Organizational Environments, Framing Processes, and the Diffusion of the Program to Address Global Climate Change Among Local Governments in the United States

Few researchers have examined how organizational environments and framing processes simultaneously influence the diffusion of organizational practices. This article combines insight from major perspectives on the diffusion of organizational innovations and from social movement studies, and shows that the adoption of a program to address global climate change by U.S. municipalities is shaped by social contagion and organizational linkages, as well as by the actions of change-promoting agents. The findings emphasize the potential as well as the limitation of the strategic efforts on the part of innovation promoters to frame adoption in a way that will appeal to potential adopters.

Nonprofit Isomorphism: An Australia–United States Comparison

This paper examines the organizational structures of nonprofit organizations in Australia and the United States. Using random samples of nonprofits drawn from the two organizational populations, the analysis compares the extent of structural resemblance or isomorphism in each. It detects similar levels of isomorphism for several structural characteristics. The paper interprets this finding as reflecting expectations for nonprofit organizations that stretch worldwide.

Development of Citizen-Organized Environmental NGOs in China

Social movement theories provide a framework for explaining the post-1990 rise in China’s citizen-organized environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs), which consisted of at least 128 organizations as of 2004. We use a political process model, which is based on favorable political opportunities, cognitive liberation, and indigenous organizational strength, to explain the sharp growth in citizen organized ENGOs. In addition, we employ a world society perspective to help clarify why the political environment in China became favorable for ENGO growth, and how international ENGO practices were diffused within China. Our analysis shows that the relatively high status of ENGO founders together with their personal and professional networks also played important roles in ENGO growth.

Forging and Sustaining Labor–Community Coalitions: The Workfare Justice Movement in Three Cities

This article examines the factors shaping the formation and longevity of labor–community coalitions through comparative case studies of campaigns for workfare justice in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York. Interviews with organizational staff and leaders reveal that their decisions to form and sustain these coalitions were shaped by their collective identities, especially their commitment to social movement unionism, and their context, particularly the sectoral distribution of workfare workers. We also highlight the role of two factors previously overlooked by labor scholars: (1) ecological processes of niche-formation, which determined if and how inter-organizational competition was overcome, and (2) authorities’ social-control strategies, which shaped coalition endurance.

“Me and the Law is Not Friends”: How Former Prisoners Make Sense of Reentry

This article examines how former prisoners of color conceptualize their political, social, and economic futures and how these conceptualizations relate to the racialized social structural obstacles encountered upon reentry and decisions to re-engage criminal labor. I find that, presented with similar post-prison challenges, excarcerated men take several approaches when reentering society. I argue that the differences among their approaches lie in their varying interpretations of how they can act as individuals against and within their social structural limitations. Their decisions to rejoin or forfeit participation in criminal economies are thus shaped by experiences confronting the limitations of material conditions but also emerge from their critiques of racialized structures.

The scoring rules in an endogenous election

Plurality rule is mostly criticized from being capable of choosing an alternative considered as worst by a strict majority. This paper considers elections in which the agenda consists of potential candidates strategically choosing whether or not to enter the election. In this context, we examine the ability of scoring rules to fulfil the Condorcet criterion. We show for the case of three potential candidates that Plurality rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies a version of the Condorcet criterion in two cases: 1) when preferences are single-peaked and, 2) when preferences are single-dipped.

---

Administrative Practices in American Unions: A Longitudinal Study

Using data collected from surveys conducted in 1990 and 2000, we examine changes in the administrative practices of US-based national and international unions. We examine the hiring, human resource, financial, strategic planning, and organizational practices and how they have changed over time. We find that unions are changing their staff hiring practices in ways that contribute to workforce professionalization and that unions are moving toward more formal human resource policies and more systematic financial and strategic planning practices. These developments appear to be a reaction to the unions’ changing operating environment and reflect the pressure on union leaders to make effective use of their declining resources.

