Mechanisms of Organizational Commitment: Adding Frames to Greedy Institution Theory

How do organizations that make significant physical, emotional, and intellectual demands foster commitment and loyalty from voluntary participants? Greedy institution theory (Coser 1974 ) answers this question by identifying structural elements that foster participants' undivided commitment to “greedy” groups, those in which participants' involvement interferes with and takes precedence over their involvement in other social spheres. In this article, I argue for the expansion of greedy institution theory to include frames and framing processes as “greedy” organizational tools that work on the microinteractional level. Using data from an ethnographic study of an intensive program that prepares low‐income students of color to attend elite boarding high schools, I show how the organization's “family” frame mobilized participants and encouraged interpretations and interactions that helped students persist in the program and remain committed to the organization. I argue that turning our attention to frames and framing processes will increase our understanding of the tools organizations use on a microinteractional level to build and repair participants' loyalty and commitment.     

Moral Reasoning in Interactional Context: Strategic Uses of Care and Justice Arguments in Mediation Hearings*

Previous studies of moral reasoning have treated moral reasoning as a product of the individual. This article extends the study of moral reasoning by analyzing its use in strategic interaction. I analyze how participants in a naturally occurring situation of conflict use moral arguments strategically and negotiate over the types of arguments that are acceptable. Gilligan's Care and Justice modes of moral reasoning are identified in participants' justifications for positions taken in nine videotaped mediation hearings. I found that participants may use both modes of reasoning during the course of a hearing, and that the type of moral argument used is often a response to the actions of other participants. Strategic uses of moral arguments included shifting mode to challenge or support another's position, bridging a difference in mode between two disputants, and shifting mode to refocus the topic. Because of their institutional and interactional roles in the hearings, mediators play a major role in negotiations over mode of moral reasoning.     

School-Based Intergenerational Programs

Abstract

This paper focuses on experiences learned from being involved in the development of a sustainable school-based intergenerational program that simultaneously incorporated lifespan education into a Grade 2-3-4 curriculum. The program operated in an Australian primary school. A model was developed through this initiative that involved a tripartite collaborative partnership between school, university educators, and the primary school community (in particular its older adults). Older adult volunteers from the school's community were invited to teach students. Program monitoring consisted of contextual and observational analysis ensuring the program was sensitive to school culture and took account of participants' experiences. This monitoring process occurred throughout the planning, development, and implementation stages. Although school educators were always pressed for time, all participants actively contributed to the program. All of the educators saw purpose and worth in having the program. Ongoing support from teachers, the principal, and university personnel plus the provision of additional resources contributed to high student involvement and the overall success of the initiative. Having a school-based coordinator was found to be necessary, yet, for school educators, problematic because of constraints on their time. The findings from this project indicate that the older adult volunteers were enriched by their involvement in the program and able to provide meaningful learning experiences for students. As well, the study suggests that educators would be better prepared for implementing this area of learning opportunities if lifespan education were provided in their undergraduate and post-graduate courses as well as in professional development initiatives.     

The Formation and Manipulation of Collective Identity: A Framework for Analysis

This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformation in collective identity boundaries towards a more inclusive definition of ‘community’. Analysis of participants' accounts before and after involvement in the eviction of a tree suggests the role of conflict with the police in producing an oppositional definition of the collective identity, facilitating links to other groups in resistance to illegitimate authority. Finally, biographical material indicates the implications of transformed identity boundaries for co-action with wider social groups. It is argued that the same intra- and inter-group processes that determine how identity boundaries extend to include a broader community might account for how people come to see themselves as part of a global social movement.     

