Combined Effects: The Influence of Organizational Form and Structural Characteristics on Contract Performance in Mixed Sector Markets

Social service contracting to nongovernmental organizations is popular form of privatization across the world. Although nonprofits are preferable social service providers for legal and normative reasons, governments in the United States increasingly rely on for-profit organizations to deliver social services. This trend warrants further exploration about whether nonprofits or for-profits perform according to theoretical expectations when they exist in the same market. This study employs qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to examine how sector-public, nonprofit, and for-profit-combines with structural variables to produce acceptable contract performance in juvenile justice programs. QCA is a discovery-oriented research tool that determines whether combinations of variables within cases produce a specific outcome and whether those combinations are consistent across cases. I find sector is not a necessary or sufficient predictor of acceptable performance on its own. Rather it combines with market factors to lead to acceptable contract performance. Combinations vary by sector, indicating that sectors behave differently in similar circumstances. The primary theoretical contribution of this paper is to provide a nuanced account of contract performance in mixed sector markets.     

The Organizational Practice of Gendered Employment: Disparate Impact and Gender Segregation in the Japanese Entry-Level Labor Market

Abstract

This article discusses the supposedly “gender-neutral” Japanese organizational hiring practice of using a track-based employment system. In this system, prospective employees are required to accept nationwide transfers in residence to obtain career-track positions. Women have difficulty fulfilling this requirement because of cultural expectations to settle down and tend to domestic affairs (day care is often hard to access). Using job placement data on graduates from a Japanese university, I found that women are more likely to be hired into firms without this track system, where they are mostly hired for non-career-track positions. Therefore, seemingly gender-neutral bureaucratic rules actually disparately affect women, maintaining gender inequality in the corporate-centered economy of Japan.     

Metropolitan Labour Markets, Peripheral Labour Markets and Socio-economic Outcomes among Immigrants to Israel

This article focuses on the impact of the local opportunity structure on socio‐economic outcomes of recent immigrants to Israel. Specifically, it examines the extent to which metropolitan labour markets versus peripheral labour markets differentially affect socio‐economic incorporation of recent “Russian” immigrants who arrived in Israel after the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989. Using the 1995 Israeli Census of Population, the analyses address the following questions: (1) were recent immigrants differentially sorted to local labour markets; (2) do local labour markets differentially affect socio‐economic attainment; and (3) do modes of socio‐economic attainment and patterns of ethnic inequality differ across metropolitan and peripheral labour markets? The analyses reveal that immigrants from the European republics and of lower education are more likely to settle in peripheral labour markets than in metropolitan labour markets. Peripheral labour markets, compared with metropolitan labour markets, have detrimental consequences for the socio‐economic outcomes of immigrants. The data do not provide strong support for the thesis that patterns of socio‐economic attainment and inequality differ much across labour markets. The rules according to which socio‐economic attainment of immigrants is determined are, for the most part, similar across labour markets. In general, occupational status and earnings of immigrants are likely to increase with the passage of time, education, European origin; and to decline with age regardless of type of the local labour market. However, the socio‐economic outcomes of immigrants are considerably higher in the metropolis than in the periphery. The findings suggest that the local labour market plays a major role in the determination of immigrants' socio‐economic rewards and outcomes.     

Gendered Congregations,Gendered Service: The Impact of Clergy Gender on Congregational Social Service Participation

Using data from the 1998 National Congregations Study, I present empirical evidence that shows that the gender of a congregation's leadership makes a difference in the likelihood that a congregation will participate in a social service programme. The results from binary logistic regression indicate that the odds of congregations with women head clergy participating in a social service programme are four times greater than those with men head clergy. In addition, as the percentage of women on a congregation's governing board increases the probability that a congregation will participate in a service project also increases. The specific types of social service programmes a congregation pursues also differ by gender of leadership, with women‐led congregations significantly more likely to pursue service projects that could be labelled feminine while avoiding programmes that are clearly feminist. To explain this gendered behaviour I incorporate Acker's (1990 ) theory of gendered organizations.     

Women Managers,Gendered Cultural Processes and Organizational Change

This paper develops a critical approach towards the nature of research and knowledge about Women in Management (WIM). A variety of perspectives in the WIM area are reviewed from an inter-disciplinary standpoint. Drawing on radical approaches to organization analysis, the paper aims to evaluate the insights provided into the position of women in management from the perspectives outlined. It is argued that feminist approaches which focus on the gendered nature of organizational processes and in particular organizational cultures, represent an important way forward in the development of adequate theorizations of the position of women managers. The paper examines the implications of this analysis for the Women in Management research agenda and explores appropriate strategies for organizational change within this arena.     