Making Sense of Organizational Change: Voices of Older Volunteers

The role of voluntary and community sector organizations in the delivery of public services is increasing and these changes bring new responsibilities and benefits to organizations that have the capacity to participate. There are concerns within the sector about the implications for citizenship and participation. The sector is highly dependent on volunteers yet little is known about how organizational change in response to new relationships with the statutory sector impact upon the commitment and well-being of people who volunteer. This paper addresses that gap in knowledge for older volunteers. Drawing upon collaborative research with a voluntary organization in the north of England, the authors explore the meanings and aspirations of volunteering for older people, and explain how and why changes associated with closer engagement with public service delivery and less grant dependency can be disempowering for them.

From Market to State Networking: The Case of a Norwegian Voluntary Organization

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate and explain how a Norwegian voluntary, faith-based organization—the Gospel Centre of Norway (Pinsevennenes Evangeliesenter)—successfully substituted a “network” for “market” strategy vis-à-vis the public sector in order to obtain organizational legitimacy and financial security. During the first decade of its existence it obtained a unique position in its relationship with the state, as a separate item in the budget of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. The organization operates in the field of substance abuse rehabilitation, i.e., in a situation where instrumental effectiveness is difficult to assess. In such a situation ritual or other institutional criteria may replace effectiveness criteria and impression management is shown to be a successful strategy. Attention is paid to the relevant environmental conditions under which this organizational change of strategy was successful.

The Therapeutic Palette: A Guide to Choice Points in Integrative Couple Therapy

This article describes the Therapeutic Palette approach to couple therapy. The Palette is organized in terms of three domains: Time Frame (past vs. present vs. future), Degree of Directiveness, and Change Entry Point (emotions, thoughts, behavior, physiology), and assists clinicians to draw from different schools of therapy in a flexible and purposeful way. In contrast to more structured, sequential approaches to integrative therapy, the Therapeutic Palette is designed to allow shifts among different theories and practices within one session. A detailed case vignette illustrates the approach.

Therapeutic Ambition,Uncertainty, and Psychotherapy with Heterosexually Married Gay Men: A Short Commentary

A Short Commentary on the article 'Staying Put in the Closet: Examining Clinical Practice and Countertransference Issues in Work with Gay Men Married to Straight Women' by Edward Alessi. The focus is upon countertransference issues, especially therapeutic ambition, in working clinically with heterosexually married gay men. The work of the interpersonal school is emphasized as providing a creative approach to therapeutic ambition with Otto Allen Will's concept of the governing principle of uncertainty.

The Institutional and Technical Structuring of Nonprofit Ventures: Case Study of a U.S. Hybrid Organization Caught Between Two Fields

This paper engages the concept of the organizational field to explore the status of a growing set of organizations referred to as social enterprises, nonprofit ventures, and social purpose businesses. The argument is developed through an ethnographic case study of a nonprofit hybrid organization (in the United States) that is training welfare recipients in their own in-house businesses. First, this paper provides an overview of the commercial trends in the nonprofit sector and the rise of social purpose enterprises. Then, employing key concepts from neo-institutional theory, the author proposes framing nonprofit-business hybrids as organizations positioned in two different organizational fields—each necessitating different internal organizational technologies—to elucidate the structural tensions that can emerge inside these new hybrid models. Internal organizational tensions identified in the case study are highlighted. Finally, the proposed use of organizational field theory developed from the case analysis is discussed in terms of social enterprise more generally.

Shame and Worker Activism: Emotional Dynamics in Face-to-Face Encounters

Shame – a feeling of social inadequacy and (the anticipation of) public humiliation – may inhibit worker activism. This article discusses the role of shame, as an emotion and a behavioral disposition, in face-to-face confrontations between workers and employers, embedded in an authority structure marked by patron-clientage and personal dependency. It explores how shame may function as an obstacle to face-to-face confrontations and claim-making, and how workers and leftwing activists try to overcome this hurdle.

From Global Cities to the Lands’ End: The Relocation of Corporate Headquarters and the New Company Towns of Rural America

Since the 1970s, a number of major corporations have located their corporate headquarters in rural and non-metropolitan areas. I interrogate this phenomenon, based on a case study of Lands’ End, a global apparel firm in Wisconsin. Much research has exposed how firms insulate themselves from claims made by workers and communities through organizational and spatial distance (i.e. global sourcing, casualization of employment structures). Corporate headquarters relocation presents a paradox, bringing key decision-makers in the global economy into new, face-to-face relationships with workers and communities. Negotiated against a radical transformation of local class structure, I argue that new forms of social regulation are emerging—in particular, a hybrid version of the Fordist-era company towns.

