The case study evaluation: A means for managing organizational and political tensions

This study of evaluation utilization identified organizational, political, and practical arrangements which facilitated wide use of The Interim Report Evaluation in policy making for California's Early Childhood Education program. In a program fraught by tensions, where evaluations had been political tools, this evaluation was special. The research used a field study approach. Analysis was guided by literature on organizations, policymaking, and evaluation utilization. It identified techniques for maintaining political support, marshalling organizational resources, and designing and disseminating an evaluation that used an ethnographic approach and that was directly applied to policy deliberations. Such techniques have significance when evaluators and researchers need to convince policymakers of their worth. This case study adds to knowledge of the research/policy intersect, on ethnographic evaluation, and on state education policymaking.     

The ‘greening’ of organizational change: A case study

There are many emerging corporate strategies designed to make large, complex business enterprises more responsive to environmental concerns. One major corporate innovation that has a direct environmental impact is the increased use of telework options for employees. These programmes significantly reduce the amount of employee travel, thereby reducing air pollution. However, adoption of telework programmes requires a change in organizational management strategies. The prevailing attitude of “If I can't see them, how do I know they are working” must be changed. This attitudinal change, coupled with the structural move towards the ‘virtual corporation’ can be managed using existing organizational development strategies and tactics. The paper reports the results of several field studies in California which examined the phenomenon of telework. The studies consistently report increases in worker productivity of 16 per cent and a significant reduction of personal automobile travel of between 20–40 per cent while engaged in telework. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for a management strategy for managing this change and highlights areas for future research.     

Corporation-bashing in documentary film: A case study of news media coverage organizational response

This case study compares/contrasts news coverage of two crisis communication responses – corrective action and defiance/attacking-the-accuser – by examining print news coverage of McDonald's Corporation and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. in conjunction with documentaries Super Size Me (2004) and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005). Discussed are crisis communication dynamics associated with this new brand of documentary filmmaking and journalism's role in the debates.     

Assessing organizational capacity for diffusion: A school-based social network analysis case study

The purposeful design of social networks is increasingly recognized as a fundamental organizational improvement strategy. In the PK-12 education sector, school-based teacher collaboration is the primary vehicle through which educators are able to gain access to essential social capital, and through which leaders promulgate diffusion of innovation and continuous organizational learning. In partnership with school administrators, the authors undertook an evaluation to examine the size, structure, and composition of school-based networks. Social network analysis (SNA) was used to measure and visualize connections (or lack thereof) of ties between teams and between educators. Isolate and disconnected network actors were revealed through visual inspection of the sociograms. Administrators used findings to reconfigure team membership to enhance teacher ability to give and receive support and collaboratively problem-solve, and to ensure greater capacity for diffusion of instructional innovation and organizational learning. This paper contributes to the field’s understanding of how evaluators and organizational leaders can use SNA to measure, visualize, and more purposefully design effective patterns of connection between people through which professional knowledge, support, and innovation will travel.     

The case for an inhabited institutionalism in organizational research: interaction,coupling, and change reconsidered

This paper makes the case for an inhabited institutionalism by pondering questions that continue to vex institutional theory: How can we account for local activity, agency, and change without reverting to a focus on individual actors—the very kinds of actors that institutional theory was designed to critique? How is change possible in an institutional context that constructs interests and sets the very conditions for such action? Efforts to deal with these questions by inserting various forms of individual, purposive actors into institutional frameworks have created inconsistencies that threaten the overall coherence of institutional theory and move it farther from its sociological roots. To provide alternative answers, we turn to the growing line of work on “inhabited” institutions. Our exegesis of this literature has two goals. The first goal is to shift focus away from individuals and nested imagery and towards social interaction and coupling configurations. This move opens new avenues for research and helps to identify the spaces—both conceptual and empirical—and the supra-individual processes that facilitate change. This shift has important theoretical implications: incorporating social interaction alters institutional theory, and our second goal is to specify an analytic framework for this new research, an inhabited institutionalism. Inhabited institutionalism is a meso-approach for examining the recursive relationships among institutions, interactions, and organizations. It provides novel and sociologically consistent means for dealing with issues of agency and change, and a new agenda for research that can reinvigorate and reunite organizational sociology and institutional theory.

     

Youth and political participation: case in Turkey

The aim of this research is to explore views about, and the extent of, political participation amongst students in a Department of Social Work. The sample was composed of 127 fourth and sixth-term students. One of the most striking outcomes of the research is that young peoples' political participation remains low, despite widespread dissatisfaction with political and economic systems. The results of this study and analysis are based on sociocultural and historic developments specific to Turkey, specifically the culture of fear fostered in Turkey following the military coup d'état of 1980, and the influence this had in the intergenerational conveyance of the notion that the ‘father government’ can protect the public without the need for active political participation, which is still prevalent amongst the study participants.     

