“Road Warriors” on “Hair-Tragger Highways”: Cultural Resources and the Media's Construction of the 1987 Freeway Shootings Problem*

Media constructions of social problems usually rework the claims of activists and other primary claimsmakers. However, the news media acted as primary claims-makers in discovering and reporting the 1987 Los Angeles freeway violence problem. The press drew upon cultural resources in constructing this problem, applying a conventional template for social problems stories and using familiar imagery to depict freeway shootings. The social organization of claimsmaking, as well as contingencies in the histories of individual campaigns, affect the choice of cultural resources used to construct social problems.     

Community-based management of psychotic clients: The contributions of D. W. and Clare Winnicott

While the term management connotes images of impersonal care, D. W. Winnicott repeatedly used this term to describe the responsive environmental holding that is central to all human development. Influenced by observations of how normal mothers and families address the physical and psychic needs of children, he and his wife, Clare, a distinguished British social worker, operationalized this concept in finding and supporting facilitating environments with a wide range of disturbed children and adults. Using case material from a contemporary community program for the mentally ill, this paper will review the Winnicotts' important, but often neglected, perspectives on the environmental management of psychotic adults.Presented at the Washington School of Psychiatry, January 14, 1989. I would like to thank Janice Quiter and the Archives of Psychiatry of The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for their assistance in researching the D. W. Winnicott collection.     

Are Boards Designed to Fail? The Implausibility of Effective Board Monitoring

In this review, we challenge the idea that directors are well positioned to be effective monitors of management. Moving beyond the logic of incentives and ability, we conceptualize a model based on the premise of boards as groups of individuals obtaining, processing and sharing information and explain how variation in information-processing demands at the director, board and firm level may challenge effective monitoring. We draw on multiple theoretical perspectives to identify these barriers to effective board monitoring. Our goal in reviewing these barriers is to help us take stock of existing research in corporate governance and to better explain board behavior beyond traditional agency and resource dependency accounts. We also aim to uncover gaps in the conceptual and empirical research and suggest areas of fruitful future research.     

Pathways to social value and social change: An integrative review of the social entrepreneurship literature

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an important means of addressing grand challenges. Although research on the topic has accelerated, scholars have yet to articulate an overarching framework that links the different pathways taken by social entrepreneurs with the positive effects of these efforts. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a systematic literature review which enabled us to conceptually differentiate between social value and social change as distinct outcomes of social entrepreneurship and identify seven pathways for achieving these outcomes. Building on our analysis, we outline a research agenda for questions pertaining to: the dynamics between social value and social change; how contextual factors and social entrepreneurs influence various pathways; design principles of business models and innovations that facilitate social value and social change; and defining, measuring, and ensuring accountability for social value and social change.     

Semiparametric Estimation of a Proportional Hazard Model with Unobserved Heterogeneity

The proportional hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity gives the hazard function of a random variable conditional on covariates and a second random variable representing unobserved heterogeneity. This paper shows how to estimate the baseline hazard function and the distribution of the unobserved heterogeneity nonparametrically. The baseline hazard function and heterogeneity distribution are assumed to satisfy smoothness conditions but are not assumed to belong to known, finite-dimensional, parametric families. Existing estimators assume that the baseline hazard function or heterogeneity distribution belongs to a known parametric family. Thus, the estimators presented here are more general than existing ones.     

Managing electronic documents and work flows: Enterprise content management at work in nonprofit organizations

Web management and knowledge management systems have made significant technological advances, culminating in large information management systems such as enterprise content management (ECM). ECM is a Web‐based publishing system that manages large numbers of electronic documents and other Web assets intended for publication to Web portals and other complex Web sites. Work in nonprofit organizations can benefit from adopting new communication technologies that promote collaboration and enterprisewide knowledge management. The unique characteristics of ECM are enumerated and analyzed from a knowledge management perspective. We identify three stages of document life cycles in ECM implementations—content, reification, and commodification/process—as the content management model. We present the model as a mechanism for decision makers and scholars to use in evaluating the organizational impacts of systems such as ECM. We also argue that decision makers in nonprofit organizations should take care to avoid overly commodifying business processes in the final stage, where participation may be more beneficial than efficiency.     

On the expansion of the market and the decline of the family

Over the past two hundred years, large, modern firms have tended to replace small, family businesses. In parallel, the family has declined as a social institution. We suggest that these developments are interrelated. Because information of cheating in market transactions spreads only gradually in large markets, the reputation of the family firm could support contractual performance only in small, traditional markets. As markets grew in size, this reputational mechanism could no longer operate. The small, family firm was then replaced by the large, modern firm. This transition led to a decrease in the importance of the family.