Do Mission Statements Matter for Nonprofit Performance?

In this exploratory study, we examine whether organizational mission statement attributes make a difference to the performance of nonprofit performing arts organizations. We use text analysis to measure two semantic attributes—activity and commonality—of mission statements. We examine whether these attributes are associated with improved performance for the instrumental and expressive functions of nonprofit performing arts organizations. Our findings indicate that the mission statement attribute activity is associated with improved performance for both instrumental and expressive functions. Our analysis of nonfindings for the mission statement attribute commonality suggests that there is a need to develop and use content analysis tools tailored to nonprofit contexts.     

Exploring Adoption-Specific Curricula in Undergraduate and Graduate Degree Programs

The systemic impact of adoption suggests the need to explore adoption-specific curricula in baccalaureate and graduate degree programs. Using a convenience sample, the present exploratory study collected data in two phases. Phase one included email requests for adoption syllabi to professional email lists and to identified faculty with adoption research and practice expertise. In phase two, 22 faculty members who responded by emailing syllabi were invited to participate in an online survey. Results only begin to unveil what we know about adoption-specific curricula in higher education. Suggestions for future research are discussed.     

“Friendly” Initiatives: An Emerging Approach to Improve Communities for Vulnerable Populations

A growing number of cities and towns are implementing “friendly” initiatives to change the community’s social and physical infrastructure to address the needs of a particular vulnerable segment of their population. Three prominent examples are aging-friendly, child-friendly, and immigrant-friendly initiatives. Although the limited but growing literature describes these initiatives as promising strategies to improve the quality of life of the targeted population, to date there has been little written about the underlying goals, values, and assumptions of these efforts. Using the value-critical approach, this article aims to better understand these aspects of population-friendly initiatives by examining the scholarly and grey literature. Social workers engaged in community and policy practice can play a key role in these efforts and call attention to the ways they may alleviate or exacerbate inequities. Future research is needed to assess the effects of these initiatives on their targeted population as well as other community residents.     

#iamafeminist as the “mother tag”: feminist identification and activism against misogyny on Twitter in South Korea

This article explores feminist activism via the hashtag #iamafeminist on Twitter in South Korea. This hashtag became an important platform for feminist identification and activism against misogyny following its start in 2015 as a way to resist prevailing anti-feminist sentiment in Korea. In addition to opposing stigmas regarding identifying as a feminist, #iamafeminist affords an inclusive frame that can promote feminist identification by sharing personal motives for and stories about being a feminist. Although critics dismiss the potential of hashtag activism due to its ephemeral nature, I argue that #iamafeminist—which I call the “mother tag”—was able to persist for three months by continuing to connect with real-time gender issues and by initiating activism against misogyny both online and offline.     

Life with and without heart disease among women and men over 50

This article uses a demographic approach and data from the Health and Retirement Survey, a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population, to investigate sex differences in the length of life lived with heart disease and after a heart attack for persons in the United States age 50 and older. On average, women live longer than men with heart disease. At age 50 women can expect to live 7.9 years and men 6.7 years with heart disease. The average woman experiences heart disease onset three years older and heart attacks 4.4 years older than men.     

A longitudinal analysis of the impact of health shocks on the wealth of elders

We investigate the impact of health shocks on wealth, using all four waves of the Health and Retirement Study, and estimate not only the short-term effect but also the long-term effect of health shocks on wealth of the elderly. We find that new health events lower wealth in elders during the period in which such health shocks occur, but the impact tends to disappear over time. We also find that health shocks result in greater wealth depletion when they occur later in life. Together with existing health problems, the overall impact of health problems on wealth increases over time.

Declining inter-industry wage dispersion in the US

Industrial effects have long been significant factors in wage inequality. Previous research indicates that wage differentials across industries were increasing through the mid 1980s. Using more recent data, however, we find that the level of inter-industry wage dispersion declined by 36% from 1986 to 2002 despite the continued trend towards increasing inequality in the labor force. This decline in inter-industry wage dispersion is evident across gender and educational groups. Using multilevel growth curve models, our multivariate results indicate that the decline is only weakly related to industrial changes in education, occupation or even productivity despite the fact that the latter variable had been a critical factor in the prior period. Indicators of globalization and downsizing also do not appear to explain this decline. For the more recent period, the most important factors associated with the narrowing of inter-industry wage dispersion are reduced unionization rates and the higher proportion of casual workers. We interpret these results as suggesting that firms may now be less economically obliged to pass on a portion of their rents to broad groups of workers and may instead be engaged in more idiosyncratic processes of negotiation with individual workers based on micro-level sources of bargaining power.     

The Emergence of Two Distinct Fertility Regimes in Economically Advanced Countries

Beginning in 2000, in economically advanced countries, a remarkable bifurcation in fertility levels has emerged, with one group in the moderate range of period total fertility rates, about 1.9, and the other at 1.3. The upper branch consists of countries in Northern and Western Europe, Oceania and the United States; the lower branch includes Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, and East and Southeast Asia. A review of the major theories for low-fertility countries reveals that none of them would have predicted this specific bifurcation. We argue that those countries with fertility levels close to replacement level have institutional arrangements, and related policies, that make it easier, not easy, for women to combine the worker and mother roles. The institutional details are quite different across countries, suggesting that multiple combinations of institutional arrangements and policies can lead to the same country-level fertility outcome. Canada, the only exception to this bifurcation, illustrates the importance of the different institutional structures in Québec compared to the rest of Canada.     

The making and unmaking of a “transborder nation”: South Korea during and after the Cold War

The burgeoning literature on transborder membership, largely focused on the thickening relationship between emigration states in the South and the postwar labor migrant populations and their descendants in North America or Western Europe, has not paid due attention to the long-term macroregional transformations that shape transborder national membership politics or to the bureaucratic practices of the state that undergird transborder claims-making. By comparing contentious transborder national membership politics in South Korea during the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras, this article seeks to overcome these limitations. In both periods, the membership status of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants in Japan and northeast China and their descendants was the focus of contestation. The distinctiveness of the case—involving both a sustained period of colonial rule and a period of belated and divided nation-state building interwoven with the Cold War—highlights the crucial importance of three factors: (1) the dynamically evolving macro-regional context, which has shaped transborder national membership politics in the region in distinctive ways; (2) the essentially political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; and (3) the role of state registration and documentation practices in shaping the contours of transborder national membership politics in the long run. By incorporating Korea—and East Asia more broadly—into the comparative study of transborder nation-building, this article also lays the groundwork for future cross-regional comparative historical studies.

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