BRAC: Anatomy of a “poverty enterprise”

Management of the poverty alleviation process has created a new form of poverty enterprise. This enterprise provides poverty‐production‐market linkages, and in the process, it combines three features: a nonprofit nongovernmental organization, a for‐profit nongovernmental organization that has established an internal market, and a profit‐making industrial and business concern. This article explains how BRAC (Building Resources Across Community) in Bangladesh has used poverty to transform itself from a tiny relief distribution organization into the world's largest poverty enterprise. This enterprise is characterized by contradictions between its public claims and actual practices.     

Trust, repute and the role of non-profit enterprise

This article examines the trust hypothesis: the claim that asymmetric information can explain the existence of non-profit enterprise in certain markets. We argue that this hypothesis, in order to be viable, has to meet three challenges: ‘reputational ubiquity’, ‘incentive compatibility’ and ‘adulteration’. Drawing on modern agency theory, we conclude that the trust hypothesis stands on shaky ground. It can be sustained only under particular conditions that have been neither carefully described in theory nor subject to empirical assessment. The available evidence, patchy and inadequate as it is, seems to suggests that there are some ownership-related differences in aspects of organisational performance connected with asymmetric information. However, there is little evidence that this relates to trustper se or provides a rationale for the existence of non-profit ownership in these industries. We conclude with a plea for substantial research on consumer expectations and provider motivations. Visiting Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.     

Decision-making practices in commercial enterprises: A cybernetic intervention into a business model

Abstract

This article presents a decision-making framework and a technology that senior managers can use to steer the enterprise within a volatile and competitive commercial environment. The main aim of introducing such a technology would be to maximize the enterprise's value vector by ensuring that business objectives are consistently unfolded throughout the enterprise and used by all managers to make decisions that are consistent with the purpose and objective of the organization. The article illustrates how a cybernetic intervention into the business model of a large organization can be used to achieve this.     

Conflict,strategic management,and public relations

Public relations will be a viable contributor to strategic management if it has knowledge and experience in the mixed motive model of public relations to include contention, avoidance, compromise, accommodation, cooperation, being unconditionally constructive, win/win or no deal, principled, and mediated.Secondly, membership in top management also depends on the experience and ability of the practitioner to do strategic planning and solve problems for the organization. This assertion incorporates the long-term accumulation of expertise and a relationship with the dominant coalition built on sound judgment and trust.     

Volunteers work for lesbian,gay, bisexual,transgender, and queer rights: Motivations at a Rochester social justice organization

The reasons volunteers contribute to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social justice organizations are multifaceted and need further exploration. This pilot study (N = 35) sought to understand volunteer motivations at a Rochester, New York social justice organization fighting for LGBTQ rights. Understanding motivations for volunteerism and volunteers' perceptions about the relative advantages and obstacles of current volunteer experiences at their agency were the primary goals of the study. The study found that these volunteers are motivated primarily by their personal values, mission of the organization, and desire to develop and maintain social relationships with the LGBTQ community. Implications for volunteer resource management and research are explored.     

Social explanation and socialization: on Bourdieu and the structure, disposition, practice scheme

The standard narrative of the sociology of education accounts for the perpetuation of relative differentials in class access to education by a structure‐disposition‐practice scheme in which the central explanatory weight is carried by properties of socialized agents. The dominant scheme of this kind is now that inspired by Bourdieu. In this context, it is, therefore, appropriate to interrogate the competence of socialization in sociological explanations of social events and processes. The argument adopts a position of scientific and critical realism, and it is suggested that a realist sociology might find in Bourdieu's approach, notwithstanding specific theoretical and conceptual weaknesses, a framework strong enough to sustain the multilevel explanations of inequality/difference necessary in the sociology of education.     

Young people and the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of ‘enterprise’: stories from a ‘Rust Belt’ city

ABSTRACT

In the ‘Rust Belt’ city of Geelong in Victoria, Australia, discourses of young people’s enterprise and innovation provide a counter-narrative to the prevailing material and symbolic consequences of industrial decline, job losses, and the growing insecurity of employment and income. GT Magazine is a weekly, large circulation magazine in Geelong with a significant focus on the activities and aspirations of enterprising young people. In this paper, we examine, by utilising techniques of content analysis and discourse analysis, the particular ways in which young people’s innovation and enterprise are framed and enacted in GT Magazine. Our analysis reveals that ‘youth’ and ‘enterprise’ are, in GT Magazine, given an embodied form that is powerfully marked by aestheticised, normalised enactments of gender, class and race. In doing this work, we make productive contributions to three key themes in contemporary youth studies: new work orders and the youthful self as enterprise; the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of affective labour in these new work orders; and the emerging spatial turn to examine young people's embodied, place-based experiences of employment and enterprise. We seek to make problematic the sense that solutions to multiple disruptions and crises in capitalism and the environment are to be found in young people’s enterprise. Particularly when that enterprise is given form in ways that are aestheticised, gendered, classed, individualised and responsibilised.     