The optimal design of fallible organizations: invariance of optimal decision criterion and uniqueness of hierarchy and polyarchy structures

We present a general framework to study the project selection problem in an organization of fallible decision-makers. We show that when the organizational size and the majority rule for project acceptance are optimized simultaneously, the optimal quality of decision-making, as determined by the decision criterion, is invariant, and depends only on the expertise of decision-makers. This result clarifies that the circumstances under which the decision-making quality varies with the organizational structure are situations where the organizational size or majority rule is restricted from reaching the optimal level. Moreover, in contrast to earlier findings in the literature that the hierarchy and the polyarchy are generally sub-optimal structures, we show that when the size, structure and decision criterion are simultaneously optimized, the hierarchy and the polyarchy are in fact the only possible optimal organizational structures when decision-making costs are present.

---

The inverse plurality rule—an axiomatization

Under the ‘inverse plurality rule’, voters specify only their least preferred alternative. Our first result establishes that this rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies the minimal veto condition (MV). We then prove that the inverse plurality rule is characterized by MV and the four well known conditions that characterize scoring rules; namely, Anonymity (A), Neutrality (N), Reinforcement (RE) and Continuity (CO). Our new characterization result is related to the characterizations of approval voting and of the widely used plurality rule. We finally show how the axiomatization of the inverse plurality rule can be extended to the axiomatization of elementary scoring rules (vote for t-alternatives scoring rules). We are indebted to two anonymous referees for their most useful comments.

---

Toward a Descriptive Model of Humanitarian Assistance Coordination

This paper argues that the operating environment of humanitarian assistance is best conceived as an interorganizational social network or regime and that the problem of power and authority in such situations must be re-founded or reconceived accordingly. This contention is developed to contribute to an important ongoing dialogue among analysts concerning how humanitarian aid may most effectively be delivered in the context of a realistic appraisal of the structural and operating conditions in which it is offered. The paper first outlines the primary elements of the organizational environment in which humanitarian efforts must proceed, next suggests a way of thinking about how one might conceive of those conditions that builds on recent work, and then sketches the elements of a strategic contingency approach to the humanitarian assistance coordination dilemma. This analytical frame leads one to rethink assumptions concerning how best to conceptualize both the environment and the behavior of humanitarian organizations engaged in providing assistance in emergency situations and to suggest that theory building for this domain of study should now turn to a network-based and strategically contingent perspective for its foundation.

Estimating the impacts of household behavior on youth smoking: evidence from Ontario, Canada

This study attempts to evaluate the relative impacts of parents, siblings, and classmates on youth smoking by employing longitudinal data from the Waterloo Smoking Prevention Program (WSPP), a chronicle of smoking habits of students enrolled in various high schools in South Western Ontario, between 1993 and 1996. The empirical results reveal household and classmate smoking to be significant determinants of individual smoking participation as well as daily smoking. Specifically, an increase in the proportion of classmates who admit to smoking and cigarette consumption by an elder sibling, are both significantly correlated with a higher probability of youth smoking. This is a consistent finding across OLS, within-individual, and IV estimates. Finally, simple OLS estimates suggest the presence of non-linear effects with respect to classmate smoking.

Constructing Gay and Lesbian Parent Families “Beyond the Closet”

This paper provides a multilayered analysis of how lesbian mothers and gay fathers construct their families in a social context that has been described by Steven Seidman (2004) as “beyond the closet.” We stress how our participants’ family-building experiences are comparable to other non-biologically related families, but distinct due to heterosexual dominance. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with 18 lesbian birth mothers and 22 gay fathers, the authors discuss how participants navigate heterosexual dominance in institutions and in personal interactions.

How Living Wage Legislation Affects U.S. Poverty Rates

I investigate how living wage legislation affects poverty. I find evidence that living wage ordinances modestly reduce poverty rates where such ordinances are enacted. However, there is no evidence that state minimum wage laws do so. The difference in the impacts of the two types of legislation conceivably stems from a difference in the party responsible for bearing the burden of the cost.