Gendered Organizations: Progress and Prospects

In this paper, we explore the context for the emergence of a theory of gendered organizations and define the basic features of the approach, noting the explosion of scholarship in the area and the now firmly established trend toward understanding gender, race, class, and sexuality as aspects of social structures. We focus on three of the most important emerging areas in research on gendered organizations: the study of intersectionality, the increasing emphasis on the importance of organizational context, and the exploration of mechanisms for organizational change. We conclude by briefly noting prospects for the further development of research on gendered organizations.     

The Latinization of the Central Shenandoah Valley

Virginia is among a number of southern states in the United States, such as North Carolina, Arkansas and Georgia, which have experienced a sudden growth in Latino immigration during the past decade. Not only is the volume of growth unprecedented, but many of the destinations are new and located in rural areas. Places that have not hosted immigrant populations for generations are quickly becoming multicultural. The small city of Harrisonburg (population 43,500 according to the 2005 estimate), which is located in the rural Central Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, is perhaps the premier example of this new pattern of change. While local advertising once promoted Harrisonburg for its 99.2% American-born and 93.7% white population, the area today holds the distinction of hosting the most diverse public school enrollment in the state (in 2006-2007), with students from 64 countries who speak 44 languages. Among them are Spanish speakers from at least 14 different countries. Drawing on social network theory, the paper examines how social networks among Latino immigrants become activated in new settlement areas. It presents a case history of the historic process of Latinization involving the settlement of a number of diverse Latino populations (from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba and Uruguay) in Harrisonburg and the surrounding Central Shenandoah Valley. The study demonstrates how a number of key institutions, including local agricultural industries (apples and poultry), a refugee resettlement office and churches recruited pioneers from these immigrant groups to the area and how pioneers subsequently engaged in further social network recruitment, thus creating multiple transnational daughter communities in the Harrisonburg area. The policy implications of this historical process are explored.     

Family comes first or open all hours?: How low paid women working in food retailing manage webs of obligation at home and work

This paper draws on qualitative findings from a study exploring work-life balance issues amongst female employees within food retailing. Whilst female employment is fundamental to this sector, there is limited evidence on employees' experiences of reconciling relatively low-paid work and the particular demands of food retailing with domestic and caring responsibilities. Managing competing discourses and demands at home and work is a feature of many women's lives. For those in low-paid jobs, with fewer material resources to fall back on, such webs of obligation, often stretching over the lifecourse, may be particularly difficult to navigate or escape. In food retail work, as in caring/domestic emergencies, timeframes may be tight and demands made on workers at short notice and outwith the standard working day. The study showed that sustaining their moral identities both as good mothers/daughters/family members ('family comes first') and as good and reliable workers ('the store must be staffed') was, therefore, an everyday practical accomplishment for these food retail employees. We explore women's accounts against the backdrop of particular familial, workplace and socio-cultural expectations and constraints, identifying overlapping sets of values between home and work as well as points of contradiction and tension.     

'You've gotta learn how to play the game': homeless women's use of gender performance as a tool for preventing victimization

As a masculinist space, ‘the streets’ present a variety of dangers to homeless women, a fact that has received too little attention within the social science literature. This study utilizes data drawn from interviews with homeless women and service providers in Edinburgh, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, to explore the complex survival strategies that homeless women develop to prevent criminal victimization. Through women's words, we see that gender is understood strategically as performance. Four gender performances are identified and discussed: the ‘femininity simulacrum’, the ‘masculinity simulacrum’, ‘genderlessness’ and ‘passing’. We discussed how each of these performances is employed in the pursuit of safety and security in frequently violent and chaotic social spaces.     

