Structure and adequacy of human service facilities: challenges for nonprofit managers

Findings from a statewide survey of nonprofit human service organizations in Illinois show great diversity in access to and use of facilities. Large proportions have facility-related problems that will require substantial investments beyond the financial capacity of the organizations themselves. The findings also point to major shortcomings in attention to or knowledge about facility-related problems among managers of these organizations. The findings have important policy implications for nonprofit managers, as well as for public and private funders and policy makers.     

Standards for Development: Food Safety and Sustainability in Wal‐Mart's Honduran Produce Supply Chains

Public‐private partnerships between supermarket retailers and development agencies help small‐scale producers reach growing domestic markets in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative data that focuses on relationships between producers, development agencies, and Wal‐Mart‐owned supermarkets in Honduras, the research presented here demonstrates how, by introducing food safety standards to development agencies' outreach efforts, but without necessarily certifying producers or offering a price premium, Wal‐Mart uses these standards to simultaneously differentiate production practices by promoting quality, while maintaining a standardized market. As a result, the responsibility and costs for incentivizing growers to change their practices is shifted to nongovernmental organizations. Therefore, although an extensive body of literature describes standards and third‐party certification systems as the means for corporations to control production practices, this research indicates that public‐private partnerships are a new vehicle by which corporations can influence agricultural production practices. In addition, this article argues that the inclusion of food safety standards in development projects leads to the conflation of food safety and sustainability, without adequately interrogating which agroecological processes food safety standards include and exclude. Therefore, retailers' private food safety standards dominate how sustainability is perceived and practiced in the development context.     

Resisting Hybridity in Community-Based Third Sector Organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand

The influence of the state policy agenda though a neo-liberal contracted funding environment is redefining the boundaries of the third sector through a process of hybridisation. Hybridised organisations adapt to possess characteristics and logics of multiple sectors (public, private or community). Increasing hybridity within the New Zealand community and voluntary sector has resulted in a perceived dichotomy separating organisations that adapt to these challenges from those that resist. In this paper, we apply a hybridity lens to seven community development organisations, who have predominantly resisted marketisation and alignment with the state policy agenda, to assess the extent of their hybridity and how this has impacted on their place in the community and voluntary sector and access to funding opportunities available from the state.     

Public or Private Management? A Comparative Analysis of Social Policies in Europe

Across the world, political leaders and policy experts frequently use the labels ‘public’ and ‘private’ to organize social policies. A line seemingly separates public from private efforts, with social policies publicly organized in some countries and privately organized in others. According to this perspective, a public social policy is undertaken by government or deals with a public matter. When a social policy is private, non‐public actors and institutions, like employers, undertake it or it deals with a private matter, like body control. This article examines whether public or private approaches to managing social policies are currently emphasized in European countries. I begin by defining social policy and then provide an overview of the public–private dichotomy in managing social policy. I review predominant typological frameworks of public–private organization of social policies and examine three welfare social policies and three social policies dealing with body control by comparing public–private organization of these six policy areas across 21 European countries. I conclude by discussing the limited diversity of public–private organizations of social policies in Europe.     

Private Polls and Presidential Policymaking: Reagan as a Facilitator of Change

Did the Reagan administration disregard majority will when craftingits policy initiatives? Did it cater to a narrow partisan constituencyinstead? The answers to these questions will help with an assessmentof Jacobs and Shapiro’s (2000b) hypothesis that presidentssince the late 1970s have used private White House survey researchas a tool to manipulate or assuage centrist public opinion whilemeeting the policy demands of their partisan core supporters,resulting in a decline in presidential responsiveness to majoritywill. Using the actual surveys administered by Richard Wirthlin(Reagan’s pollster) between 1981 and 1983, this articlewill demonstrate the level of consistency between majority opinionon 129 policy issues and Reagan’s behavior through 1984,and it will explore the conditions under which the presidentwas more or less likely to respond to public preferences. Thedata reveal that the Reagan administration was constrained bythe popular will in predicable ways: if the policy issues wereabout domestic concerns, highly popular, and visible in themedia, then the administration acted in line with public preferencesmore than 70 percent of the time. Further, Reagan and his adviserswere selective in responding to party activists: they championedissues drawn from their conservative ideological agenda thatfit with the current tide in public opinion, while sidesteppingother issues dear to party activists that encountered strongmajority resistance. While I do not contest Jacobs and Shapiro’s(2000b) important observation that presidents often use surveyresearch to "craft talk" in an attempt to channel the publicdebate, the evidence here highlights how the president nonethelessremains constrained by the popular will, at least on domesticissues.     