Information happenings: Performing reflexive organizational research 1

This article is an experiment in organizational narration. The adoption of a novel literary form enables the author to address certain contemporary themes in the reflexive presentation and reporting of organizational research. In pursuit of an alternative mode of expression, the notion of the ‘Happening’ is found to be a helpful rhetorical device. ‘Happenings’ serve as a vehicle for the theatrical reframing of important epistemological issues concerning the nature of ‘organization’, ‘research’ and ‘reporting’. This textual strategy is not, however, an end in itself. In substantive terms, it is used to explore and give voice to key thematic elements of the author's ethnographic study of a high technology project. The work of literary critic Kenneth Burke and his method of Dramatism, reflexively reframed, is employed to examine the social motives which inform ‘computer identity’, ‘information Utopias’ and ‘technicism’.     

BSE as an organizational construction: a case study on the globalization of risk

This article examines the BSE problem as an example of the 'globalization of risk'. In order to determine whether the 'globalization of risk' is a social construction depending on the context, the paper emphasizes the particular role of organizations. It makes an empirical comparison of the BSE-related risk-constructions of five business associations in the German meat industry sector. The results show that the associations construct the risk in close relation to their horizons of globalization, thereby reflecting provision problems, which the companies they are representing face. While the main organizational domains in the sector tried to cope with the risk problem by different means of local market 'closure', one association, founded in reaction to the BSE problem, took over a 'reflexive' role with regard to the emerging risk communication on BSE in Germany.     

Navigating the ethical maze in disability research: ethical contestations in an African context

Despite changes in how disability is viewed, ethical requirements for disability research have hardly changed. Some ethical clearance procedures, processes and practices still consider persons with disabilities as not able, creating unease among researchers and research participants with disabilities themselves. This paper considers five ethical contestations arising from research in the area of disability in an African context: positionality, vulnerability, signed consent, anonymity, and research committee composition. We argue that ethical requirements in practice are still largely based on a medical model of disability and propose that culturally sensitive social and human rights models should influence disability research ethics.     

Analysis of organizational conditions for risk management: the case study of a petrochemical site

This paper presents an ergonomic intervention in the petrochemical sector. The scheduled shutdown of one of the gas production sites has led the management to reduce the number of personnel on site, and then to get new recruits and experienced technicians from other sites as the policy for leaving personnel had not been properly planned, resulting in understaffing on site. Workers with seniority on the site, and who are also the most experienced do not accept the way newcomers are induced on site, whereas the management accuses them of resisting change. The intervention consisted in reconnecting local and corporate management through making the work activity visible and linking two sets of data that they held separately. Different types of analyses were made, work demography, decision making processes and tools used by the management, analysis of the building of career and work logics. Those different levels of analysis are gathered in macro-ergonomics, while showing the possible combinations between top down and bottom up approaches. The intervention resulted in concrete changes: HR simulation tool, training organisation, feedback.     

The ethics of deception in social research: A case study

Using data from a study on courtship through personal advertisements, I argue that Kai Erikson's classic case against disguised observation is flawed. Certain kinds of deception are necessary to gather certain data in certain settings. I placed bogus ads in a personal column to obtain and analyze responses. The data would have remained inaccessible—indeed, many of the responses would not have existed in the first place—without some measure of deception. While deception was used, no risk whatsoever was posed to respondents. I further argue that several of Erikson's criteria of risk do not separate ethical from empirical questions; informants use very different criteria in evaluating the risk of harm to them posed by social research that sociologists use. The question of exploitation is more complex, since it has to be weighed against how much of an effort my respondents made and hence, what it is exactly that I took from them. A “panel of judges” decided that most of my male (but not my female) respondents would not have gotten dates with my hypothetical ad placers, and that the research method I used was not especially unethical.     

Civil Society Partnerships: Power Imbalance and Mutual Dependence in NGO Partnerships

This study examines the distinction between power imbalance and mutual dependence to better understand how NGOs manage resource dependencies in their relationships with civil society partners. The NGO leaders we interviewed emphasized mutual dependence in the relationships they developed with other NGOs regarding access to financial and information resources. In contrast, discourse about their relationships with IGOs focused on the acquisition of legitimacy and access, and was dominated by power imbalance. NGOs were largely accepting of both forms of dependence in pursuit of the community’s shared goals and for the greater good of constituents. Our finding that NGOs refrain from terminating suboptimal relationships also reflects the extent to which mutual dependence governs NGOs partnering strategies.     

Consequences of organizational commitment in abolished company sports team - a case study in Japan

The purpose of this study was to show that how the abolishment of company sports team influenced the organizational commitment in employees. In this study, Three-Component Model of Organizational Commitment (Meyer and Allen, 1997) was tested with 16 employees (10 males, 6 females) of T Company in NAGANO prefecture. The average age of the participants was 44, 50 years (SD=±0.85). And from 16 employees, 3 male employees were measured on organizational commitment with interview test. According to the analysis, the relation between organizational commitment in employees and the abolishment of company sports team was not positive significant correlation. Furthermore, results of interview test did not show the relation between organizational commitment in employees and the abolishment of company sports team. However, results of interview test showed the relation with organizational commitment of players in T Company sports team. Consequently, the goal to possess a sports team in T Company was not to boost organizational commitment in employees. In addition, it is necessary to reconsider the correlation among employees engaged in T Company in the future.     

