Information and Communication Technologies: Reshaping Voluntary Organizations?

Electronic networking holds the promise of innovation with involuntary organizations as they seek to respond to deep shifts in the social, economic, and political spheres in which they operate. Evidence from our study of U.K. voluntary organizations demonstrates relatively low uptake of the core networking technologies and applications essential to support the reconfiguration of key relationships in and around the organizations. Friends of the Earth and the Samaritans are exceptions to this trend. Case studies of these organizations suggest they are using information and communication technologies to reshape internal relationships and reconfigure relationships externally. The extent to which the organizations are reconfiguring around intelligent campaigning and intelligent client service is tempered by their long‐standing values.     

Imagining the Good Place: Public Services and Family Strategies in Rural Ecuador

Recent scholarship seeks to lift up alternatives to neoliberalism that build community well‐being and a sense of place. This study follows three families in a rural highland Ecuadorean community and their investments in human capital, family businesses, and migration. It applies a human ecological model to show how complex ideologies around community well‐being, such as buen vivir (living well), are articulated at the macroscale and experienced at the meso‐ and microscales through investments in public services and their impact on rural families. Our collaborative ethnography elevates families’ voices to show how they both experience and envision community well‐being. We incorporate human capabilities and a community capitals framework to show how investments and ideologies flow across scales. We highlight the role of local social capital and regional territorial dynamics that support both economic growth and social inclusion. Our collaborative ethnography illustrates how rural residents imagine the good place (buen lugar), a resilient foundation from which they can build their family strategies. However, we find that lack of political and financial investment truncates active citizenship at the local scale, limiting the ability to achieve the full promise of buen vivir.     

Overtime and Undertime: An Analysis of Hours Worked*

Drawing on 1980 Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS), this study compares the determinants of annual hours of work for whites, blacks, and mainland-born Puerto Ricans residing in the New York SMSA in 1979. Two theoretical approaches are tested; a neoclassical specification and an extended structural model. The analysis supports both approaches. Few differences in coefficients exist between white and minority men, but the hours of minority women are less sensitive to family demands than are those of white women. The implications of these and other findings are discussed.     

Self-perceived occupational stress and distress in a Scottish police force

This paper describes an empirical study (n = 699) of occupational stress in a Scottish police force. The self-perceived stress associated with a variety of organizational and opearational stressors was examined along with the associated distress in the police officers in terms of symptoms of anxiety, somatic complaint, severe depression and social dysfunction. The analysis revealed that in spite of the potential that police work offers for exposure to adverse opeational situations such as violence or death, the highest levels of associated stress lie in relation to organizational factors such as officers' perceptions of staff shortages, inadequate resources, time pressures, lack of communication and work overload. Differential rates of perceived stress are reported accordng to gender, rank and working location. This paper further validates previsous research on stress in British police and addresses the situation from a Scottish perspective.     

Making a place for escort work: a case study

This case study focused on the steps taken by a Canadian city bordering the United States to manage the commercial sex component of an adult entertainment package that draws many American visitors. It explored how the city dealt with the potential of community stigmatization resulting from its growing reputation as a place for easily accessible sex trade. The distinctive Canadian laws related to the sex industry, the predominantly laissez-faire attitude toward people's sex lives, and concerns about maintaining the atmosphere of safety and privacy protection preferred by many residents set boundaries to the approach that could be taken. The specific historical, geographic, social, and political location of the city figured prominently in its choice of a normalization rather than a spatialization strategy.     

Stratification and prestige among elite experts in methodological and mathematical sociology circa 1975

This discussion has two purposes. One is to describe the social differentiation of experts within an élite invisible college devoted to methodological and mathematical work circa 1975. The other is to illustrate the positional approach in network analysis. After introducing the invisible college to be considered, the form of stratification within it is described. Although completely interconnected to one another, experts are stratified across five structurally unique statuses. The form of stratification is given greater empirical meaning by considering its content. There is a subtle linkage between the extent to which a status is defined by substantive and methodological influence relations. The most prominent experts have merged their methodological concerns with specific substantive concerns. The most prestigious status is occupied by a “social statistics élite” to whom a “mobility élite” exists as a satellite status. Methodology leaders among social psychologists divide into a group pursuing the study of three-person groups, a “triads élite”, and a group with more general interests, a “social psychology élite”. Finally, a “mathematical sociology élite” jointly define no status since they have highly dissimilar substantive relations with one another and other experts. The last question addressed concerns the distribution of prestige in the college. As would be expected under a norm of universalism, the relative prestige of experts within the college is uniquely determined only by an expert's record of publishing in the college's core journals. The discussion concludes with comments.     

A note on inferences regarding network subgroups

The evidence presented in Bernard et al. (1980) does not warrant their conclusion. We comment on their lack of concern with the substance of social differentiation in the systems they use as evidence. The substance of social structure is argued to affect the scope, adequacy and power of conclusions drawn from a network analysis and is accordingly a factor to be explicitly considered in justifying those conclusions. With these ideas in mind, our reanaly sis of one system on which good data are available, ostensibly supporting the Bernard et al. conclusion, illustrates how their conclusion regarding network subgroups in that system is unwarranted