Creating safe spaces: designing day shelters for people experiencing homelessness

Day shelter programs are an important resource for people experiencing homelessness, offering respite from inclement weather, social stigma, victimization, and access to essential services and resources. Creating functional day shelter spaces requires that staff, services, and facilities support the needs of this vulnerable and marginalized population. Little guidance, however, is available regarding the design of day shelter spaces that support service engagement and positive service outcomes. This systematic review was conducted to support the development of a new day shelter in Fort Worth, Texas, identifying and reviewing interdisciplinary resources relevant to the design of these facilities. Based on the review, a preliminary taxonomy emphasizing day shelter client safety, security, dignity and health and well-being is proposed. Additional discussion identifies practical considerations affecting the implementation of the taxonomy, design priorities, and how the taxonomy was applied to the design of the Fort Worth day shelter.     

The City Park as a Public Good Reference for Internet Policy Making

Extensive literature has provided evidence of the organic nature of the Internet as a domain for different sorts of activities. Most policy making regarding the Internet, however, has focused on its economic dimensions (e.g. e-commerce, copyrights, privacy) while taking timid steps when it comes to its cultural and social dimensions. We propose a more comprehensive approach for global policy making on the Internet by looking retrospectively at processes that led to the creation of urban parks, and examining those processes in light of public goods theory. We conducted historical and theoretical analyses to show that, in the same way urban parks define spaces that mediate between different functions of the city, it is possible to define buffer spaces within the Internet that mediate between competing spheres of activity. As a complex phenomenon involving infrastructure, applications, and content, the Internet possesses features that can be located at different points between purely private and purely public goods. This fact parallels the growing attention that public goods theorists are paying to non-economic factors to explain the provisions of goods under circumstances that do not easily fit supply/demand laws. We argue that urban parks, as hybrid public goods, offer a reference for the design of policies that harmonize competing interests because they are spaces justified by manifold rationales (economic, political, social and cultural). As parks offer possibilities for spontaneous re-appropriations of the city as a cohesive entity (i.e. something beyond a disconnected collection of populations), defining similar multi-purpose spaces on the Internet would facilitate coexistence of competing and complementary behaviours by allowing users to re-appropriate this technology as a comprehensive entity beyond a mere aggregation of transactions and interests.     

Now Being Social: The Barrier of Designing Outdoor Play Spaces for Disabled Children

The design of outdoor public play spaces such that disabled children can make use of them is set in the three constructs of play, childhood and disability, drawing upon academic learning, international policy and national policy in England. The suggestion is made that one of the main barriers to the adequate provision of such spaces is that providers and designers do not know how to design such spaces. The paper explores the knowledge which is available to overcome this barrier and which might lead to the provision and design of appropriate outdoor play spaces that disabled children can more fully use.     

"Walking the Walk" of Public Service Motivation: Public Employees and Charitable Gifts of Time, Blood, and Money

Research generally indicates that public employees "talk thetalk," but do they also "walk the walk" of the public servicemotive (PSM)? Are public service employees more likely thanothers to engage in public service activities? The behavioralimplications of PSM are addressed by studying the involvementin charitable activities of public, nonprofit, and private workers.Using data from the 2002 General Social Survey, multivariatelogistic regression models are estimated to examine self-reportedgifts of time, blood, and money to charitable organizations.It is found that government employees are more likely to volunteerfor charity and to donate blood than for-profit employees are.Additionally, nonprofit workers are also more likely than theirfor-profit counterparts to volunteer. However, no differenceis found among public service and private employees in termsof individual philanthropy. These findings generally lend supportfor the hypothesis that PSM is more prominent in public servicethan in private organizations, especially as it pertains togovernment personnel.     

‘Unconventional modes’ of transport in rural Britain: Progress to 1985

‘Unconventional modes’ of public transport have been perceived in some quarters as a valid new policy option for tackling rural accessibility problems in Britain. The nature of unconventional modes (UCMs) and community transport (CT) is explained. Within a changing policy context, the UCM/CT sector has expanded steadily over the last 20 years. It is expedient to review the status of these modes in 1985, immediately prior to the deregulation of the British bus industry. The distribution of the most common modal types is examined more closely. Despite recent expansion and official encouragement, the ability of UCMs to alleviate rural access problems is debateable, and their future role is uncertain.     

Nearby Nature and Long-Term Care Facility Residents

Abstract

As the population in North America continues to age, long-term care facilities for housing the elderly are likely to become even more important. Because one of the primary foci of these facilities is on sustaining and enhancing quality of life while eventually helping patients and families cope with the dying process, both the physical and social environments are critical to the facilities' success and the users' well-being. Healing, or restorative gardens and other designed green spaces have been suggested by many academics and practitioners as important components of these environments, yet there has been relatively little systematic research on the use and benefits of nature in this context. Do elderly residents of long-term care facilities benefit from access to outdoor areas? What are the design characteristics that are most important for this unique population?

