Bridging Cultures Through Unpaid Labor: US Volunteer Teachers’ Experiences in China’s Yunnan Province

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - International volunteering has become a complex field in the context of globalization. Within the discourses of...     

Whither the virtuous cycle? Past and future trends in black-white inequality in educational attainment

The inequality in the relative years of education between blacks and whites has diminished dramatically over the 20th century. One possible explanation for this convergence is a virtuous cycle of parents passing on educational advantage, from one generation to the next, leading to an overall educational upgrading. In this paper we test the virtuous cycle hypothesis by estimating the three way interaction of cohort, race, and family background. We find that the convergence in educational attainment between blacks and whites over the past century was driven by processes unrelated to family background.     

Girls’ “New Femininity” Refusals and “Good Girl” Recuperations in Soap Talk

The “new femininities” produced in postfeminist media confront girls with complex and challenging subjectivities that reach into the spaces where girls engage in their own productions of self. Feminist scholarship has interrogated and critiqued the “girl” produced in postfeminist popular culture texts, highlighting her internal contradictions and often problematic re/production within the heterosexual matrix. Yet, despite an intensified focus on girls featured in popular culture, the ways that girls themselves make sense of the “girl” in contemporary femininity texts has been relatively neglected. Viewing girls' sense-making of femininity in popular culture texts as crucial in the process of their subjectivity or self-production, in this paper we examine pre-teen girls' negotiations of femininity through their talk about Scarlett, a main teen girl character in a New Zealand soap drama. Our analyses and discussion focus on girls' management of the contradictory and regulatory productions of femininity in the text, in particular the often classed conditions under which girls recuperate the “good girl” discourse to refuse the regulatory femininities inside the heterosexual matrix. We suggest that an absence of empowering discourses outside of postfeminism's sexual empowerment limits girls' resources for critiquing and challenging regulatory femininities, “new” and “traditional.”     

A home from home: the organization as family

The basic unit of human organization has always been the family, although the meaning and composition of “family” has altered over the millennia of human existence. The current view in Western thought is that there is a distinct schism between the family and other social organizations, particularly those organizations associated with work. As a broad distinction, the family is held to be in the private sphere of human interaction and work organizations in the public. Much feminist theory is predicated on this private/public split, and one of the reasons proposed for the social inequality of women is that the private, which is women's “natural” domain, is held to be of lesser social significance.

The paper considers, in a light-hearted (but we hope not lightweight) manner, the metaphor of the organization as family. We provide analogies between the notions of “family” as a private social institution and the work organization, drawing no conclusions, but providing some small insights into affinities and congruences which blur the private/public distinction. If we assert anything at all, it is this: because the work organization is family, we are able to slip from one to the other each day with the minimum of psychic stress.

“Travail, Famille, patrie” (the slogan of the Vichy régime)     

On square ordinal contingency tables: a comparison of social class and income mobility for the same individuals

Summary.  Square contingency tables with matching ordinal rows and columns arise in particular as empirical transition matrices and the paper considers these in the context of social class and income mobility tables. Such tables relate the socio-economic position of parents to the socio-economic position of their child in adulthood. The level of association between parental and child socio-economic position is taken as a measure of mobility. Several approaches to analysis are described and illustrated by UK data in which interest focuses on comparisons of social class and income mobility tables that are derived from the same individuals. Account is taken of the use of the same individuals in the two tables. Additionally comparisons over time are considered.     

A multilevel approach to building and leading learning organizations

A multilevel model is offered proposing that organizational learning is an interdependent system where effective leaders enact intervention strategies at the individual (micro), network (meso), and systems (macro) levels. We suggest that leaders approach organizational learning by setting the conditions and structure for learning to occur, while limiting direct interference in the actual creative processes. First, leaders may increase the level of developmental readiness of individual followers, thereby increasing their motivation and ability to approach learning experiences and adapt their mental models. These individuals then serve as catalysts of learning within and between social networks. Second, leaders may promote the diffusion of knowledge between these knowledge catalysts within and across social networks through influencing both the structure and functioning of knowledge networks. Finally, leaders may target actions at the systems level to improve the diffusion to, and institutionalization of, knowledge to the larger organization.     

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Abstract

We have one report this issue which is, not surprisingly, on the topic of electronic serials. This institute, which reached full capacity, covered both theoretical and practical considerations for dealing with the influx of electronic serials. Many of us are barely coping with the need to plan and implement access to the vast amount of electronic information publishers have now mounted. We are faced with many new decisions about cataloging, vendor selection, license agreements, and consortial arrangements. The institute was planned as a basic course on electronic serials and addressed many of these topics froma wide range of viewpoints. Due to the popularity and success of this institute it will be repeated in April, 1998, in St. Louis.