Empowerment or Limitation? A Critical Exploration of American State Women-Owned Business Programs

Public Organization Review - Governments have a history of intervention in the market to aid small, minority, and women-owned businesses. This research explores women-owned business development...     

Theme-Based Book Review: Competence

Public Organization Review - This theme-based book review considers three recent titles related to competence, from practitioner and scholarly perspectives: Administrative Competence: Reimagining...     

Peer relationships during late childhood in internationally adopted and institutionalized children

The aim of this study was to analyse the interpersonal relationships in the school context of children living in different care settings (adoptive families, residential care centres, birth families). Participants were 76 children between eight and fourteen years of age (M = 10.78, SD = 1.38), belonging to one of three groups: international adoptees, children living in residential care in Spanish institutions, and a comparison sample of Spanish children living with their birth families with no connection with child protection. Sociometric information was collected in the classroom of each child during school hours. Internationally adopted children from Russia showed considerable difficulties in their relationships with peers; they were more likely to be rejected and their peers described them as less prosocial and somewhat more aggressive. With a better sociometric position than the adoptees, children in residential care were rated by their peers as more aggressive and less prosocial than the normative population. Coordination and integrated work between the family, protection centres, schools, and other social services should be a strategic priority in the promotion of healthy social development in these groups of children.     

Change agency as performance and embeddedness: Exploring the possibilities and limits of Butler and Bourdieu

In this paper, we explore the dual role of human agency in maintaining the status quo and generating change. Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu offer differing conceptions of change agency in relation to organization and transformation of gender relations. Focusing on how those approaches would work, we analyse an empirical case study on a particular change process: getting women the right to vote in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell. We contribute to the current use of Butler's and Bourdieu's theories in organization studies in three main ways. First, we explore stability and change from the lenses of these two scholars. Second, we illustrate how change agency looks from these two distinct perspectives. Finally, we offer an empirical analysis that identifies the main elements of change agency in the two frameworks and discuss the possibilities and limitations of bringing these two approaches together to better understand change agency.     

Paradoxes of risk management: Social responsibility and self-exclusion in Dutch casinos

This article deals with the basic contradictions of risk management and responsibility regarding problem gambling and self-exclusions, and draws special attention to the role knowledge production and science play in the construction and evaluation of gambling risks. This remarkable case of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is analyzed from a risk-governance perspective. It is grounded on a case study of the CSR practice of the Dutch casino monopoly, in particular the problem gambling mitigation and self-exclusion program of this corporation. The intentions and operations of this ‘responsible gambling’ practice constitute new business values and working norms. At the same time empirical evaluations of the self-exclusion program reveal that despite all the efforts put in the risk-management strategies, a significant part of the problem cannot be addressed at all. This points toward a major paradox of risk management. Overall the article highlights the ambiguous nature of risk management and responsible gambling.     

Toward a Theory of Law in Society

Abstract

Interest group conflict, power, and values have been prominent in recent attempts to analyze law as social control. The role of fact beliefs in creating, interpreting and administering legal norms has been relatively neglected, especially in the few efforts toward theories of law in society. Both fact beliefs and value beliefs are here related to legal norms, and also to group interests, power and conflict. Law is conceived of as the formal social control of the political state, a definition that does not at all require acceptance of Austin's view of law as commands of the sovereign. The forced choice between power elite and structural-functional theories is avoided, since law operates in a wide variety of power situations. The subjective meanings of interest group actions directed toward legal norms are seen as consisting of value and fact beliefs, an approach of particular promise in analyzing law and social change.     

Value Accentuation or Convergence: Analysis of the Pattern and Process of College Student Change

Abstract

College student value change was analyzed for individual and group value accentuation or convergence among a longitudinal panel study of students in a traditional, large liberal arts college and a small, innovative living-learning subenvironment. Initially students in the innovative environment were more liberal, socally conscious, culturally sophisticated and intellectually oriented than their counterparts in the traditional setting, and, after two years, accentuation of these group differences had occurred. However, these group differences were not the result of accentuation of individual differences. Instead, increases in the student values were linked to interaction with peers and faculty on related topics and these patterns of interaction were more likely to occur in the living-learning subenvironment. Finally, those students who initially were lowest on a value and who frequently interacted with faculty or peers on related topics tended to experience the greatest value change.     

Modernization and the Demographic Transition: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses of a Revised Model

Abstract

We specify a revised model of the demographic transition which accounts for national fertility levels and changes over the past two decades. The model includes cultural, geographic, demographic and family planning program variables, in addition to a measure of national socio-economic modernization. Using crude birth rates for 117 countries, we operationalize and then apply the revised model to 1974 rates, and then test a longitudinal model of 1955–59 to 1974 change in rates. A final model for 81 less developed nations from the original set of 117 countries includes a measure of family planning program effort. Including this highly significant measure in a model of 1955–59 to 1974 change results in further evidence favoring modification of the traditional demographic transition model. Implications for the future course of fertility in underdeveloped countries are discussed.