Marijuana,Gender, and Health-Related Harms: Disentangling Marijuana's Contribution to Risk in a College “Party” Context

Sociological studies suggest that there is social change occurring in the acceptance of lesbians and gay men in the workplace. Compared to prior decades, there are more businesses that welcome, value, and even privilege nonheterosexual sexual identities and relationships. Few studies have analyzed workers' experiences in these types of work contexts. In this article, we explore the experiences of “out” LGB women and men who work for organizations that they consider “gay-friendly.” In-depth interviews demonstrated that, although gay and lesbian workers feel that they are accepted in “gay-friendly” organizations, they nevertheless described differential treatment because of their sexual identity. We discuss evidence of stereotyping, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in their work experiences. Although the movement toward greater acceptance of gays and lesbians in the workplace has made significant progress, the transformation is so far incomplete. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for the study of equality in organizations.     

An Organizational Model of Higher Education Institutions and Faculty Teaching Goals*

The theory of organizations as “open systems” is used to develop hypotheses on the relationship between academic institutions and faculty teaching goals. The effects of three measures of academic organizations–type of control, institutional functions, and institutional affluence–on faculty support for four types of teaching goals are tested with data from a nationally representative sample of 301 academic institutions. Through the use of a path analytic model, it was found that these organizational characteristics directly affect the types of teaching goals faculty members endorse and the level of support for teaching goals in general.     

Problems recruiting volunteers: Nature versus nurture

In a national study of public charities in the United States, we find that some organizations experience little difficulty recruiting volunteers while others report substantial problems. We study which organizations are more likely to report recruitment problems, separating the underlying forces for those problems into two camps. One, which we label “nature,” represents organizational conditions that cannot readily be overcome by a management response. The other, which we label “nurture,” represents organizational conditions that volunteer resource managers and other members of the top management team can directly influence as they seek to make their organization more inviting to prospective volunteers. We find some support for both camps, concluding that managers must be prepared to work with both immutable and malleable conditions when devising strategies for recruiting volunteers whose schedule and skills fit the organization's needs.     

Voluntary Association Membership and Political Participation: an Exploration of the Mobilization Hypothesis*

Survey data from 390 respondents was analyzed to determine the relative effects of organizational involvement, socioeconomic status, and political attitudes on political participation. Two theoretical perspectives were investigated: mobilization theory and selection theory. Both the mobilization and selection perspectives were supported by the data; however, organizational involvement was shown to explain more of the variance in political participation than did social status and political attitudes. The mobilization perspective was further examined to determine if it worked equally well in all types of organizations. We found that the relationship between organizational involvement and political participation was stronger for “instrumental” than for “expressive” groups and for organizations characterized by high, as compared to low, levels of political discussion.     

HOW DO VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS FOSTER PROTEST? THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL INVOLVEMENT ON INDIVIDUAL PROTEST PARTICIPATION

Prior research shows that members of voluntary organizations are more likely to protest than nonmembers. But why, among members, do some protest while others do not? I explore whether organizational involvement—the extent in which members engage in the “life” of their organizations—affects protest. I identify four dimensions of involvement—time and money contributions, participation in activities, psychological attachment, and embeddedness in interpersonal communication networks. Only the first dimension has robust effects on protest, and they are nonlinear: intermediate contributors have the highest protest rates. The three other dimensions substantially increase protest only under specific “involvement profiles.”     

Participation in formal and informal volunteering: Implications for volunteer recruitment

This study examines factors influencing “formal” volunteering (that is, to an organization) and “informal” volunteering (that is, volunteering carried out individually outside of an organizational context) and the relationship between these two activities. We hypothesize that formal and informal volunteering activities are positively interrelated but that they are shaped by different types of personal resources: involvement in social networks increases the likelihood of both types of volunteering, but human capital increases the likelihood of formal volunteering rather than informal. The bivariate probit regression results emanating from the Independent Sector's “Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 2001” survey are generally supportive of the hypotheses. The findings suggest that nonprofit and public organizations that involve volunteers consider the pool of informal volunteers as a fertile ground for recruitment and find ways to better utilize older Americans in formal volunteering. The results also suggest that volunteer recruitment through organizational membership may be an effective strategy.     

Power at a distance: Organizational power across boundaries

Organizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizations that contrasts with Perrow's idea of individuals being “absorbed” by organizations. Despite this hollowing out, there is a persistence of concentrated economic power or “concentration without centralization.” Organizational power in this landscape is increasingly exercised at a distance, not only geographically but also in the sense of moving across organizational boundaries and through technologies of valuation. Three bodies of research exemplify different types of power at a distance. (a) Research on global production networks shows how power travels across geographic and network distances. (b) Research on financialization and its consequences shows how power is mediated by frames and metrics. (c) Emerging research on big data and Artificial Intelligence shows how power is encoded into seemingly neutral technologies and made to seem inevitable. This work helps to update the sociology of organizations and opens up new research questions.     