Time–space intensification: Karl Polanyi, the double movement, and global informational capitalism

This article advances the concept of “time–space intensification” as an alternative to existing notions of time–space distanciation, compression and embedding that attempt to capture the restructuring of time and space in contemporary advanced capitalism. This concept suggests time and space are intensified in the contemporary period – the social experience of time and space becomes more explicit and more crucial to socio-economic actors’ lives, time and space are mobilized more explicitly in individual and corporate action, and the institutionalization of time and space becomes more politicized. Drawing on Polanyi’s concepts of fictitious commodities and the double movement, and developing them through an analysis of work organization and economic development in the Irish software industry, the article argues that the concept of time–space intensification can add significantly to our understanding of key features of the restructuring of the temporal and spatial basis of economic development and work organization.     

Gender,Work and Organization: A gender–work–organization analysis

This article, celebrating 25 year of Gender, Work and Organization, reflects on some of the events that led to establishing the journal. It proceeds to consider the three central elements that have inspired the journal ‐ gender, work and organization ‐ and how they have become more problematic, perhaps much more problematic, over the lifetime of the journal. Indeed, paradoxically, these shift have occurred at the same time as GWO and the field of which it is part have become more established. Just as the field of gender and organizations has become more legitimate area of study, the concept of ‘gender’ has become more complex, more contested, less certain. This also applies to the notion of ‘organization’, perhaps less so to ‘work’. The latter part of the article considers what happens when one views the GWO itself in terms of gender‐work‐organization analysis, and how such questions may develop in the future.     

The legitimacy of social enterprise

Social enterprise has emerged as a businesslike contrast to the traditional nonprofit organization. This article develops an explanatory direction for social enterprise based on institutional perspectives rather than more traditional rational economic concepts. Through Suchman's typology of legitimacy (1995), the article argues that the origin and evolution of social enterprise is put into dramatically different focus, particularly through the concept of moral legitimacy. Moral legitimacy not only connects the overall emergence of social enterprise with neoconservative, pro‐business, and promarket political and ideological values that have become central in many nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development but also explains the observation that social enterprise is being more frequently understood and practiced in more narrow commercial and revenue‐generation terms.     

Asian Women,Job Training and the Social Organization of Immigrant Labor Markets

This paper examines the entry of Asian immigrant women into a gendered labor market via government-funded job training programs. The focus is on the intake processing of clients into an employment training program operated by a community based organization. The study reveals that women's family responsibilities and the cultural capital they bring function to screen them into or out of training programs and ultimately shape their location in the workforce. The study thus draws attention to how race, class, and gender enter into the organization of Asian immigrant women into the labor market. This investigation is based in institutional ethnography (Smith 1987), a research strategy which displays how activities in a particular setting are coordinated with more extended forms of social organization. The study shows that the overriding concern with successful placement in a job as mandated by government regulations is a critical factor in selecting the women for these programs.     

Employee communication,job engagement,and organizational commitment: A study of members of the Millennial Generation

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between job engagement and two key components of employee-organization relationships (EOR). Findings from a survey of members of the Millennial Generation (N = 539) in the United States indicate that job engagement mediates the relationship between employee communication and organizational commitment. It is concluded that when employees are engaged in their work, their commitment to the organization is strengthened and the likelihood of them leaving the organization decreases. Furthermore, an argument is made in light of the study’s findings that engagement and commitment work in concert to strengthen EORs overall. To foster engagement, organizations should remove obstacles to internal information flow and provide ongoing feedback to employees about individual and organizational issues.     

Professionalism, educated labour and the state: hospital medicine and the new managerialism

This article examines the degree to which doctors, as members of an autonomous profession, function as organic intellectuals within capitalist society (Abercrombie and Urry, 1983) and, more generally, the complex and ambivalent relations that sustain their role within a ‘service class'. It is in this context that the organization of medical care and its delivery in Britain will be addressed. In particular, the current and intended changes in the organization and control of hospital medicine within the NHS, notably the issues of medical audit, clinical budgeting and the role of the ‘internal market’.     

Telling stories,reflecting, learning: hannah arendt and organization

This article is written in recognition of the need for dialogue between organization theory and other disciplines and languages. It uses some concepts coined by Hannah Arendt to develop reflection concerning organizational dynamics. Arendt's category of action, as different from both labour and work, makes possible to define, in an original way, the political dimension of organizational action. The category of thought, again, as defined by Arendt, allows us to highlight the production of meaning which takes place in organizations. With the help of those two concepts, the author develops a notion of organizational learning as a process where the political and cognitive dimensions of organizational action are strongly interrelated.     