The Impact of Interdisciplinary Teams on Organizational Relationships

Based upon research in an alcoholism treatment organization, the study explores the impact of interdisciplinary team treatment on organizational participants and structure. The findings suggest that alternate organizational arrangements are necessary for organizations which use the team method. The implications of team treatment for professionals were confounded because of power relationships within the organization. Role bargaining between professionals was observed to be virtually non-existent because of the dominance of a single discipline. A surprising finding was the extent to which supervisory personnel were disadvantaged in the study. Caution is suggested for those organizations most likely to adopt the team method, large public health organizations.     

Gendered Organizational Cultures: Narratives of Women Travellers in a Male World

The paper will present various self-identity narratives of women pioneers in male occupations who ‘take their place’ in a male gendered organizational culture. These narratives belong to a single discourse of what may be called ‘travellers in a male world’. This discourse presumes the existence of a territory marked out as male which is trespassed upon by females who are formally members of the same occupational community, but who, in actual practice, must stake out their positions in the field. Social structures coerce discourse positions and set up a series of expectations and social obligations, although several subject positions can be taken up for oneself, and for the ‘other’. This process has been labelled ‘positioning gender relations within an organizational culture’ and has been described as liminal work, performed discursively and in transitional spaces. Gender relations can therefore be viewed as cultural performances learned and enacted on appropriate occasions both by men and women.     

Against the Tide: Gendered Prejudice and Disadvantage in Engineering

Although a balance has been achieved in the overall numbers of female and male students in higher education in the industrialized countries, vertical sex segregation has remained high as male academics and students continued to outnumber their female counterparts internationally. Gender representation is only one façade of gendered disadvantage in engineering, as complex forms of gendered disadvantage occur in social, cultural, psychological and economic layers of life, where women engineering students find themselves swimming against the tide of prejudice. This article draws on comparative and historical data, and a qualitative study with interviews and a questionnaire survey which generated 603 completed responses from female and male engineering students in Turkey. It seeks to reveal the complex and layered nature of gendered prejudice levelled against female engineering students. The findings suggest that linear formulations of gendered prejudice and disadvantage in engineering study are insufficient to account for the complexity of influences on career choice and their concomitant gendered outcomes.     

Masculinity as a Gendered Form of Desire: Laplanche and Enigmatic Seduction

Laplanche’s formulation of primal seduction and afterwardsness is employed to theorize masculinity as a gendered form of desire. This formulation is grounded in the notion that gender, sexed difference, and Freudian sexuality are complexly interrelated and mutually determined, forming gendered desire and desirous gender. With Laplanche, identification with a gendered other is understood to be preceded by identification by the other. Masculinity is in this instance constituted by how one translates and retranslates the enigmatic signifiers inscribed by the address of adult caregivers, and by how the untranslated remains of that address inspire and animate the performance of gender. Primal seduction is here further employed, in extended form, to explore and augment understandings of the intergenerational transmission of masculinities through paternal seduction. Masculinities are in this articulation considered to emerge in relation to the vulnerabilities associated with the experience of the enigmatic within relations of power, in the tensions between subjectivity and subjectification. The article privileges the enigmatic, unrepresented experiences of being, and the otherness of self, and while I attempt to apprehend these understandings through the presentation of case material, I do so to demonstrate that the enigmatic is, by definition, elusive and indeterminate, and I invite the perspective that this problematic not be resolved.     

Exploring Organizational Form in the Affordable Rental Housing Sector

The nature and benefits of different kinds of affordable rental housing providers, and particularly for-profit housing developers, have been contested by practitioners and scholars. We contribute to this debate by exploring whether the missions, the resources harnessed to build housing, the human resources, and the involvement of residents in decision-making differ based on organizational form. Using case study design, we examine two third sector organizations (a zero equity cooperative and a community-based non-profit) and a for-profit located in Canada. The two third sector organizations had less knowledge of housing construction and harnessed in-kind contributions compared to the for-profit. These organizations, and again in contrast with the for-profit, also pursued social missions, including supporting other organizations and sharing their experiences related to housing construction. The zero equity cooperative featured greater resident involvement in the development and the management of the housing compared to both the community-based non-profit and the for-profit.