Job Insecurity and the Timing of Parenthood: A Comparison between Eastern and Western Germany

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the economic determinants of fertility behavior by addressing the role of job insecurity in couples’ intentions concerning parenthood and its timing. It starts from the hypothesis that cultural values moderate individuals’ reactions to job insecurity and the way it is related to family formation. With a systematic thematic content analysis of a set of semi-structured interviews with childless men and women around the age of 30 in eastern and western Germany, we are able to show that there are substantial differences in the consequences of job insecurity on intentions to have a first child. In western Germany, a relatively secure job career is expected to precede family formation, and this sequence of transitions is rather rigid, whereas in eastern Germany job security and family formation are thought of and practiced as parallel investments. We suggest that the lack of convergence in family formation patterns between eastern and western Germany after the unification of the country in 1990 is partially related to different attitudes toward job insecurity in the two contexts.     

Family togetherness and the suburban ideal

An examination of the history of suburbanization in the United States shows that the suburban ideal has, from its beginnings, been associated with a vision of family togetherness, meaning that husband, wife, and children choose to spend their leisure time with one another. While the migration to the suburbs has been in part fueled by a desire to escape the mix of classes and ethnic groups of urban areas, and by government- and market-shaped economic incentives, the suburban ideal has stressed finding an environment in which family ties can be strengthened. The social and spatial structure of suburbia promotes familial isolation through a lack of public space and through an emphasis on home maintenance and home-centered entertainments. It is argued that by providing such optimal conditions for togetherness, suburbia may actually undermine familial harmony by exacerbating the strain of trying to live up to an essentially unattainable ideal.     

Accountability of nonprofit organizations and those who control them: The legal framework

Legal accountability, understood as either an obligation to meet prescribed standards of behavior or an obligation to disclose information about one's actions even in the absence of a prescribed standard of behavior, is imposed on nonprofit organizations and those who manage them by state law and by fedral tax-exemption law. A perception that charities are exempt from both the electoral control that holds government accountable and the market forces that discipline business encourages a tendency to look to law to ensure accountability in the charitable sector, to perceive that shortcomings in the law are responsible for shortcomings in the sector, and to conclude that repair or reconstruction of the legal framework is the appropriate corrective. However, although the legal framework is far from perfect, sweeping change will not likely solve the problems and may well undermine the most positive characteristics of the sector. Some aspects of accountability cannot and should not be the subject of legal rules. Efforts to make charities accountable by redrawing legal standards of behavior in accord with popularly recognized standards of propriety, or even “excellence,” are likely to be counterproductive. Instead, adjustment of the legal framework in the hope of improving accountability should be incremental and should be evaluated in the context of organizing principles and core values that reflect our best understanding of the unique strengths of the sector and the functions it serves in our society.     

Intervening with homeless youths: Direct practive without blaming the victim

Homeless adolescents present with an array of difficulties, being perhaps the neediest group of youths in the U.S. While policy and programmatic needs of this population are often discussed, their clinical needs can be overlooked for fear of implied victin blaming. This paper examines characteristics of homeless youths, diverse practice methods that have been applied to this population, and related theories. Three models of practice are descibed, with examples, as potentially applicable to indiidual and family intervention with this population.     

A Fractional Dickey–Fuller Test for Unit Roots

This paper presents a new test for fractionally integrated (FI) processes. In particular, we propose a testing procedure in the time domain that extends the well–known Dickey–Fuller approach, originally designed for the I(1) versus I(0) case, to the more general setup of FI(d₀) versus FI(d₁), with d₁<d₀. When d₀=1, the proposed test statistics are based on the OLS estimator, or its t–ratio, of the coefficient on Δ^d1y_t−1 in a regression of Δy_t on Δ^d1y_t−1 and, possibly, some lags of Δy_t. When d₁ is not taken to be known a priori, a pre–estimation of d₁ is needed to implement the test. We show that the choice of any T^1/2–consistent estimator of d₁∈[0 ,1) suffices to make the test feasible, while achieving asymptotic normality. Monte–Carlo simulations support the analytical results derived in the paper and show that proposed tests fare very well, both in terms of power and size, when compared with others available in the literature. The paper ends with two empirical applications.