Jewish Family and Children's Services: a pioneering human service organization (1850-2008)

Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin, and Sonoma Counties is a pioneering nonprofit human service organization that has delivered services for 157 years. Over the course of its history, the organization has transformed itself from an all-volunteer agency delivering aid to immigrant families during the Gold Rush era to a $30 million nonprofit human service organization offering a full-range of services to adults, children, and families. The history of Jewish Family and Children's Services sheds light on the importance of strong leadership, strategic planning, external relationships, and strong donor support.     

The Bayview Hunters Point Foundation for Community Improvement: a pioneering multi-ethnic human service organization (1971-2008)

The Bayview Hunters Point Foundation for Community Improvement is a nonprofit organization established in 1971 to defend the legal rights of African-Americans living in its community. Over the years, the agency diversified its services to include mental health and substance abuse treatment, violence prevention, youth programming, and HIV services. The organization has overcome multiple challenges during its 37-year history in relation to social, political, and economic changes that have influenced the way the organization has financed and delivered its services. The history of the organization presents a collaborative approach to community problem-solving and exemplifies the important role that external relationships play in relationship to nonprofit growth and survival.     

Leaving Alinsu: Towards a Transformative Community of Practice

Wenger's portrait of Alinsu insurance claims processors as elaborated in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity remains closely associated with the community of practice model. The enduring metaphor of Alinsu has limited the scope of Wenger's theory to relatively simplistic, closed, and reproductive systems. The model has both reproductive and transformative potential, and it is the latter that has been less widely taken up and developed. In this article I consider ways in which analyzing a different instantiation, the No Outsiders participatory action research project, can reinvigorate and broaden our understandings of the community of practice model and point the way toward the possibility of learning and practice communities that are more transformative and less reproductive.     

Culture and human resources management: Selecting leadership in a nonprofit organization

This article examines the influence of culture in a nonprofit organization on a major human resources management decision: the selection of a new leader. Specifically, this article investigates the recent selection of the national executive vice president (known as EVP, the highest-ranking, paid staff member) in the American Cancer Society and details how three particular aspects of the culture influenced the structure, process, and outcome of the selection decision.     

Knowing cows: Transformative mobilizations of human and non‐human bodies in an emotionography of the slaughterhouse

This ‘emotionography’ of the slaughterhouse elucidates how the identities of both human and non‐human individuals are constructed by line and lairage workers. Hegemonic masculine ideals that underpin slaughterhouse work mean that the emotions of workers as well as the emotional experience of cattle are either denied, diminished or repressed. Based on fieldwork in an Irish slaughterhouse, I articulate how the industrial slaughter of animals entangles human and non‐human life in metamorphic processes that seek to diminish the emotionality of individuals, maintaining the boundary between human/non‐human animals. These transformations simultaneously pacify the emotional toll of killing non‐human individuals and reinforce perceptions of cows as sellable, killable and edible in the commodification of bovine bodies. Amidst the relative absence of emotions in slaughterhouse ethnographies, this article reveals how emotions emerge, erupt and confound the act of slaughtering cattle for slaughterhouse workers unsettling categorizations of masculinity and ‘animals as food’.     

中国服务业国际竞争力的实证研究

自上个世纪80年代以来,我国服务业在国民经济发展中的地位和作用日显突出,服务业增加值占GDP的比重由1981年的21.8 %提高到2001年的34.1 %,增长了12个百分点。但由于长期受到计划经济体制的束缚,起步晚、基础差,而且在内部结构和总体实力上都有较大问题,与发达国家甚至一些发展中国家相比差距仍然很大。2002年我国服务业增加值占GDP的比重只有33.5 %,还达不到发展中国家的平均水平。而且中国加入WTO后,随着承诺履行程度的进一步加深,服务业的开放已不可避免,服务贸易自由化将成为中国服务业发展必须面对的现实,服务业面临着前所未有的挑…     

Evaluating a human service program: Employing the judicial evaluation model

The emergence of adversarial models as an approach to formative and summative evaluations is gaining recognition among educational research professionals. The implementation of the Judicial Evaluation Model (JEM), as described in this article, is the first application to a human service employment and training program. Evaluation questions raised within the study were designed to assess the efficacy of linkage arrangements between the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) prime sponsors and education service providers in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The four stages of the JEM and its application to CETA are discussed, the panel findings are reported along with noted pitfalls and strengths, suggested guidelines for implementation, and a few recommendations.     

建设和完善"和谐人居"的社会组织

一、"和谐人居"的探讨正合时宜 "和谐人居"是从建设"和谐社会"中引申出来的.从层次来分析,首先要从"和谐家庭"开始,构成"和谐社区",再由成千上万的大大小小的社区组成"和谐社会".可以说,只有社会的基本细胞是和谐的,才会有更高层次的和谐.在人居环境中营造和谐局面,是建设现代化城市的基本条件.     