Accountability in organizational life: Problem or opportunity for nonprofits?

This article reviews the notion of accountability as an intrinsic experience in daily organizational life and contrasts it with the more traditional construct of accountability as an external control or monitoring device. The concept of “felt responsibility” can provide an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. Both research and the author's field experiences in nonprofit settings suggest how nonprofit leaders and managers can use felt responsibility to help individuals act with accountability to themselves and to others. The concept of “conversation for accountability” poses a pragmatic opportunity for nonprofits in particular to turn the current environment of finger pointing and aggressive monitoring into an enabling organizational practice that benefits both nonprofit members and their clients or constituencies.     

Organizations and the structure of culture

Recent work emphasizes how organizations and organizing are suffused by culture. Ignored, however, is the question of how organizations and organizing shape cultural understandings. In this paper, we draw attention to how organizations impact the creation, maintenance, and matching of cultural associations: The “structure of culture.” Cultural associations are distributed understandings of “what goes with what,” diffused via their co-adoption by individual and corporate actors. We argue that the process of associative diffusion is heavily influenced by organizational forms, routines, and operations. While organizations shape culture production, they likewise shape resulting associations between cultural items, actively modifying the structure of culture. We conclude that the role of organizations in shaping the structure and dynamics of culture should be a central topic of study moving forward.     

The evolving role of organizational theory within economic sociology

Organizational theory was one of the roots of the “new” economic sociology. In recent years, a set of complementary research programs have come to the fore that augment our understanding of the social structuring of markets. These include an interest in the role of conventions and commensuration, market devices, the performativity of economics, and the role of morality in the construction of markets. These other interests have come to enrich our conception of the ways in which “the social” structures market activities. While this has decentered some of the emphasis on organizations, there are still active research programs pushing forward new ideas that are focused on organizations, institutions, and networks in economic sociology. We discuss some of the recent work on organizational logics, inter‐ and intra‐organizational networks, and social movements and organization. We note there has also been some hybridity as scholars borrow from each other's toolkits in order to deepen our knowledge of the way the economy works. Organizational theory remains a main theoretical mainstay of economic sociology, but it has now been joined by additional perspectives.     

Organizational sensegiving: Indicators and nonprofit signaling

Resource acquisition depends upon the agreement between an organization's sense of identity and the perceptions of organizational identity held by resource providers. To smooth the flow of resources and buffer against potential issues, organizations seek to manage external perceptions and, to the extent possible, control their organizational identity. Using exploratory factor analysis, we examine the data from 300 GuideStar profiles to develop a sense of how nonprofit organizations “give sense” to resource providers and attempt to manage their organizational identity. We find evidence of three sensegiving strategies. We then use a seemingly unrelated regression model to examine the relationship between these strategies and revenue outcomes, finding evidence that (a) nonprofit organizations demonstrate intentional sensegiving, and (b) different sensegiving approaches are related to different income streams.     

New Institutional Entrepreneurship and a Celebrity CEO: The Role of Institutional Actors in Japan

DiMaggio and Powell [1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48 (2): 147–160] suggest that the trend currently seen in Japanese organizations to develop organizational reforms, and notably downsizing, is a kind international ‘mimetic isomorphism’ based on Western blueprints. These concepts of isomorphism and legitimacy go hand in hand with the increase in the use of Western language. However, this paper shows that these concepts have not entered into Japanese culture without debate, resistance and transformation. The paper also looks at the newly developing concept of ‘institutional work’ [Lawrence, T., and R. Suddaby. 2006. “Institutional Work.” In The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, edited by S. Clegg, T. B. Lawrence and W. R. Nord, 215–254. London: Sage; Lawrence, T. B., R. Suddaby, and B. Leca. 2009. Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Lawrence, T. B., R. Suddaby, and B. Leca. 2011. “Institutional Work: Refocusing Institutional Studies of Organization.” Journal of Management Inquiry 20 (1): 52–58], and argues that this is a useful concept in order to study how PR activities in the Western style have become institutionalized within organizations. The paper also investigates the roles of institutional actors in Japan, by examining the case of Nissan Motor. This industry leader announced drastic downsizing, almost for the first time in Japan, suggesting its contribution to creating new institutional entrepreneurship more widely within Japanese organizations. This research examines the role of top leaders and mass media, who are one of the main institutional actors but are less often considered by neo-institutional theory.     

How organizational characteristics shape gender difference and inequality at work

Why should students and scholars who are interested in gender difference and inequality study organizations? In recent years, as research on organizations has migrated to business schools and become less connected to other subfields of the discipline, the value of organizational sociology has become less evident to many. Yet characteristics of organizations contribute in important ways to producing different experiences and outcomes for women and men, by constraining certain individual actions and enabling or bringing about others. In this essay, we trace the consequences of four categories of organizational characteristics—the formal structure of work, employment practices, informal structure and culture, and organizational networks and fields—for gender inequality in three areas: workplace experiences, work–family conflict, and career outcomes. We close with some brief reflections on future directions for research linking organizations and gender.     

