The strategic restructuring of nonprofit associations: An exploratory study

In the past decade, many voluntary associations have reported experiencing tension and frustration in the relationships between central offices and local affiliates. The current challenge is how to maintain cohesion of the association and the utility of the central office while accommodating the desire of affiliates for autonomy. Based on an eighteen-month exploratory study of the evolution of two associations, this article explores these tensions and offers five propositions for the effective restructuring of the leadership and governance of associations over time.     

Dominican‐American Etbnic/Racial Identities and United States Social Categories

The majority of Dominicans have sub‐Saharan African ancestry, ¹ 1 In the 1980 Dominican census, 16 percent of the population were classified as blanco (‘white’), 73 percent were classified as indio (‘indian‐colored’), a term used to refer to the phenotype of individuals who match stereotypes of combined African and European ancestry and 11 percent were classified as negro [‘black’] (Haggerty, 1991). These categories are social constructions, rather than objective reflections of phenotypes. The positive social connotations of “whiteness,” for example, lead many Caribbean Hispanics to identify themselves as white for the public record regardless of their precise phenotype (Dominguez, 1978:9). Judgments of color in the Dominican Republic also depend in part upon social attributes of an individual, as they do elsewhere in Latin America. Money, education and power, for example, “whiten” an individual, so that the color attributed to a higher class individual is often lighter than the color that would be attributed to an individual of the same phenotype of a lower class (Rout, 1976:287).
which would make them “black” by historical United States ‘one‐drop’ rules. Second generation Dominican high school students in Providence, Rhode Island do not identity their race in terms of black or white, but rather in terms of ethnolinguistic identity, as Dominican/Spanish/Hispanic. The distinctiveness of Dominican‐American understandings of race is highlighted by comparing them with those of non‐Hispanic, African descent second generation immigrants and with historical Dominican notions of social identity. Dominican second generation resistance to phenotype‐racialization as black or white makes visible ethnic/racial formation processes that are often veiled, particularly in the construction of the category African‐American. This resistance to black/white racialization suggests the transformative effects that post‐1965 immigrants and their descendants are having on United States ethnic/racial categories.     

Application of wavelets to the pre-processing of underwater sounds

In this paper we consider data on underwater sounds of differing types. Our objective is to filter background noise and achieve an acceptable level of reduction in the raw data, whilst at the same time maintaining the main features of the original signal. In particular, we consider data compression through the use of wavelet analysis followed by a thresholding of small coefficients in the resulting multiresolution decomposition. Various methods to threshold the wavelet representation are discussed and compared using recordings of dolphin sounds. An empirical modification to one of them is also proposed which shows promise in better preserving certain structures in our particular sound data.     

A RANDOMIZATION PROBLEM IN FORMING DESIGNS WITH SUPERIMPOSED TREATMENTS1

Some programmes of experimentation require the superimposition of a new set of treatments on an existing experiment. Randomization of such treatments has received little attention in the literature but merits careful consideration. The present paper examines two apparently different theoretical approaches, one in effect randomizing the experiments together and the other randomizing the second experiment without reference to any randomization used in the first. In the simplest superimpositions the two methods give identical results in practice but problems arise when one Latin square is to be superimposed on another.