Rethinking youth voice and institutional power: Reflections from inside a service learning partnership in a California juvenile hall

This article shares the dilemmas that emerge from a community service project that engages students in a systematic critique of the juvenile justice system from the inside. It explores how competing images of youth (as dangerous thugs, vulnerable children and kids who have made bad choices) coexist uneasily within the juvenile justice system and significantly shape and constrain this community service learning project. They influence how volunteers understand their experiences and relationships with students inside, and they shape how young people in the system speak about their own lives, the inequalities they see around them, and the juvenile justice system itself. By exploring these dynamics this article aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of youth voice.     

Growing Pains: The Transformative Journey from a Nascent to a Formal Not-For-Profit Venture

This article examines how a social venture transitions from nascent to formal status and argues that the transformation of the organization set in motion by establishing formal boundaries is a deeply profound one. Drawing from the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship literature on what prompts and energizes individuals to initiate new not-for-profit ventures, and linking it to a notion of revolutionary crisis as organizations emerge and develop, we seek to illuminate and explore the tension, and its consequences, between nonprofit entrepreneurs and the organization they create as the new venture transitions from nascent to formal. We do this by presenting the results from an in-depth case study examining the gestation and boundary-forming phases of Robert’s Place Cooperative, a plucky start-up cooperative in a midsize Midwestern city.     

The Unity Council at 40: a pioneering community development and service organization (1967-2007)

The Spanish Speaking Unity Council (Unity Council) is a community development nonprofit organization that was established in 1964, during the civil rights movement, by a group of community members who wanted to ensure the political representation of the Latino community. Over its 45-year history, the Unity Council has grown into a $12 million community development organization that delivers a range of programming, including social services and employment training as well as facilitating the development and support of local businesses, low-income housing, and neighborhood improvement activities. The history of the agency presents the multiple challenges and rewards associated with development in an underserved community and an example of the important role that leadership plays in the growth of a nonprofit.     

Perceptions of union power,service, and confidence in labor leaders: A study of member and nonmember differences

Attitudes toward specific aspects of unionization held by the subjects of large national samples of the U.S. work force (the1977 Quality of Employment Survey) and the general population (the1972–1978 General Social Surveys) are examined in two separate analyses. Comparisons of the attitudes held by union members and nonmembers are made on specific dimensions of union power and service and confidence in union leaders. Nonmembers are found to have stronger perceptions that unions are influential in running the country and that unions are stronger than employers. Conversely, union members have stronger perceptions that unions offer protection, job security, improve wages and conditions of work, are worth their dues, and have greater confidence in union leaders. Discriminant analysis of data over a five-year period also revealed that union members have a stable higher confidence level in union leaders than nonmembers. Explanations for such union member and nonmember differences are hypothesized. The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Brent Schooley. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Western Academy of Management meetings at Monterey, California, 1981.     

Buying a pig in a poke: An experimental study of unconditional veto power

We study an ultimatum experiment in which the responder does not know the offer when accepting or rejecting. Unconditional veto power leads to acceptances, although proposers are significantly greedier than in standard ultimatum games, and this is anticipated by responders. We also elicit responders’ willingness to pay for (un)conditional veto power. The bids reveal a large endowment effect.     

Transformative Processes in Marriage: An Analysis of Emerging Trends

The study of conflict has dominated psychological research on marriage. This article documents its move from center stage, outlining how a broader canvas accommodates a richer picture of marriage. A brief sampling of new constructs such as forgiveness and sacrifice points to an organizing theme of transformative processes in emerging marital research. The implications of marital transformations are explored including spontaneous remission of distress, nonlinear dynamic systems that may produce unexpected and discontinuous change, possible nonarbitrary definitions of marital discord, and the potential for developing other constructs related to self‐transformation in marital research.     

Social Work Education without Walls: Ethnography as a Lens for Transformative Learning

A call for innovation in social work has been put forth to address our society’s greatest problems. This call applies to social work education, which encompasses multiple functions including teaching, research, and practice. Yet, innovation in social work is constrained by the limits of current social work approaches and methods. Increasing social work’s impact in the real world requires illuminating the complexities of reciprocal forces between human lives and the environment. Understanding such complexities incorporates spatial and interdisciplinary approaches, such as ethnography. Ethnography, as method and metaphor, is a lens for transformative learning in social work education: It is the message. Ethnography illuminates real-world complexities and deepens social work education through its core contributions: methodological holism, methodological engagement, and methodological comparison. In deepening social work education, ethnography renders visible salient links in social work’s field of dialectics, invoking the systems perspective. Yet, ethnography extends beyond and expands on the systems perspective, emphasizing engaged integration. Engaged integration of social work’s dialectics forwards the discourse about the profession’s identity. Thus, ethnography is a tool for advancing knowledge and promoting transformative learning in social work education.