bounded places, processed people and group culture. Substantialism, however, proves to be a largely mythical category that obscures two types of relational ethnography: Desmond’s empiricist transactional ethnography and an alternative, theoretically driven structural ethnography. Drawing on Desmond’s own ethnographies, On the Fireline and Evicted, I explore the limitations of his transactional ethnography—a “spontaneous sociology” that rejects the theoretical engagement and comparative logic. I elaborate and illustrate structural ethnography, drawing out the implications for public and policy sociology.     

Strategies of valuation: repertoires of worth at the financial margins

This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations.     

A Tale of Two “Unorganizables”

How should we define “organizability?” I identify here four factors that contribute to a group’s organizability: organizers’ expectations, labor market structures, employers’ actions, and workers’ union sentiments. I briefly discuss how the first three factors correspond with workers’ union sentiments in comparing two divergent occupations: teaching assistants (TAs) and web designers. Workers must choose between conflicting identities in constructing themselves as “organizable” workers. While TAs ultimately framed their identities primarily as employees, web designers still consider themselves unorganizable. I explore similarities and differences between these cases and propose some steps union organizers and web designers could take in unionizing.     

Hidden Agendas in Beratungs-und Veränderungsprozessen

Consulting and organization development claim to boost the client organization’s efficiency — this official goal is frequently foiled by hidden agendas which are not officially communicated. Hidden functions of consulting are to prove to the management’s legitimacy, to explain the failure of change processes, to strengthen the initator’s position in internal power struggles or to relieve the system from conflict. On the consultants’ side there is a tension between professionalism on one side and the necessity to secure follow-up projects and to sell standard products on the other side. The authors present possible interpretations for such hidden agendas and illustrate them with case studies from their practical experience as consultants.     

Givers,takers and matchers – Reciprocity styles and their contribution to organizational behaviour

This article in the journal “Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation (GIO)” bridges Adam Grant’s popular concept of givers, takers and matchers to state-of-the-art theories and research of prosocial organizational behavior such as Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB). By proposing a three-dimensional framework of social orientation, the authors provide an approach allowing the reconciliation of inter-individual differences of social motives and situational factors, enabling cooperative behavior in the workplace. The practical implications of encouraging cooperative behaviour and collegial support are indicated for individual (personnel selection and development), team (team design and values) and organizational (organizational culture development) levels.     

Larregue’s Critique of Cofnas et al. (2017): A Rejoinder

Data from the General Social Survey indicate that conservatives’ self-reported trust in scientists has steadily decreased since 1974. In Cofnas et al. (The American Sociologist, 2017), we suggested that this trend may have been partly driven by the increasing tendency of scientific institutions, and the representatives of such institutions, to distort social science for the sake of liberal activism. Larregue (The American Sociologist, 2017) makes three opposing arguments: (1) It is “very hard” to establish the charge of bias, especially since we did “not state what [we] mean by ‘bias.’” (2) We did not establish a causal relationship between scientists’ (alleged) liberal activism and conservatives’ distrust of science, and we ignored activism by conservative scientists. (3) We were wrong to advocate “affirmative action” for conservatives in academia. We address these arguments in turn: (1) Larregue does not engage with our main arguments that liberal bias exists in social science. (2) In recent years, prominent scientific organizations have, with great publicity, intervened in policy debates, always supporting the liberal side without exception. It is not unreasonable to assume that this would diminish conservatives’ trust in these organizations. Contra Larregue, in Cofnas et al. (The American Sociologist, 2017) we explicitly acknowledged that conservative scientists can also be biased. (3) We never advocated “affirmative action” for conservatives, and in fact we object to such a proposal.     

Vocal Cues Underlying Youth and Adult Portrayals of Socio-emotional Expressions

Despite known differences in the acoustic properties of children’s and adults’ voices, no work to date has examined the vocal cues associated with emotional prosody in youth. The current study investigated whether child (n = 24, 17 female, aged 9–15) and adult (n = 30, 15 female, aged 18–63) actors differed in the vocal cues underlying their portrayals of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (meanness, friendliness). We also compared the acoustic characteristics of meanness and friendliness to comparable basic emotions. The pattern of distinctions between expressions varied as a function of age for voice quality and mean pitch. Specifically, adults’ portrayals of the various expressions were more distinct in mean pitch than children’s, whereas children’s representations differed more in voice quality than adults’. Given the importance of pitch variables for the interpretation of a speaker’s intended emotion, expressions generated by adults may thus be easier for listeners to decode than those of children. Moreover, the vocal cues associated with the social expressions of meanness and friendliness were distinct from those of basic emotions like anger and happiness respectively. Overall, our findings highlight marked differences in the ways in which adults and children convey socio-emotional expressions vocally, and expand our understanding of the communication of paralanguage in social contexts. Implications for the literature on emotion recognition are discussed.     