Conditions Facilitating Participatory-Democratic Organizations*

This paper examines “alternative institutions” in a variety of institutional domains as participatory-democratic modes of organizution. Grounded in comparative data, it posits structural conditions, both internal to an organization and in its environment, which support or undermine the achievement of its collectivist-democratic ideals. While the literature on social movement organizations well demonstrates the fragility of democratic systems and their tendency toward oligarchization, goal displacement, and organizational maintenance, this work suggests, in propositional form, conditions which militate against these all-too-common transformation patterns.     

Exploring the Connection Between Organizational Identity and Public Relations Behaviors: How Symmetry Trumps Conservation in Engendering Organizational Identification

One way for organizations to survive in the increasingly complex and competitive world may be to maintain or “conserve” a strong organizational identity, which often is expressed in organizational mission statements. Framed by literature in business communication, university development, and public relations behaviors (formerly public relations models), this article explores how organizations may use public relations behaviors to create, maintain, and strengthen their identities. Findings indicated that, in the effort to engender stakeholder identification with their organizations, public relations practitioners are better served attempting to do so using symmetrical communication, as opposed to conserving communication.     

On Assessing Organizational Priorities: Concept and Method*

Criticisms of the concept “organizational goal”are summarized. An alternative formulation is proposed wherein organizations are viewed as open systems. Through continual interaction incumbents seek to manipulate, and are manipulated by, expectations that they, and persons within various environmental sectors, hold for the organization regarding its mission, authority relations, relative status, affective expressions and sanctioning activity. Organizational missons include sets of social expectations which define appropriate tasks, priorities, territoralities, processing procedures and evaluation criteria. Behavioral observations of police communication officers are used to explore one aspect of mission—organizational priority. Three types of criteria appear critical in understanding priority rankings: 1) feedback intensity, 2) environmental capability to influence recognition and acceptance of feedback, and 3) sequential requirements.     

Organizations and Learning: A Critical Appraisal

Discussions about organizations and learning continue to attract critical interest. Since the emergence in the 1970s of the notion of the “learning organization,” notions of systems’ learning, knowledge management and lifelong learning have progressively entered into the debates. Earlier debates, which drew on education and psychology fields as well as organization and management studies, frequently explored plural objectives for learning occurring within organizational and workplace arenas. They included emphasis on workers’ as well as managerial interests in various forms and objectives of learning. Latter debates on organizational learning appear predominantly shaped by a distinctive economic rationality and management interest. This article, from a sociological vantage point, reviews key thematic issues and critically explores some current questions in regard to organizations and learning. It proposes that a prevailing economic model in accordance with generalized policy objectives evident across the advanced economies for a neo‐liberalized “knowledge‐based economy” and “learning society” poses a particular set of contemporary issues and problems. The current juncture may, however, stimulate further innovation in models of learning organizations that widen agenda and prospects for learning.     

Neue Arbeitswelt,Führung und organisationaler WandelNew Economy,Leadership and Organizational Change.

This article of the journal “Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation.” analyzes and discusses current changes in the working environment with regard to the associated opportunities and risks. Due to the growing dynamism of the markets, digitization, the demographic change and the change of values the importance of flexibility and changeability as central prerequisites for organizational survival is rising constantly. At the same time organizations and employees make higher demands on each other. This shift in the “psychological contract” between employees and organization is discussed in the light of the characteristics of “generation Y”. The article concludes by summarizing consequences of these developments for work in organizations, leadership, change processes and consulting.     

Solidarität

Which socio-psychological terms are connected with the term “solidarity”? Solidarity is understood as a specific attitude and quality of relationships between individuals in groups and organizations and on the level of society. A disturbed balance between “self-enhancement” and “self-transcendence” caused by socio-cultural developments diminishes solidarity. The questions that are considered and discussed, are the following: Under which conditions does solidarity arise, which conditions in groups allow individuals to learn about solidarity, do current organizational structures affect the well tried forms of organized solidarity and how does empowerment conflict with the balance of power in society?     

What Motivates Which Volunteers? Psychographic Heterogeneity Among Volunteers in Australia

Six psychographic segments of volunteers in Australia are constructed on the basis of their volunteering motivations. The resulting segments include “classic volunteers,” whose motivations are threefold: doing something worthwhile; personal satisfaction; and helping others. “Dedicated volunteers” perceive each one of the motives for volunteering as relevant, while “personally involved volunteers” donate time because of someone they know in the organization, most likely their child. “Volunteers for personal satisfaction” and “altruists” primarily wish to help others, and finally, “niche volunteers” typically have fewer and more specific drivers motivating them to donate time, for example, to gain work experience. The segments are externally validated and demonstrate significantly different socio-demographic profiles. Consequently, it seems that motivation-based data-driven market segmentation represents a useful way of gaining insight into heterogeneity amongst volunteers. Such insight can be used by volunteering organizations to more effectively target segments with customized messages.