Doing good while doing business: Using financial viability to enhance employability for the disadvantaged

The employment social enterprise (ESE) model can provide an opportunity to create a financially viable business that helps individuals with employment barriers become integrated into the labor force. This research studied eight ESEs. Findings suggest that by applying private‐sector business principles to a workforce development programs, social enterprises can provide participants with meaningful and valuable work experience, while offsetting program costs. Analysis identified four promising practices that social entrepreneurs should adopt when setting up a new enterprise. Enterprises should (a) provide soft‐skill training and social services to participants; (b) operate at a size that allows for economies of scale in production and the provision of support services; (c) have few occupational skill requirements; and (d) hire supervisors with both industry knowledge and the capacity to support individuals with employment barriers.     

Formalization,collectivization, and the demand for union services

Formalized collective bargaining rather than individual employer-employee negotiation is the fundamental characteristic of a unionized labor market. Formalization involves the substitution of rules for employer discretion. Collectivization substitutes simultaneous decision making on behalf of all workers in a unit for a set of individual employee decisions. Formalization and collectivization are present in nonunion as well as union labor markets and their extent varies within as well as between these two sectors. In particular, individuals may negotiate where they belong in a union environment, and the presence of rules invites negotiation over their interpretation. Nevertheless, because formalization and collectivization are obvious concomitants of trade union organization, their costs to both employers and employees should explain the probability of union organization, as well as the incidence of such antecedents of the modern trade union as the Italian padrone who acted as foreman, pay-master, and employment agency for newly-arrived immigrants to the United States; and the Indianjamdar, a construction industry recruiter-foreman. Our occasional observations of union-induced costreductions may appear to counter the implicit assumption in much of the trade union literature that unions always induce suboptimal combinations of factor inputs and factor payments (nonunion firms could choose union-induced parameters on their own and do not). Because these cost reductions may be accompanied by increased costs imposed by unions, however, the cost reductions discussed below imply nothing about overall effects of unions on employers or employees. I wish to thank John Pencavel for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. For further analysis of these points, see Flanders (1968). See Epstein and Monat (1973) for a discussion of the services provided by labor contractors.     

Demografischer Wandel,Alterung und Arbeitsmarkt in Deutschland

Debates about the consequences of demographic change for the labor market relate to two distinct levels; both will be addressed in this chapter. First, demographic ageing changes the composition of the workforce. Theories about how labor markets work lead to the conclusion that demographic changes do not affect immediately supply and demand of labor and the structure of the workforce. Rather, consequences of demographic changes are moderated by labor market institutions.Second, demographic ageing has consequences for the organization of work. Permanent topics of sociological research are consequences of ageing workforces in the firm for productivity and innovation, consequences of ageing workforces for human resource policies of firms, extent of and coping with the problem of limited durations to perform strenuous work tasks, and consequences of ageing workforces for industrial relations. One central finding is that firms meet various challenges in their external and internal environments, among them being ageing workforces only one. Moreover, as strategic actors, different firms can choose different strategies even in similar environments. Consequences of demographic changes for work organization on enterprise level are, therefore, far from deterministic.     

Does Opening Adoption Records Have an Adverse Social Impact? Some Lessons from the U.S., Great Britain,and Australia, 1953–2007

This study provides an international history of the adoption reform movement in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia from 1953 to 2007. It empirically tests how safe birth parents and adopted adults are in countries that have opened their adoption records, usually birth registration records, using contact preference forms and contact vetoes. The results of this investigation reveal that a vast gap exists between the fear by birth parents and adopted adults that their privacy will be invaded and their family disrupted and the reality that few or no offenses are committed. It follows that opening adoption records with contact preference forms or contact vetoes provides a balanced adoption disclosure system and is a viable alternative to the sealed adoption policies currently used in the vast majority of American states and Canadian provinces.     

Governance and Enterprise Restructuring: The Case of Macedonia

This paper is a case study of the Republic of Macedonia (Southeast Europe), which focuses on examining governance and enterprise restructuring. Governance and enterprise restructuring is already defined indicator in EBRD’s studies and transition reports, measuring the effective corporate governance and corporate control exercised through domestic financial institutions and markets, fostering market-driven restructuring. As of the beginning of the transition process, governance and enterprise restructuring remains in the center, as essential pillar, that moves forward the society towards developed market economy. The data used in this article are analyzed with an econometric regression model, which as employed in this study examines the interrelationships between governance and enterprise restructuring and set of policies that influence the governance patterns.