Caring vs. Cashflow

Summary

The administration and delivery of human services often involve apparently conflicting goals, such as the desire to offer quality services to those most in need while maintaining a sound financial status for an agency. Using the example of needs for caring vs. cashflow in a hospice, this article describes how computer simulation was used to explore possible solutions for this common dilemma in human service organizations. A system dynamics model was developed to represent student and staff beliefs about the causal relationships between processes of caring and cashflow. A generic system dynamics computer application, STELLA, was used to simulate and explore varying assumptions and beliefs about agency functioning. The simulation period proved very useful as an educational tool, and as a motivator for staff to pursue a solution to the caring vs. cashflow dilemma.     

Browsing the culture: membership and intertextuality at a mormon bookstore

This paper argues that organizational and local host cultures are related through the intertextual performance of membership. It proceeds by claiming that organizations may be usefully read as intertexts, and that the relationship between organizations and their environments is enacted by speakers as they negotiate their multiple identities in talk. These claims are then used to analyze the intertextual performance of membership at a Salt Lake City, Utah bookstore owned by the Mormon church. The analysis demonstrates how: (1) organizational routines surrounding the interpretation of product serve as performances of host-cultural membership; (2) communication among and between store employees and customers clarifies types of host-cultural identity; and (3) the management of controversial texts enacts the organizational environment. The analysis is intended to mark an intersection between organizational and cultural studies by demonstrating how organizations potentially function as sites for the reproduction of interpretive communities, conducted through the use of cultural texts.     

Stakeholder participation in evaluation design: Is it worth the effort?

Naturalistic approaches to program evaluation generate multiple interpretations and possible conclusions, but lack inherent guidance on how to choose among or reconcile them. A practical frame of reference for addressing this challenge emphasizes criteria of utility and credibility, as well as an evaluation process that is participatory and openly value-pluralistic. This paper discusses the logic of justification underlying such a practical perspective.     

Justifying conclusions in naturalistic evaluations: A practical perspective

Naturalistic approaches to program evaluation generate multiple interpretations and possible conclusions, but lack inherent guidance on how to choose among or reconcile them. A practical frame of reference for addressing this challenge emphasizes criteria of utility and credibility, as well as an evaluation process that is participatory and openly value-pluralistic. This paper discusses the logic of justification underlying such a practical perspective.     

‘We Listen for What the Waves Intone’: Intertextuality and the Circum-Atlantic Poetics of Seamus Heaney,Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes

Abstract

This article argues that the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes constructs the Atlantic space as an oceanic intertext. Utilising Joseph Roach’s notion of the circum-Atlantic, this article examines how Trethewey’s and Dawes’ intertextual engagement with Heaney highlights how the Atlantic rim retains ‘a memory imperfectly deferred’. Through tracing connections between the work of Heaney, Dawes and Trethewey it becomes apparent that, in addition to thematic preoccupations with the legacy of imperial racisms and colonial displacement, the writers share a similar set of motifs. These poets fashion watery interstices at the margins of the Atlantic – coastlines, bogs and flooded islands – as intercultural lieux de mémoire, resonant with memory and haunted by an intertextual poetics that evokes the chorus of ‘water-lost’ Atlantic voices. This article suggests that, although the Atlantic is fashioned as an agent of disconnection, violence and liminality, it also functions as a reminder of the deep time that joins the Atlantic regions and its archipelagos, with its layers of multiple temporalities and storied pasts.     

Exploring Intimate Cultures,Societal Addresses,and Public Literacies

In this article we provide a perspective on hybridity both as a theoretical lens for understanding diversity and a method for organizing learning. We argue that the use of multiple, diverse, and even conflicting mediational tools promotes the emergence of Third Spaces, or zones of development, thus expanding learning. Using examples from our ethnographic study of the literacy practices of one dual immersion elementary school classroom, we illustrate through an analysis of the discourse and literacy practices of the teacher and students in this culture of collaboration, how hybrid activities, roles, and practices can lead to productive contexts of development.     

Tweeted,deleted: theoretical,methodological, and ethical considerations for examining politicians’ deleted tweets

In an election, political candidates often slip up and want a do-over. On Twitter, they get this chance. Candidates can delete tweets and hope no one notices. But organizations such as Politwoops notice. Politwoops archives politicians’ deletions in the hopes of bringing more transparency and accountability to political discourse. This article discusses the theoretical value, methodological challenges, and ethical considerations of examining deleted tweets and using the Politwoops archive. Specifically, this article (a) discusses how analysis of deleted tweets can expand and deepen research on impression management and online self-presentations in elections, (b) proposes the use of an intertextual content analysis ? a hybrid approach that incorporates elements of a qualitative content analysis and an intertextual interpretative analysis ? when analyzing deletions, (c) investigates and exposes some of the limitations of the Politwoops archive, and (d) given the limitations of the Politwoops archive, discusses the potential ethical dilemmas of researchers creating their own datasets of deleted tweets. Overall, analyzing deletions can reveal what campaigns strategically present and hide from voters in order to create electable personas. To uncover the content of candidates’ deleted tweets and how they may contribute to impression management, researchers must first consider several methodological and ethical matters.     