Meaning and Identity in “Cyberspace”: The Performance of Gender,Class, and Race Online

This article explores issues of gendered, classed and raced identities using examples drawn from my research on a type of online forum known as a mud. I critique previous accounts of research regarding identity online which have suggested that online interactions encourage greater identity fluidity and multiplicity. Drawing on examples from face-to-face interviews and online interaction, I discuss several aspects of identity. I first examine participants' efforts to meet face-to-face and discuss their privileging of offline information regarding identity. Using two examples of “gender-switchers,” I then show how some participants distance themselves from experiences of gendered identities which might otherwise disrupt previously held beliefs about gender. Next I discuss classed and raced identities, which participants express in conversations about income and ethnicity. These discussions point to the interconnections between online and offline interpretations of class and race. Thus, in discussing these examples, I emphasize the need to examine not just online performances, but also the participants' interpretations of such performances. Despite the potentially disruptive effects of online ambiguity, many participants continue to believe in essence and continuity of identity.     

Speaking French in Portugal: An analysis of contested models of emigrant personhood in narratives about return migration and language use

I address how the offspring of Portuguese emigrants in France, Luso‐descendants (LDs), interpret their language practices and identities relative to models of language and personhood from their ‘sending’ society. Specifically, I examine how LDs tell each other narratives about having been identified as an emigrant in Portugal, based on French‐influenced speech. In telling each other these stories, LDs position themselves relative to two models of language and personhood. The first diasporic model interprets LDs' French as willful abandonment of an essential Portuguese identity. The second transnational model interprets LDs' French as the legitimate result of extended residence abroad. I examine how participants explicitly and/or implicitly invoke both models, through the relationship between narrating and narrated participants' language use. I conclude by asking about LDs' awareness of their simultaneous adherence to multiple models of language and identity.     

Voices from the stories untold: Lesbian,gay, bisexual,trans, and queer college students' experiences with campus climate

ABSTRACT

Twelve self-identified college students within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spectrum were interviewed on campus climate perceptions and their experiences of discrimination and isolation at their university. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify themes from the data. This process resulted in the emergence of three themes, identified as discrimination, isolation, and avoidance. The most salient experiences of discrimination and isolation reported by participants came from within LGBTQ organizations or from lesbian or gay male individuals that participants sought out for social support. LGBTQ intra-community discrimination was considered to be particularly damaging to participants' sense of belonging and involvement within the LGBTQ community. Discrimination and isolation from straight-identified organizations or individuals was reported mostly in the context of fraternities/sororities and religious organizations. Furthermore, actions by members of these latter groups caused participants to avoid these groups out of expectations of negative interactions. These results inform empirical research to bring awareness to acts of discrimination that continue to take place within the university toward LGBTQ students. Specific implications for social work practice with LGBTQ college students and future research on diverse LGBTQ populations and resources are discussed.     

FINDING POLITICS IN THE SILLY AND THE SACRED: ANTI-RAPE ACTIVISM ON CAMPUS

Volunteers often describe what they do as nonpolitical. That is, they tend to construct their efforts as simultaneously above and below politics but rarely as explicitly within the realm of politics. Using data from field research at a campus antirape organization, I analyze these aspects of participants' efforts and consider how they are linked to politics. I argue that even actions which appear at first glace to be nonpolitical have political consequences for movements and movement participants. Constructing volunteers' efforts as apolitical, either above or below politics, has the consequence of limiting the transformative potential of volunteer and activist work. I conclude by discussing this and other consequences of avoiding politics.     

Perceptions of Relational Practices in the Workplace

We examined the intersection of gender and work through an investigation of relationally motivated behaviour in the workplace. Using Fletcher's ethnography of women's relational practices in a masculine work environment as a springboard, we examined Fletcher's typology of relational practice, participants' perceptions of employees who perform these forms of behaviour and whether these perceptions were related to gender. Working adults (N = 128) completed online surveys containing workplace scenarios and rated how effective and submissive they perceived the behaviour to be. Overall, participants rated relational practices as ineffective and submissive, regardless of whether a man or a woman had performed them. However, they reported that they would behave the same way as the target and they offered relationally oriented reasons for their choice. Relational practices remain paradoxical in the workplace, both necessary and devalued.     

