When the Lord builds the house: An autoethnographic account of working in an evangelical for-profit organizational culture

Religion is often perceived as a private topic, thus belonging outside the traditional conceptualization of a work environment. However, religion is a pervasive organizing framework and an understanding of its role in the workplace is needed from a communicative perspective. In the following autoethnography, I describe my experience working for a Christian for-profit homebuilder – starting with new employee orientation and moving through my final day at Local Homes. I focus on instances where tension emerges between expectations and reality as I learn about and interact within the overtly evangelical Christian organizational culture. The tension is illustrated through four vignettes that correspond to the traditional phases of socialization. Through writing this autoethnographic account, I attempt to move beyond my personal experience and situate my story within larger disciplinary and societal conversations about the socialization process in a religious organization. With this goal in mind, I conclude with methodological and theoretical implications.     

The sacred and the profane in life science work: The case of assisted reproduction laboratories

Reproductive medicine and assisted reproduction therapies have been developed over the last decades resulting in over five million babies. The handling of human reproductive materials and patients is based on the ability to combine health care work and techno-scientific expertise in both the clinic and the laboratory setting. This study of Swedish assisted reproductive technology clinics demonstrates that the active day-to-day manipulation of human reproductive materials enact both the ‘profane’, through treating the embryos as raw materials in standardized procedures enabling economies of scale, and the ‘sacred’ through enacting a separation, the potential to human life, the patients ordeals, and seriousness. The enactment of the profane and the sacred is mostly balanced but at certain points in the work procedures, their intersecting becomes particularly salient. Such points provide opportunities for the study of the sense making of professionals in organizational grey zones, during techno-scientific activities.     

Professionalization through attrition? An event history analysis of mortalities in citizen journalism

ABSTRACT

Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site’s risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site’s mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory’s ‘liability of newness.’ We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition.     

教育期望中的班级效应分析

班级是中国基础教育领域重要的组织设置。利用“中国教育追踪调查”（CEPS）数据,应用分层线性模型,本研究关注班级设置,包括班级组织结构和班级氛围,对初中生教育期望的影响。研究结果表明,在多个组织结构变量中,班主任的受教育程度和教龄对学生教育期望影响显著,但任课老师的资历影响不显著;在多个班级氛围变量中,学生的教育期望既受到班级客观学业水平的影响,亦受到师生之间互动关系的影响。此外,在控制了班级氛围变量后,师资配置对学生教育期望的影响不再显著。总之,在以往研究重点关注个体、家庭和学校影响的基础上,本研究将对教育期望的研究进一步拓展到学校内部的班级环境,并发现师生之间建立的紧密互动关系及良好的班级氛围对学生的教育期望发挥着最重要的影响。     

Employee communication,job engagement,and organizational commitment: A study of members of the Millennial Generation

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between job engagement and two key components of employee-organization relationships (EOR). Findings from a survey of members of the Millennial Generation (N = 539) in the United States indicate that job engagement mediates the relationship between employee communication and organizational commitment. It is concluded that when employees are engaged in their work, their commitment to the organization is strengthened and the likelihood of them leaving the organization decreases. Furthermore, an argument is made in light of the study’s findings that engagement and commitment work in concert to strengthen EORs overall. To foster engagement, organizations should remove obstacles to internal information flow and provide ongoing feedback to employees about individual and organizational issues.     

Poking a sleeping bear: the challenge of organizational recruitment for controversial topics

ABSTRACT

Researchers often approach employers to investigate employees’ work and family experiences. Organizational willingness to grant access to employees can vary, especially when the research topic is seen as controversial or contentious for the employer. This paper explores this methodological challenge using a research example from Manitoba, Canada, which explored the use of parental leave by male employees and the impact of managerial attitudes and corporate culture on usage. Sixty large employers were recruited with only seven of those organizations agreeing to participate. In this paper, the reasons organizations gave for declining to participate and the implications of their decisions for the research are examined. Although the final sample included 905 managers and employees, participating organizations tended to be employee-focused and family-friendly employers. Organizations declined participation for a variety of reasons: avoiding raising the issue with unions, awareness that their policies unfairly benefited female leave takers, and simply not seeing the relevance of a topic relating to men’s work–family experiences. A dialogue often absent from the literature, it is important to understand how employers can limit researchers’ access to employees on controversial topics. The existence of such barriers suggests alternative avenues to recruit participants directly when topics are contentious for employers.     

“It’s a generosity loop”: Religious and spiritual motivations of volunteers who glean produce to reduce food insecurity

Food insecurity is a common social issue and households look to assistance from food pantries, which often have difficulty supplying fresh or nutritious food. A substantial amount of produce is left in the fields, which can be collected through gleaning. In a focus group with volunteer gleaners at a faith-based nonprofit organization that attempts to fill the gaps of food insecurity, the motivations, challenges, and benefits of volunteering were examined. Volunteering in gleaning generated a sense of collective purpose and community; it addressed deeply held religious and spiritual impulses; and it puts volunteers directly in contact with nature.     

The effects of perceived quality of organizationally provided meal service on employees’ job performance and mediating role of organizational identification

Contemporary managers are developing alternative ways to sustain their competitive advantages. Motivation-enhancing features such as high-quality meal service provided by organizations can be thought of as one of these methods. The effect of the perceived quality of meal service provided by organizations on the job performance of employees and the mediating role of organizational identification during this process is studied. Private security-sector employees working in Turkey (N?=?597) are being focused in this study. As a result of analyses (correlation and regression analyses, structural equation model), the authors find that the perceived quality of meal service provided by organizations improves employees’ job performance significantly and organizational identification has a partial mediating role on this association. The findings of this study will be of interest to key stakeholders such as public or private organizations, labor unions and the media.     

Getting to Where You Want to Go: Designing Information Systems and Using Your Data Through the Application of Analytics and Informatics

ABSTRACT

This article, based on the closing session from the 2017 NC Serials Conference, describes a systems perspective where data serve as both real-time and summative information and knowledge about how an organization is performing, what services and resources its users are using and interacting with, and areas for which the organization is doing well or needs improvement. The author posits that data are most useful when the context is informed by clear goals that provide a direction to where the organization is and wants to be. Applied examples are discussed for several environments, including an academic department, school of education, regional libraries, and public libraries.     

Self-interest and the theory of action

The concept of self-interest remains underdeveloped in sociology although central to economics. Recent methodological and social trends render sociological indifference to the concept untenable. The term has enjoyed historical predominance in the West since the sixteenth century. While it is seen in modern economics as a singular motivating force, Adam Smith regarded self-interest in economic action as necessarily moderated by sympathy. In addition to its problematic economic conceptualization self-interest has an experiential basis in unequal power relations. An alternative to the concept of self-interest is presented by Amartya Sen in his account of commitment; its inconsistencies, however, render Sen's statement unsatisfactory. Differences between present and future interests indicate that the distinction between self-interested and other-interested action is not sustainable.