Forty elderly residents of three different urban long-term care facilities were interviewed about the importance of outdoor green spaces and views within the facility, their use of the facility's outdoor spaces, benefits they derive from those spaces, and barriers to using the spaces. Facilities differed both in terms of the amount of nature in their outdoor spaces and in the design of, scale of, and access to those spaces. Results show that overall residents place a high value on access to green spaces and derive a number of benefits from these spaces, yet they spend relatively little time in these settings. Barriers to greater use of outdoor spaces included physical limitations, lack of staff assistance, and design issues. Implications for the value of nature spaces in long-term care facilities are discussed, along with specific design recommendations.     

Creating caring institutions for community informatics

This paper explores the potential affordances of applying a feminist ethics of care approach to community informatics practices in public internet access facilities. As feminist technology scholars have long observed, technology and technoculture are strongly encoded as masculine, privileging traits such as scientific knowledge, rationality, objectivity, and distance. These characteristics are expressed in traditional infomediary practices in a variety of ways, including notions of expertise, ways of conceptualizing technology, emphasis on skills attainment, and deficit-based models of user behavior. In contrast, ethics of care emphasizes the importance of relational and situated knowledge, pluralistic voices and experiences, and relationships bound by mutual interdependence. Traditionally, caring has been feminized and thus necessarily excluded from technoculture and relegated to invisible and unpaid labor. Caring and associated affective labor practices remain an under-examined subject in infomediary practices. Public libraries and community technology centers are logical places to explore for care work, given that they share many characteristics of the spaces where care work has historically been performed. We argue that an ethics of care framework has several possible affordances for infomediary practices in these institutions, including highlighting the gendered power dynamics that define and shape existing practices; distributing care work and making existing care work visible; and envisioning a more holistic and ethical approach to engaging diverse publics. We translate Tronto’s seven warning signs for ‘bad care’ in institutions into seven positive guidelines for providing ‘good care’ in public internet access facilities, then contextualize these for community informatics institutions and practices.     

Projections internationales ou détours vers le local? Les diplomaties identitaires des sikhs (Inde) et des Mohajirs (Pakistan)

Ethnic diplomacy can be characterised as a ‘popular mode of diplomatic action’. As such, it is an illustration of the privatisation of diplomacy, which may involve private actions sponsored by state actors or, on the contrary, private actions with a public outcome in the realm of foreign policy. By attempting to reach out to state actors, international organisations and global NGOs, ethnic diplomats articulate a cultural mode of transnational mobilisation. But these two dimensions of ethnic diplomacy, its ‘culturality’ and its ‘transnationality’, cannot be taken for granted and should be questioned thoroughly. Through this analysis, it appears that long-distance nationalists do not always succeed in transnationalising their activities and that they often end up re-locating themselves in exile. And more than ethnicity or cultural repertoires, it is the political culture of ethnodiplomatic organisations and their relations with the diasporic environments in which they evolve which helps to explain the outcome of these popular modes of diplomatic action.     

Access to Philanthropic and Commercial Income Among Nonprofit Community Service Organisations

Governments depend on nonprofit, voluntary sector organisations to deliver social and community services, and public funding is the sector’s most important income source. However, in many countries, public funding for social services is becoming more limited, conditional and precarious, and governments are encouraging nonprofits to diversify their funding base, and shift their reliance to income from market activity and private donations. This article is concerned with access to philanthropic and commercial funding among nonprofits, and the factors affecting it. It firstly discusses an emerging policy agenda to promote private funding among nonprofit community service providers. Then, multivariate analysis of survey data from 521 Australian nonprofits shows which organisations access income from client fees, business activities, community fundraising, and philanthropic foundations. By exploring inequalities in the distribution of these main sources of private funding, the article helps identify the types of organisations that face challenges in establishing and sustaining streams of private income, and which are likely to require ongoing public support.     

