Caveat Venditor? Museum Merchandising, Nonprofit Commercialization, and the Case of the Metropolitan Museum in New York

This paper reviews some of the underpinnings of the current commercialization debate in the nonprofit sector, based on an analysis of Metropolitan Museum of Art data from 1960 to 2002. The case suggests at least two avenues for additional research: First, while analysts tend to see the origins of the commercialization phenomenon in the fiscal setbacks of the 1980s, the economic crisis of the 1970s and the resulting erosion of endowment funds may also have been an as of yet unexplored driving force behind the commercialization trend. Second, current conceptual frameworks of the phenomenon adequately explain the motivations behind the observable rise of the museum's commercial activities. However, the changing rationales as well as economic fortunes of commercial activities in this case highlight the need for a better understanding of the long-term effects and consequences of commercial activity by nonprofit organizations, particularly in light of the current push for increased entrepreneurialism.

Exploring the Interaction Between Volunteering Status,Paid Job Characteristics and Quality of Volunteers’ Motivation on Mental Health

The literature on the health-promoting effects of community work has primarily dealt with the population in retirement age, yet the vast majority of volunteers are people still in the workforce. The aim of this study is to observe the relationship between volunteering and health within the context of working life, considering paid work conditions and motives to volunteer as moderating variables. We conducted an online survey with a sample of Swiss workers employed in different industries. Results show that volunteers with self-determined motives (but not with controlled motives) report lower levels of stress and burnout than non-volunteers. Moreover, volunteers in general (regardless of the quality of motivation) report higher levels of work engagement and well-being. Analyses further reveal an interaction effect for burnout and stress, where the difference between self-determined volunteers and non-volunteers becomes larger with unfavorable working conditions at their paid job, hinting at potential compensatory effects. Implications for future research and the voluntary sector are discussed.     

German sociology of law

Although several founders of sociology had a German mother-tongue and German jurisprudence may be the leader in systematic legal dogmatism, these factors have not worked in tandem to produce an influential law and society movement in Germany.¹ To the contrary, these two scientific cultures were split throughout most of the twentieth century and thus left little opportunity for producing a sociology of law. This article outlines the development of the sociology of law in Germany, sketches its current state, and concludes with a cautious forecast.     

Zentralisierung durch Dezentralisierung

Paradoxical slogans such as “controlled autonomy”, “externally organized self-organization”, “centralistic decentralization” and “regulated anarchy” point to strategies by the management which make use of two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the advantages in innovation and efficiency that are implied in decentralized self-organization on the one hand and the advantages in synergy and control that come with a centralized management on the other hand. Starting from this assumption on the combination of centralization and decentralization as a deliberate management strategy, the results of a case study are discussed which was conducted in a medium-sized German company. This leads to a re-consideration and partial reversal of the original assumption. It is shown that, rather than being a strategy intentionally employed by the management, “centralization by decentralization” was an unintended side-effect of the introduction of team structures on several hierarchical levels which originally was a part of decentralization.     

Mutual Tuning of Multiple Trajectories

In this article, I offer a pragmatist conceptual framework to link the sociology of health and illness with the sociology of science and technology. Starting from an examination of the practice of doing medicine and science, I extend Anselm Strauss's trajectory concept to analyze the temporality and processual character of an evolving phenomenon in two important ways. First, I analyze how a single trajectory emerges out of the interaction of multiple trajectories and how emerging and existing trajectories shape each other with differential power. Second, in accord with recent writings in science and technology studies, agency is extended from humans to non-humans. I discuss different origin and ending strategies of trajectories and the management of trajectories over time.     

Bringing Indonesia into the global welfare regime debate: A literature review and future research agenda

Studies on welfare state regimes have been dominated by consideration of rich OECD/European and increasingly East Asian countries/territories, leaving South Asian cases such as Indonesia underexplored. The few existing studies that have explicitly tried to conceptualize the Indonesian welfare regime have resulted in little consensus. To address the resulting lack of clarity, this article reviews scholarly articles relevant to bringing Indonesia into the global welfare regime debate, specifically encapsulating how the country has been classified compared with its East Asia counterparts. Accordingly, we find that existing studies have mainly concentrated on the Indonesian health care and social protection expansion, which has led authors to conclude that this evolution demonstrates Indonesia's transition away from welfare productivism. By contrast, we argue that Indonesia's productivist characteristics have largely prevailed while informal networks, clientelism, strong families, and the limited effectiveness of the civil society movement created a specific social politics in Indonesia. We thus conclude that the causal mechanisms typically attributed to welfare development in more developed welfare geographies, including East Asia, cannot fully explain the evident institutional formation in the Indonesian case. The future research agenda for studying the welfare regimes in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries is discussed.     

Impression management in the market for residential care for children and youth in Sweden

In what has become quite a turbulent quasi‐market for residential care for children and youth, providers now compete for public contracts. To create visibility and attract customers, many providers use marketing activities to project the desired impression of themselves to maintain or strengthen their market position. In this article, we analyse how companies that provide residential care for children manage the impressions they project on their websites and in advertisements. The results reveal that residential care providers use a range of impression management strategies to enhance their organizational image and to respond to potentially damaging or threatening images. The information providers choose to disclose leaves customers—in this case, the social workers responsible for choosing and purchasing care on behalf of clients—with rather limited opportunities to evaluate the quality of care. This is a significant problem considering other, more reliable, sources of information are difficult to access.     

Promoting a higher retirement age: A prospect‐theoretical approach

Demographic ageing and the necessity of raising the retirement age is one of the most frequently debated topics among European welfare policy experts. This study used prospect theory as developed in behavioural economics to explain public attitudes towards pension reforms. It argues that, in line with prospect theory, negative incentives are more useful in changing people's attitudes in favour of a higher statutory retirement age than are positive incentives. Therefore, in the case of increasing life expectancy, defined‐contribution schemes that apply actuarial formulae linking the level of starting monthly pension benefits to life expectancy are more useful in promoting a higher retirement age than conventional defined‐benefit schemes, which typically do not forge an automatic connection between longevity and starting pensions. The implications of prospect theory for attitudes towards pension reforms were tested using Eurobarometer survey data collected in 2004 and 2009 in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.