The classing gaze and its gendering effects: (dis)‐respectability,emotional (in)‐competency,and the counselling experiences of domestically violent Taiwanese men

Research on domestically violent men typically takes an oppositional logic of gender. While the significance of class in researching domestically violent men is identified, class and gender are often treated as separate entities that do not complicate each other. Drawing upon group observations and in‐depth interviews, this paper identifies how intersections of class and gender manifest in the counselling experiences of domestically violent Taiwanese men. From a Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the authors analyse (1) how class distinctions serve to (re)produce gendered hierarchy; (2) how contradictory experiences of gender reveal a relational understanding of class; and (3) how the gendered nature of domestically violent men is inscribed with a meaning of (working) class specificity for maintaining middle‐class ‘purity’. In analysing men's multiple and conflicting experiences, this paper contributes to research on domestically violent men by showing how class and gender are actively constructed and not produced in a monolithic/invariant way.     

ADDRESSING SOCIAL DILEMMAS WITH MASCOTS,INFORMATION, AND GRAPHICS

Reducing nonpoint source pollution is a complex social dilemma involving externalities, information asymmetries, and coordination problems. Using a laboratory experiment, this research investigates how mascots, public information, and data visualization can improve collective group behavior to address a social dilemma. Results show that groups reduce pollution in the experiment when a community mascot expresses negative emotions in response to poor water quality outcomes. Additionally, groups pollute less when they are provided public information about water quality, and abatement is greater when feedback is negatively framed. This study demonstrates how novel nonmonetary incentives can be used to achieve a collective environmental goal. (JEL D79, Q25, Q52, Q53, D83)     

Collingridge’s dilemma and technoscience

Collingridge’s dilemma is one of the most well-established paradigms presenting a challenge to Technology Assessment (TA). This paper aims to reconstruct the dilemma from an analytic perspective and explicates three assumptions underlying the dilemma: the temporal, knowledge and power/actor assumptions. In the light of the recent transformation of the science, technology and innovation system—in the age of “technoscience”—these underlying assumptions are called into question. The same result is obtained from a normative angle by Collingridge himself; he criticises the dilemma and advances concepts on how to keep a technology controllable. This paper stresses the relevance of the dilemma and of Collingridge’s own ideas on how to deal with the dilemma. Today, a positive interpretation of technoscience for effective TA is possible.     

Trends in Development Aid,Negotiation Processes and NGO Policy Change

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) and government donor agencies (GDA) are often caught in a dilemma; an NGO between responsiveness to its target group(s), expectations of individual donors and demands of its GDA; GDA between its policy to respect NGO’s integrity, its wish to keep NGOs accountable for received fund and its operation within the bounds of its general policies. This dilemma is mirrored in the NGO–GDA negotiation for funds. Based on negotiation theory and using three explanatory approaches, 18 years of negotiations between an NGO, Vi Skogen (ViS) and its GDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), are analyzed in order to demonstrate how organizational structures, power relations and the context influence the outcome of the negotiations. All three approaches help to explain how ViS managed, mainly in the interest of its individual donors, to resist changes demanded by Sida and also to explain how the agendas of ViS and Sida finally converged.     

Resolving conflicting demands on evaluation: A test demonstration of videotex for farmers

Evaluating an innovation for federal, state, and local policymakers and program managers alike entails conflicting demands on the evaluation study. Policymakers at federal, state, and local levels are best assisted by impact evaluations, whereas state and local program managers are best assisted by process evaluations. In-house evaluators often have an advantage in conducting process evaluations; external evaluators generally have an advantage in conducting impact evaluations. A cost-effective approach may be to combine in-house process evaluation and external impact evaluation. This dual approach was found to reduce conflicting demands on the evaluation of an experimental videotex system for agricultural producers.     

A microcomputer program for evaluation analysis

Systematic program/policy evaluation generally involves processing a set of (I) goals to be achieved, (2) alternative programs or policies for achieving them, and (3) relations between goals and alternatives in order to arrive at the best alternative, combination, or allocation. The nature of evaluation thus leads to such analytic problems as (1) multiple dimensions on multiple goals, (2) multiple missing information, (3) multiple alternatives that are too many to determine the effects of each one, (4) multiple and possibly conflicting, constraints, and (5) the need for simplicity in spite of all that multiplicity. Microcomputers aid in overcoming all five problems by facilitating such methods as (1) paired comparisons, weighted raw scores, and part/whole percentaging to deal with multi-dimensionality, (2) sensitivity analysis to deal with missing information, (3) allocation percentages to deal with multiple alternatives, (4) sub-optimizing to deal with conflicting constraints, and (5) decision matrices to deal with the need for simplicity.     