Indexicality and experience: Exploring the meanings of /aw/‐monophthongization in Pittsburgh1

In this paper we test the hypothesis that monophthongal /aw/ is semiotically associated with local identity in Pittsburgh. We compare results of an experimental task that directly elicits participants' sense of the indexical value of /aw/‐monophthongization with the occurrence of this variant in the same people's speech. People who hear monophthongal /aw/ as an index of localness are unlikely to have this feature in their own speech, and many of the people who do monophthongize /aw/ do not associate this variant with localness. Exploring how four of these participants talk about this feature and its meanings, we show that the indexical meanings of speech features can vary widely within a community, and we illustrate the danger of confusing the meaning assigned by hearers to a linguistic form with the meaning users would assign to it. We suggest that a phenomenological approach, attending to the multiplicity and indeterminacy of indexical relations and to how such relations arise historically and in lived experience, can lead to a more nuanced account of the distribution of social meanings of variant forms than can studies of perception or production alone.     

The Unique Aspects of Short-Term Teaching: How to Teach the “How To's” to the Doers

Effective short-term teaching, as in continuing education, requires of the teacher special competence in small group dynamics and current practice involvement. Students are practitioners who are motivated to learn quickly whatever will be immediately useful to them on their jobs. Objectives must be clearly defined and understood by both teacher and learner and content presented in a specific and well-focused manner. Educators involved in short-term teaching should relate participants' experiences to concepts, facilitate sharing, and involve participants in developing content. Teaching methodology is purposefully selected to stimulate learner engagement. Evaluation of progress toward educational goals is an ongoing process.     

Why do participants in voluntary organizations leave? Exploring the relationship between value congruence and length of stay

Recognizing the importance of values and the specific characteristics of participants and situations in voluntary organizations, we examine how value congruence—the fit or compatibility of values between participants and the organization, or among participants—interacts with personal and situational factors to predict participants' length of stay in their organizations. Introducing the case of a voluntary organization that offers shared housing, we measure value congruence through textual similarity in the self‐introduction documents of 49 participants and the organization's mission statement. This approach differs from the self‐reported measures based on participants' perceptions or recalled interactions used in previous studies. In line with expectation‐disconfirmation theory, participants with the strongest beliefs in organizational values had shorter lengths of stay. The amount of intraorganizational communication also moderated the relationship between value congruence and length of stay. This study provides theoretical and methodological implications for nonprofit management by considering personal and situational factors and evaluating value congruence by textual similarity.     

Exploring Home Sharing for Elders

Research suggests that third party-arranged home sharing (“TPAHS”) enables elders to remain at home in advanced age by connecting elder home owners with suitable live-in “matches.” TPAHS potentially saves elders, their families, and Medicaid budgets millions of a dollars per year in avoided and postponed nursing home costs. In interviews with elder TPAHS participants of one TPAHS program, we found that similarity in values, ability to utilize the TPAHS organization's guidance, and, when relevant, familiarity with their matches' mental health challenges, correlated with said participants' satisfaction with their matches while a lack of these qualities correlated with match dissatisfaction. With these findings in mind, we suggest strategies TPAHS organizations can use to best serve the elderly TPAHS participants who may benefit from intensified match support but may not seek it.     

Social Structural Location and Vocabularies of Participation: Fostering a Collective Identity in Urban Agriculture Activism

Contextualized within the visible inequality that permeates its local food landscape and the broader elitist food culture of California's San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland's urban agriculture movement comprises actors with rich vocabularies of motive for participation. Drawing from 25 in‐depth interviews with movement activists, I uncover a racial and social class homogeneity among participants that contributes to the formation of a collective identity but also limits the movement's outcomes in important ways. This research draws from Bourdieu's theory of class distinction and social movement theories of collective identity formation to contribute to literature on the reproduction of class and racial privilege in alternative food activism. I find that narratives for movement involvement converge on three discourses: possession of education‐derived knowledge to contend with the agroindustrial complex, the conflation of the creation of community through urban food growing with inclusivity, and a missionary‐like desire to educate others as to the benefits of growing their own food. I argue that the movement could benefit from a more diverse repertoire of action generated from a greater integration of racially and economically diverse actors working together to reorient the food system toward local food production alternatives.     