Advancing nonprofit organizational effectiveness research and theory: Nine theses

Drawing on the general literature on organizational effectiveness, the specialized literature on nonprofit organizational effectiveness, and recent research in the field, this article advances nine theses, or conclusions, about the effectiveness of public benefit charitable, nonprofit organizations (NPOs). NPO effectiveness is (1) always comparative, (2) multidimensional, (3) related to board effectiveness (but how is not clear), (4) related to the use of correct management practices but not in any simple “best practices” way, and (5) a social construction. Furthermore, (6) it is unlikely that there are any universally applicable best practices that can be prescribed for all NPO boards and management, (7) organizational responsiveness is a useful organizational‐level effectiveness measure, (8) distinguishing among types of NPOs is important and useful, and (9) level of analysis makes a difference in researching and understanding effectiveness. The article concludes by considering implications for organizational practice, boards and governance practices, program evaluation, including program outcomes assessment, and capacity building and capacity builders.     

Media use and transnational political and civic participation: a case study of Mexicans in the USA

Although communication is largely understood as a prerequisite for transnational activity, little research explores exactly how transnational communities use media and what the implications of media use are for transnational civic and political participation. Research from communication studies suggests that media can affect civic and political participation in various, sometimes contradictory, ways. In an effort to merge literature from transnational and communication studies, in this study I focus on the case of Mexicans in the USA, offering secondary analyses of two datasets concerning their communication habits and civic and political participation in Mexico. Results suggest differential effects on participation based on preferences for certain media and pre‐existing attitudes.     

The political transnationalism of Ecuadorians in Barcelona,Madrid and Milan: the role of individual resources,organizational engagement and the political context

In this article, we examine the transnational political engagement of Ecuadorians in three European cities – Barcelona, Madrid and Milan. Drawing on previous studies that emphasize the role of organizational and institutional resources for political mobilization (as well as those that take into consideration respondents’ resources and the migration process), we analyse the results of a survey conducted between 2006 and 2008 on approximately 300 Ecuadorian individuals in each of these three cities. We examine two different dimensions of Ecuadorian political transnationalism at the individual level, namely attitudinal and participatory. Contrary to previous findings, our results show that recently arrived Ecuadorians and those with less stable household conditions are more involved in transnational politics. Associational involvement shows multiple effects. Engagement in Ecuadorian associations fosters political interest in and information about Ecuador, whereas involvement in any organization promotes electoral transnational politics. The political context is only relevant when accounting for participation in Ecuadorian elections.     

The dual network structure of organizational problem solving: A case study on open source software development

We reconstruct the dual network structure generated by the association between 72 contributors and 737 software bugs engaged during a full development cycle of the free/open source software project Epiphany. Estimates of structural parameters of Exponential Random Graph Models for two-mode networks reveal the structural logics shaping activities of collaborative problem solving. After controlling for contributor-specific and software bug-specific characteristics, we find that contributors (“problem solvers”) tend to distribute their activity over multiple software bugs. At the same time, however, we find that software bugs (“problems”) tend not to share multiple contributors. This dual tendency toward de-specialization and exclusivity is sustained by specific local network dependencies revealed by our analysis which also suggests possible organizational mechanisms that may be underlying the puzzling macro-structural regularities frequently observed, but rarely explained, in the production of open source software. By combining these mechanisms with the influence of contributors characterized by different levels of involvement in the project, we provide micro-level evidence of structural interdependence between “core” and “peripheral” members identified exclusively on the basis of their individual level of contribution to the project.     

Network stability in organizational flux: The case of in-house management consulting

This article explores the effects of organizational flux on the statics of interpersonal knowledge exchange structures. In our empirical case, organizational flux refers to high rates of personnel turnover, temporary project work, constant recombination of team memberships, and short-term collaboration. Network statics refers to the balance between forces composing and decomposing a network. Set in continuously changing organizational compositions of an in-house management-consulting unit, our study offers insights into the relationship between organizational characteristics and informal networks between experts. Against conventional intuition, we find a dense and stable structure of knowledge exchange. Furthermore, we elaborate on the two concepts of organizational flux and network statics, by comparing the observed structures with theoretical (random graphs) and empirical references (other empirical cases), and by using ERG models to account for different factors of organization, social balance, and individual attributes.     

Litigation and political transformation: the case of Russia

This article analyzes some recent developments in the system of public law in the Russian Federation, focusing in particular on changing patterns of litigation and increases in use of administrative law, linked to new acts of legislation. It argues that discussion of the Russian case provides a sociological perspective in which we can understand the importance of legal actions in hybrid polities. It explains that litigation in Russia, even where it may have counter-systemic outcomes, is partly incentivized by the government, as promotion of access to law is seen as a means to formalize interactions between citizens and government and so to extend the societal penetration of the political system more generally. Litigation thus forms a mode of practice that, dialectically, possesses both inner- and counter-systemic status. In addition, the article argues that the case of Russia allows us to comprehend litigation as an element in processes of nation building and social integration more widely, and Russia illuminates the systemic significance of litigation in other societies.