Evolutionary Evaluation: Implications for evaluators,researchers, practitioners,funders and the evidence-based program mandate

Evolutionary theory, developmental systems theory, and evolutionary epistemology provide deep theoretical foundations for understanding programs, their development over time, and the role of evaluation. This paper relates core concepts from these powerful bodies of theory to program evaluation. Evolutionary Evaluation is operationalized in terms of program and evaluation evolutionary phases, which are in turn aligned with multiple types of validity. The model of Evolutionary Evaluation incorporates Chen's conceptualization of bottom-up versus top-down program development. The resulting framework has important implications for many program management and evaluation issues. The paper illustrates how an Evolutionary Evaluation perspective can illuminate important controversies in evaluation using the example of the appropriate role of randomized controlled trials that encourages a rethinking of “evidence-based programs”. From an Evolutionary Evaluation perspective, prevailing interpretations of rigor and mandates for evidence-based programs pose significant challenges to program evolution. This perspective also illuminates the consequences of misalignment between program and evaluation phases; the importance of supporting both researcher-derived and practitioner-derived programs; and the need for variation and evolutionary phase diversity within portfolios of programs.     

Educated in Romance: Women,Achievement, and College Culture (Book)

This article outlines a dialogical approach to understanding how South Asian-American women living in diasporic locations negotiate their multiple and often conflicting cultural identities. We specifically use the concept of voice to articulate the different forms of dialogicality-polyphonization, expropriation, and ventriloquation-that are involved in the acculturation experiences of two 2nd-generation South Asian-American women. In particular, we argue that it is important to think of acculturation of the South Asian-American women as essentially a contested, dynamic, and dialogical process. We demonstrate that such a dialogical process involves a constant moving back and forth between various cultural voices that are connected to various sociocultural contexts and are shaped by issues of race, sexuality, and gender.     

“Wall Street” meets Wagner: Harnessing institutional heterogeneity

If institutional heterogeneity tends overall to reduce survival chances, it may also persist and be harnessed to good use. This article investigates this ambivalence by looking at how institutional heterogeneity emerges, develops, and survives. An inductive study of the “Metropolitan Opera” archives suggests that what enables heterogeneity to survive and to withstand the pressure for homogenization is its inherent potential for “multivocality.” The analysis shows how institutional discrepancies were bridged over through an opportunistic, “multivocal” action pattern, whereby the organization maneuvered between conflicting institutional demands, seeking to minimize dependence on any single constituency or evaluation principle. Maintaining discretionary options is essential in multi-dimensional space, where ambiguity makes optimization impractical. The trade-off in this action pattern includes remarkable adaptability and operational inefficiencies.     

How scientists and engineers use cultural resources to make controversies and selves meaningful

In this essay, I provide an overview of recent sociological studies of science, technology, religion, and spirituality; the ways they contribute to sociological theorizing; and make some recommendations for future research. There are two major themes in these studies. One of them analyzes religious and spiritual discourse as controversy practice, suggesting how religion and spirituality are used as cultural discourses to understand controversy, who the actors are or should be, how to act in a controversy, and how popular discourses inform, and are informed by, science and technology discourses. This theme contributes to theorizing by describing how forms of cultural talk organize understandings of controversies, interactions, and action. The second theme explores scientific and religious identities, and how they are made compatible with each other. This theme points sociological theory toward considering science and religion relations as intertextual relations.     

Capability,freedom and profound disability

It has been suggested that capability theory is well suited to assess egalitarian principles of justice as these apply to people with learning difficulties and disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to explore how extensive that assistance is in respect of people whose difficulties are multiple and profound. I am concerned with one aspect of capability theory in particular; namely, the place accorded to the concept and value of freedom. I argue that capability theory exaggerates the importance of freedom as a basic value for egalitarian evaluation.     

Formative Evaluation of EAPs by Studying Role Perceptions and Organizational Cultures

This article argues that formative evaluation is the most appropriate strategy for the current developmental stage of Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs). Since most EAPs entail multiple interventions and have poorly defined success criteria, the utility of summative evaluation in this field is limited. A method for conducting formative evaluations is outlined. It involves the combination of quantitative and qualitative strategies: using a questionnaire to compare the perceived (actual and desired) role of EAP workers by significant groups in the organization; and, then by studying the organizational culture in which these programs are imbedded through intewicws with key informants. Examples from a study in Israel demonstrate the usefulness of the suggested approach.