Study finds racial difference in prevalence of political advocacy organizations
July 9, 2009 at 10:26 am | In immigrants, non-profits, organizational density, political organizations, social movements, what to read | Leave a Comment
Sarah Reckhow’s “The Distinct Patterns of Organized and Elected Representation of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” published in Urban Affairs, uses data from Melissa DATA and newspaper accounts. She finds that, for Latinos and Asian-Americans, the group’s proportion in the population increases the number of political advocay organizations; for African-Americans, however, the pattern does not hold. From the abstract: Studies of minority political incorporation have demonstrated that advocacy organizations are critical for advancing minority electoral success and policy change. Drawing on an original data set of 30 midsized U.S. cities, the author evaluates the extent of organized representation of racial and ethnic groups and the effect of organized representation on elected representation. Latinos and Asian-Americans both have greater numbers of local advocacy organizations as the groups’ proportion of the population increases. Yet many cities with sizable African-American populations have a lower density of advocacy organizations than cities with fewer African-Americans. A smaller field of organizations increases elected representation for African-Americans but not for Latinos.
Celeste Watkins-Hayes publishes book on the professional lives of bureaucrats in welfare offices
June 27, 2009 at 3:36 pm | In job centers, job search, new books, poverty, social service agencies, welfare offices, what to read | Leave a Comment
A behind-the-scenes look at bureaucracy’s human face in the wake of welfare reform, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a study of welfare officers and how they navigate the increasingly tangled political and emotional terrain of their jobs. Celeste Watkins-Hayes here reveals how welfare reform engendered a shift in focus for caseworkers from simply providing monetary aid to the much more complex process of helping recipients find work. Now both more intimately involved in their clients’ lives and wielding greater power over their well-being, welfare officers’ racial, class, and professional identities have become increasingly important factors in their work. Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork in two very different communities, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is for anyone looking to understand the impact of the institutional and policy changes wrought by welfare reform as well as the subtle social dynamics that shape the way public resources are meted out to the poor at the individual level.
Mario Small publishes book on networks of mothers in urban childcare centers
June 5, 2009 at 12:26 am | In barbershops, beauty salons, childcare centers, churches, grocery stores, neighborhoods, new books, organizational networks, poverty, social capital, what to read | Leave a Comment
Mario Small has published a new book, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everday Life. From the book description: Social capital theorists have shown that some people do better than others in part because they enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people’s deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, childcare centers, schools, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book illustrates and develops this argument by exploring the experiences of New York City mothers whose children were enrolled in childcare centers. Relying on scores of in-depth interviews with mothers, quantitative data on both mothers and centers, and detailed case studies of other routine organizations (from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches), Unanticiapted Gains shows that how much people gain from their connections depends substantially on institutional conditions they often do not control, and through everyday process they may not even be aware of. Click here for more information and an excerpt.
Min Zhou publishes book on incorporation of Chinese into U.S. cities
June 5, 2009 at 12:12 am | In amenities, immigrants, neighborhoods, new books, organizational density, social organization, what to read | Leave a Comment
Min Zhou, a sociologist of immigration who has written on immigrant entrepreneurship and on schools as community institutions, has published a new book, Contemporary Chinese America. From the book description: Contemporary Chinese America is the most comprehensive sociological investigation of the experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States—and of their offspring—in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this volume, [Zhou] collects her original research on a range of subjects, including the causes and consequences of emigration from China, demographic trends of Chinese Americans, patterns of residential mobility in the U.S., Chinese American “ethnoburbs,” immigrant entrepreneurship, ethnic enclave economies, gender and work, Chinese language media, Chinese schools, and intergenerational relations.
Joe Galaskiewicz receives NSF funding to study Phoenix organizations and their impact on the urban community
May 21, 2009 at 7:34 pm | In amenities, barbershops, beauty salons, churches, grocery stores, neighborhoods, news, non-profits, organizational density, organizational networks, social service agencies, supermarkets | Leave a Comment
Joe Galaskiewicz at the University of Arizona recently received $162,274 from
the National Science Foundation to fund his project, “Organizations and their
Impact on the Urban Community.” This funding helps Joe continue his research on
the distribution of organizational resources across the Phoenix metropolitan
area, their effect on what children do in the free time on the weekends, and
how organizations migrate across the metropolitan community in response to
demographic shifts, changes in zoning laws, and competition among
organizational providers. The research looks at a broad range of
establishments that serve community residents including parks, recreation
centers, churches, retail outlets, restaurants, bowling and fitness centers,
barber shops, department stores, malls, theatres, and many, many more local
establishments. For some of Joe’s preliminary results, go to:
http://www.childresearch.net/RESOURCE/RESEARCH/2007/GALASKIEWICZ.HTM
New paper finds evidence that amenities drive household migration
May 16, 2009 at 9:51 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment“Local amenities and life-cycle migration: Do people move for jobs or fun?,” by Yong Chen and Stuart Rosenthal, published recently in the Journal of Urban Economics, uses national data from 1970 to 2000 to track household migration patterns. From the abstract: Do households move for jobs or fun, and where do they go when they move? We address these questions using the 1970–2000 US Census. Based on a panel of quality of life and business environment measures, households prefer MSAs in warm coastal areas and non-metropolitan locations, while firms prefer large, growing cities. In addition, cities with improving business environments acquire increasing shares of workers, especially workers with high levels of human capital; cities with improving consumer amenities become relatively more populated by retirees. Further analysis of individual level migration decisions indicates that regardless of marital status, young, highly educated households tend to move towards places with higher quality business environments. This tendency is especially pronounced among highly educated couples who are more subject to job market co-location problems. In contrast, regardless of education, couples near retirement tend to move away from places with favorable business environments and towards places with highly valued consumer amenities. These patterns help explain why areas unattractive to both households and business have struggled, as with upstate New York, while the sun-belt and other regions are thriving.