Doing Sociology in the Age of ‘Evidence-Based Research’: Scientific Epistemology versus Political Dominance

Social science history from its beginnings has witnessed periods of confrontation between – generally speaking – qualitative and quantitative paradigms, even talking of ‘war’, ‘wrestlers’ and ‘warriors’. And, again from the very beginnings, our discipline has been forced to relate with funding agencies. Sometimes, the two paths – the scientific one and the financial one – cross: we may think at the role of the private foundations in financing a certain type of investigation, notably surveys against case studies or qualitative research. Nowadays, we see an increased attention by federal agencies and private foundations on a particular sector of research, randomized controlled trials (RCTs), focusing on techniques seen intrinsically superior from the methodological and epistemological point of view. This article will analyze the recent increase of the randomized controlled trials as the new “gold standard” for social research; the call for the “experimenting society” (Campbell American Psychologist, 24(4), 409–429, 1969), willing to import the randomized controlled trials approach into the field of social policy and planning, is not new, if we think that yet in 1963 Campbell and Stanley wrote that “a wave of enthusiasm for experimentation dominated the field of education in the Thorndike era, perhaps reaching its apex in the 1920s” (Campbell and Stanley 1963/1966: 2). Many problems of validity with RCTs soon came to be recognized – even by Campbell, who stated that he has “held off advocating an experimenting society until they can be solved” (Campbell Evaluation Practice, 15(3), 291–298, 1994: 294). In the following years a different set of evaluation strategies were developed, but today there’s a new effort to re-introduce the experimental approach in the academic arena. What is the difference? As we will see, the scientifically-based research is now established and codified by law, funding is linked to a particular way of doing research, and the consequences on scientists work are yet to be explored.     

Rainfall interception capacity of tree species used in urban afforestation

Afforestation is inserted in the urban environment and interferes directly in the surface runoff. In order to quantify the rainfall interception by tree species, an experiment was carried out in the city of Uruaçu, Goiás, Brazil, with the four most common tree species in the urban afforestation of the region. The species chosen were the Mangifera indica (mango tree), the Caesalpinia peltophoroides (sibipiruna tree), the Pachira aquatica (munguba tree) and the Licania tomentosa (oiti). In order to register precipitation, ten pluviographs were used. They are capable of measuring precipitation over time in terms of duration, volume, and intensity. For events with a mean cumulative precipitation of 16.7 mm, the mean values of interception found in each species were: Mangifera indica - 8.0 mm; Pachira aquatica - 7.4 mm; Licania tomentosa - 7.2 mm; and Caesalpinia peltophoroides - 4.8 mm. The research confirms the importance of studies related to the identification of the species’ individual characteristics that interfere in the rainfall interception capacity and that can consequently contribute to urban drainage actions. In addition, it proves the existence of variations of rainfall interception in relation to rainfall events and during their occurrences and emphasizes the need for a careful definition of the species that will compose the urban afforestation.     

Assessing the Role of Gambling on Problematic Alcohol Consumption by Police Officers

While a number of studies have attributed critical incident stressors to alcohol abuse among police officers, no study has examined the role gambling, if any, plays on problematic alcohol consumption. Therefore, data from the Police Stress and Domestic Violence in Police Families in Baltimore, Maryland, 1997–1999 are analyzed to test the influence of gambling on problematic alcohol consumption engaged by police officers. Results indicated that gambling is significant in predicting problematic alcohol consumption. Burnout, peer drinking, and self-control also predicted the dependent variable. The study’s results, as well as the study’s limitations and directions for future research, are also discussed.     

Drawing Boundaries or Drawing Weapons? Neighborhood Master Status as Suppressor of Gang Violence

Criminological scholarship on gangs has documented that attempts to take over territory and drug markets under the control of another gang is a primary motivation of inter-gang violence. However, little is known about situations where competition over territory and drug markets comes from within the territory, or about instances where gang competition does not lead to violence between criminal groups. Drawing on over 140 interviews and over nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Canada’s oldest social housing project—Regent Park—this article describes and analyzes the changing nature of the neighborhood’s gang landscape as a result of neighborhood redevelopment. In particular, it examines why the emergences of a rival gang within Regent did not incite violence as the literature would expect. The article outlines how the emergence of a new rival gang within a territory previously dominated by established criminal groups did not result in the type of violence, in part because the two groups shared a “master status” of being Regent residents, which served to buffer inter-gang violence. Further, it argues that instead of drawing weapons, the established criminal groups expressed their frustration with the loss of their territorial monopoly to emerging groups by morally distinguishing themselves from the new groups. This article concludes by casting a scholarly spotlight on the means through which boundary work develops between criminal groups, and how cultural contexts affect identities and discourses in physical space.