“And then AIDS came along”: A life course turning point and sub-cohorts of older gay men

Research on life course turning points focuses on heterosexuals. Scholars acknowledge that the early AIDS epidemic was a period of crisis for current older gay men, and that this period has shaped and will likely continue to impact their lives. However, few studies have considered the range of early AIDS-related experiences within this group. In this article, I use a life course perspective and in-depth interviews with 40 gay men (60+) in Atlanta to address the following questions: (1) How did current older gay men's experiences vary during the AIDS years? (2) What social factors shaped this variation? I identified three AIDS-related sub-cohorts, which were defined by how participants' social and spatial relationships to urban gay communities influenced their experiences of personal loss, community loss, personal support, and community support between 1981 and 1996. The results suggest that scholars and service providers interested in how early life experiences impact later life should consider the divergent early AIDS-related experiences within the group “older gay men.”     

Downloading plug‐ins for nationalism and cosmopolitanism

A crucial factor in differentiation between existing approaches to nationalism and cosmopolitanism is the positioning of these approaches within a continuum between particularism and universalism, based on their understanding of space and time. However, this also poses a major difficulty in studying practices of nationalism and cosmopolitanism: Reducing these practices to a position within the particularism/universalism continuum establishes different forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism as ‘order of things’, through which any practice is projected as an approximation or a distortion of this ideal ‘order’. Such a projection tells more about the researchers' own theoretical commitments than the participants' practices. This article utilizes some conceptual tools from Actor‐Network Theory in an effort to establish a sketch for an alternative projection to study practices of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which will give the participants an opportunity to perform their own time and space, instead of reducing them to placeholders of an already determined position, a priori identified by researchers.     

Framed Encounters with Conservation and Mining Development: Indigenous Peoples' use of Strategic Framing in Suriname

While studies on the use of framing as a strategy for social movements have proliferated in the past 20 years, little is still known about how and why the frames vary across social movement actors and/or events. This article addresses this knowledge lacuna by comparing and contrasting Indigenous peoples' use of rights and identity frames in response to conservation and development events in Suriname. The variation in frames, and possible reasons for these variations, was compared across actors and events by considering (1) alignments of the global Indigenous rights movement with different movements and organizations over time, and (2) participants' level of involvement with national and global Indigenous rights movements. Evidence of strategic frame variation in this study demonstrated Indigenous peoples' ability to creatively and strategically pursue their interests by asserting their collective identity and rights in encounters with conservation and development projects. They accomplished this through the presentation of frames that called into question the logic and fairness of protected areas, their innate capacity to protect the environment, as well as their rights to land, and economic interests in mining. The greater use of rights frames by participants reflected networks generated with human rights organizations. Frame inconsistencies were apparent across conservation and development events that indicated uneven levels of involvement with Indigenous rights movements, which may yet produce unintended consequences for Indigenous communities. However, this case could also signal new possibilities for Indigenous peoples in terms of greater maneuverability in being able to assert their rights and negotiate their identities in relation to conservation and development, and ultimately to gain more power and autonomy over their own affairs.     

CCRC Here We Come! Reasons for Moving to a Continuing Care Retirement Community

Abstract

To better understand why people move to CCRCs, we conducted qualitative interviews with 20 elders who were planning on moving into one such facility within six months of the interview. In this paper, we describe participants' reasons for moving and their perceptions of the trade-off or anticipated gains and losses inherent in the move. Push factors included desire to plan while still able to do so; optimal timing and being ready for a change; fear of burdening family; burden of home and yard maintenance; own or spouse's failing health; and environmental barriers. Pull factors included attachment to the community; joining friends and neighbors who were moving at the same time; proximity to family; amenities of the CCRC and the prospect of long-term care in the future. One of the unanticipated findings was that far from considering this as their last move, participants looked forward to anew and exciting phase of life.