ICT for all? Access and use of Public ICT Sites in the UK

As part of their "information age' policy agenda, the UK government sees "universal' access to information and communications technology (ICT) being achieved via new and existing public sites, where shared access to new technologies can be made available at little or no cost. State-sponsored augmentation of public ICT access in the UK has involved a variety of initiatives, most notably the recent establishment of a network of over 7,000 "UK Online Centres' located in a variety of distributed sites such as libraries, museums and colleges. Whilst there have been a number of localized case studies of users of public ICT sites, there has been little large-scale "mapping' of how these facilities are being used (and not used) by the general public. Based on a randomized household survey with 1,001 individuals in twelve research areas in the West of England and South Wales - augmented with a "booster' sample of 100 interviews with individuals carried out in public ICT sites in these areas - the present paper seeks to explore: (i) who has access to what forms of public ICT sites; and (ii) who is (and who is not) making use of different forms of public ICT sites. The survey data suggest that, in terms of people's effective access to ICT, public access sites have a relatively slight profile when compared with household and wider family access - perceived to offer ready access to ICT by only a minority of respondents. Moreover, when the use of these public ICT sites is examined, there is little evidence of public ICT sites attracting those social groups who may otherwise be excluded or marginalized from the information age. Given these findings, the paper considers the influences underlying the currently modest impact of public ICT sites on the general population and suggests changes to current public ICT provision that may prompt wider usage of these sites.     

Talking about violence: a microanalysis of narrative processes in a family therapy session

In this article, we look at the development in family therapy of narratives about domestic violence. We report on microanalyses of a family therapy session, using narrative research methods, including some conversation analytic tools. The main questions posed in this investigation were: How does storytelling of a highly charged and delicate topic like domestic violence develop in the session?; how do the different actors in the therapy room contribute to telling such stories?; how do actors try to put forward domestic violence as a conversational topic? and how do different actors react to these attempts? Our research illustrates how the recounting of stories of violence seems to go hand in hand with modes of interaction that discourage the telling of these stories. In the back‐and‐forth process between voices of hesitation and voices of reassurance, the participants weigh the level of safety in the session. In as far as the voices of hesitation can be reassured of the safety, it becomes gradually possible to talk about delicate, problematic experiences, such as violence in the family.     

Market logics: how locality and mobility make artistic livelihoods in Dakar

This essay addresses two questions linking artists and market spaces in Dakar. First, what do access, proximity, and the representation of locality have to do with the art market? And, secondly, how do markets, networks, and mobility produce and structure artists as a professional category in Dakar? The analysis and theorisation proposed here aligns Dakar’s art market with the city’s other markets as a transactive and productive space. In doing so, this essay also contends with dismissive assessments about the art market in Dakar as inadequate or fledgling. The practices of two artists, Fally Sene Sow and Douts Ndoye, orient discussion of the relationship between artists and markets by focusing specifically on how artists gain mobility and access to multiple networks and opportunities by way of market logics.     

Surgeon and Safari: producing valuable bodies in Johannesburg

This essay explores how concepts of value and cheapness circulate around the bodies of clients of the Johannesburg-based cosmetic surgery tourism company Surgeon and Safari. I show how the production of a luxurious experience and the mitigation of risk take place within a transnational network enabled by the presence of medical tourism in multiple locales. By placing Surgeon and Safari's activities within the context of the neoliberalization of health care in South Africa, I explore how the division between private versus public health spaces functions as both a technique of valuing clients' bodies and as a process of racialization.     

Homicide Arrest Clearances: A Review of the Literature

This is a review of the research literature on homicide arrest clearances or homicides for which no offender is arrested. The article describes the decline in the percent of homicides resulting in arrests and charges from over 90 pecent in 1960 to 61 percent in 2006. Research is reviewed on the reasons for the lack of public attention and concern and the low homicide clearance rates in the USA in comparison with other countries. Research on the extent to which homicides are uncleared because they involve low-status persons and those economically disadvantaged is compared with research suggesting that it is the characteristics of the homicide event that make clearance difficult. It seems that such factors as age, gender, and race/ethnicity play a role in whether the homicide is cleared by arrest. Characteristics of homicides that increase clearances include occurrence in private residences, domestic homicides, and homicide with weapons other than firearms. Research on what police can do to increase clearances is examined. Suggestions on how to increase access to information on how homicide investigations are carried out are also discussed.     

Private Prisons in Public Discourse: Measuring Moral Legitimacy

New policies require legitimacy to survive. Prison privatization represents a policy challenged by initial perceptions of illegitimacy. In the 1980s, governments began to allow private firms to run correctional facilities, shifting an inherently coercive, traditionally governmental function—incarceration—to the private sector. With data from 706 articles in four major American newspapers spanning 24 years, this research uses Freudenburg and Alario’s concept of diversionary reframing to measure and track the moral legitimacy of prison privatization across time and place. Findings suggest that initially high levels of moral legitimacy facilitated some states’ adoption of private prisons, while initially low levels of moral legitimacy stunted the growth of privatization in other states. This study presents a novel way of measuring moral legitimacy, demonstrates how the concept may be used to help explain controversial public policy changes, and documents the cultural content of private prison debates in the United States.