Specialization and the Survival of Self‐Help Organizations

This article examines the survival rates of 589 self‐help organizations in order to understand how self‐help niches, organizations specializing in biomedical, human services, and behavioral health, differentially impact longevity. Drawing on a study of the self‐help movement, we examine how the various mechanisms by which specialization impacts self‐help movement organizations' chances of survival. Extending the concepts of embeddedness, countervailing powers, and organizational specialization to self‐help organizations, we investigate how formal structures and professional alliances differentially promote longevity. Results show how formalization enhances self‐help organizations' longevity, and serves as a mechanism by which specialization impacts organizational viability. While formalization has a robust and beneficial impact on longevity, some professional linkages are negatively associated with survival and others are positively associated with it.     

Bridging Cultures Through Unpaid Labor: US Volunteer Teachers’ Experiences in China’s Yunnan Province

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - International volunteering has become a complex field in the context of globalization. Within the discourses of...     

Workplace racial composition, perceived discrimination, and organizational attachment

Prior research has devoted considerable attention to the relationship between the racial and ethnic composition of jobs and various indicators of organizational attachment. Fewer studies, however, examine how workplace racial composition affects individuals’ experiences of racial discrimination or how these experiences impact workers’ organizational attachment. To address this lacuna, we first examine the effects of workplace racial composition on perceived racial and ethnic discrimination. Next, we examine whether perceived racial discrimination mediates the association between racial composition and organizational attachment observed in prior studies. Finally, we explore whether these relationships are similar (symmetric) or different (non-symmetric) for non-Whites and Whites. The analyses indicate: (1) working with predominately same-race coworkers tends to diminish perceptions of racial discrimination, (2) perceived racial discrimination mediates some of the effects of racial/ethnic composition on organizational attachment, and (3) some non-symmetric effects between non-Whites and Whites are found. We conclude with implications for future research.     

Construction Safety Risk Modeling and Simulation

By building on a genetic‐inspired attribute‐based conceptual framework for safety risk analysis, we propose a novel approach to define, model, and simulate univariate and bivariate construction safety risk at the situational level. Our fully data‐driven techniques provide construction practitioners and academicians with an easy and automated way of getting valuable empirical insights from attribute‐based data extracted from unstructured textual injury reports. By applying our methodology on a data set of 814 injury reports, we first show the frequency‐magnitude distribution of construction safety risk to be very similar to that of many natural phenomena such as precipitation or earthquakes. Motivated by this observation, and drawing on state‐of‐the‐art techniques in hydroclimatology and insurance, we then introduce univariate and bivariate nonparametric stochastic safety risk generators based on kernel density estimators and copulas. These generators enable the user to produce large numbers of synthetic safety risk values faithful to the original data, allowing safety‐related decision making under uncertainty to be grounded on extensive empirical evidence. One of the implications of our study is that like natural phenomena, construction safety may benefit from being studied quantitatively by leveraging empirical data rather than strictly being approached through a managerial perspective using subjective data, which is the current industry standard. Finally, a side but interesting finding is that in our data set, attributes related to high energy levels (e.g., machinery, hazardous substance) and to human error (e.g., improper security of tools) emerge as strong risk shapers.     

Girls’ “New Femininity” Refusals and “Good Girl” Recuperations in Soap Talk

The “new femininities” produced in postfeminist media confront girls with complex and challenging subjectivities that reach into the spaces where girls engage in their own productions of self. Feminist scholarship has interrogated and critiqued the “girl” produced in postfeminist popular culture texts, highlighting her internal contradictions and often problematic re/production within the heterosexual matrix. Yet, despite an intensified focus on girls featured in popular culture, the ways that girls themselves make sense of the “girl” in contemporary femininity texts has been relatively neglected. Viewing girls' sense-making of femininity in popular culture texts as crucial in the process of their subjectivity or self-production, in this paper we examine pre-teen girls' negotiations of femininity through their talk about Scarlett, a main teen girl character in a New Zealand soap drama. Our analyses and discussion focus on girls' management of the contradictory and regulatory productions of femininity in the text, in particular the often classed conditions under which girls recuperate the “good girl” discourse to refuse the regulatory femininities inside the heterosexual matrix. We suggest that an absence of empowering discourses outside of postfeminism's sexual empowerment limits girls' resources for critiquing and challenging regulatory femininities, “new” and “traditional.”     

On square ordinal contingency tables: a comparison of social class and income mobility for the same individuals

Summary.  Square contingency tables with matching ordinal rows and columns arise in particular as empirical transition matrices and the paper considers these in the context of social class and income mobility tables. Such tables relate the socio-economic position of parents to the socio-economic position of their child in adulthood. The level of association between parental and child socio-economic position is taken as a measure of mobility. Several approaches to analysis are described and illustrated by UK data in which interest focuses on comparisons of social class and income mobility tables that are derived from the same individuals. Account is taken of the use of the same individuals in the two tables. Additionally comparisons over time are considered.