NYT Magazine personal account of foreclosure crisis
May 16, 2009 at 9:35 am | In neighborhoods | Leave a Comment
Edmund Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, is facing foreclosure, after a series of bad decisions regarding the purchase of his house in DC. A first-person account in the NYT Magazine reveals how the organizational incentives of his mortgage broker generated options that seemed too good to pass up. If a well-paid, well-informed expert whose job it was to follow the actions of the Federal Reserve for the nation’s newspaper of record could hit rock bottom, how should we expect low-income neighborhoods to fare? See this report.
Welfare States in Transition Symposium – May 15, 2009
April 25, 2009 at 10:22 am | In conference, non-profits, welfare offices | Leave a CommentREGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!
Please click below
https://ssanet.uchicago.edu/rsvp/centennial/event.cfm?eventid=090515
Registration is required for attendance.
The University of Chicago -School of Social Service Administration Centennial Welfare States in Transition: Social Policy Transformation in Organizational Practice
Friday, May 15, 2009
9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. with reception to follow
The School of Social Service Administration
969 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Organized by: Evelyn Brodkin, Associate Professor
Recent decades have witnessed a transformation in social policies and practices in the U.S. and internationally. Some of the most dramatic changes are occurring in policies that are reshaping the relationship between welfare and work. This symposium will examine this transformation, not only as enacted in law, but as enacted in practice. It will feature a series of papers and discussion that offer organizations-eye views of ways in which the changing relationship between welfare and work is being translated into practice in different states, cities, and in other countries.
The papers and discussion will consider shifts in both policy and practice, advancing new ways of thinking about the role of organizations in social policy transformation. As welfare and work policies have changed, so have the administrative arrangements under which they are implemented, arrangements increasingly constructed around new public management strategies of devolution, contracting, and performance measurement. How are these changes in policy and practice redefining the relationship between disadvantaged citizens, the state, and the market?
This symposium brings together researchers examining welfare-to-work as a global policy trend and new public management as a global administrative trend. It provides a forum for a discussion of the effects of these trends and their implications for future efforts to address poverty, inequality, and marginalization.
Confirmed Speakers:
Michael Adler
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh – Scotland
Martin Brussig
University of Duisburg-Essen, Institut Arbeit und Qualifikation (Institute for Work, Skills and Training) – Germany
Joel Handler
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), School of Law and School of Public Affairs – USA
Yeheskel Hasenfeld
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare – USA
Henning Jorgenson
Aalborg University, Centre for Labour Market Research (CARMA) – Denmark
Petra Kaps
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (Social Science Research Center Berlin), Institut für Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung (Institute for Labor Market Policy and Employment) – Germany
Matthias Knuth
University of Duisburg-Essen,Institut Arbeit und Qualifikation (Institute for Work, Skills and Training) – Germany
Susan Lambert
University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration – USA
Flemming Larsen
Aalborg University, Centre for Labour Market Research (CARMA) – Denmark
Michael Lipsky
Demos, Center for the Public Sector, and Georgetown University, Public Policy Institute – USA
Gregory Marston
University of Queensland, School of Social Work and Human Services – Australia
Jennifer Mosley
University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration – USA
William Sites
University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration – USA
C.C.A.M. (Els) Sol
University of Amsterdam, Hugo Sinzheimer Institute – Netherlands
Joe Soss
University of Minnesota, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs – USA
Ludo Struyven
Catholic University of Leuven, Higher Institute of Labour Studies – Belgium
H.H.A. (Rik) van Berkel
Utrecht University, School of Governance – Netherlands
Celeste Watkins-Hayes
Northwestern University, Departments of Sociology and African-American Studies – USA
This Symposium is sponsored in part by the Danish Social Science Research Council and RESq – an international research network studying reform of employment services and social welfare policy.
Contact 001.773.702.1166 or centennial@ssa.uchicago.edu with
questions.
http://ssacentennial.uchicago.edu/events/symposium-brodkin.shtml
New paper: Availability of healthy foods may decrease hypertension
March 28, 2009 at 8:28 am | In amenities, food deserts, grocery stores, health, hypertension, neighborhoods, supermarkets | Leave a Comment“Neighborhood Characteristics and Hypertension,” authored by Mahasin Mujahid and others, was recently published in Epidemiology. From the abstract: The goal of this study was to investigate cross-sectional associations between features of neighborhoods and hypertension and to examine the sensitivity of results to various methods of estimating neighborhood conditions. We used data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis on 2612 individuals 45-85 years of age…. Neighborhood (census tract) conditions potentially related to hypertension (walking environment, availability of healthy foods, safety, social cohesion) were measured using information from a separate phone survey conducted in the study neighborhoods…. Residents of neighborhoods with better walkability, availability of healthy foods, greater safety, and more social cohesion were less likely to be hypertensive.
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