New book examines the historical mechanisms behind residential exploitation
February 24, 2010 at 3:31 pm | Posted in housing, neighborhoods, new books, race, reading list, what to read | Leave a comment
Rutgers University History Professor Beryl Satter, highlights the financial mechanisms of residential segregation in her new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. The daughter of Mark Satter, a Chicago lawyer who uncovered redlining tactics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Satter highlights the history that is buried in the minds of so many Chicago families, especially hers. Placing the story of a young African American couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton, at the center of the book, Satter provides personal examples of the hardship endured by African Americans during the Great Migration. The book goes into depth about contract selling, the practice in which landlords sold African Americans overpriced homes, kept the titles until black homeowners paid them off, and charged excessive interest rates to insure they never could. Contract selling cost thousands of migrating blacks their livelihoods and solidified many of the economic disparities in housing and access to credit that social scientists are working to understand today.
New edition of “Human Services as Complex Organizations” released
December 18, 2009 at 4:39 pm | Posted in amenities, job centers, new books, non-profits, poverty, race, social service agencies, welfare offices, what to read | Leave a comment
Sociologist and social welfare scholar Yeheskel Hasenfeld has recently published a new edition of his seminal volume, Human Services as Complex Organizations. This comprehensive and state-of-the-art collection on human service organizations weaves the latest theoretical and empirical studies in macro theory with contemporary examples from hospitals, schools, social service organizations, mental health centers, and public welfare agencies. Blending theory with application, this outstanding anthology highlights the moral choices and accomplishments made by human service organizations. University of Michigan Professor Emerius Mayer Zald writes, “Hasenfeld has done it again. An excellent collection of essays on many of the most important trends and issues involving human service organizations.” The volume features essays from urbanorgs.org members Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Evelyn Brodkin, Stephen R. Smith, Jodi Sandfort and many others.
Celeste Watkins-Hayes publishes book on the professional lives of bureaucrats in welfare offices
June 27, 2009 at 3:36 pm | Posted 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 | Posted 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 | Posted 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.
New book by Scott Allard
November 27, 2008 at 11:05 am | Posted in neighborhoods, new books, organizational density, social service agencies, what to read | Leave a comment
Out of Place: Poverty, Place and the New American Welfare State. Sweeping changes in welfare programs since 1996 have transformed the way America cares for its poor. Today, for every dollar spent on cash welfare payments, some twenty dollars are spent on service programs targeted at the working poor—job training, adult education, child care, emergency assistance, mental health care, and other social services. This important book examines our current system and the crucial role that geography plays in the system’s ability to offer help.
Drawing on unique survey data from almost 1,500 faith-based and secular service organizations in three cities, Scott W. Allard examines which agencies are most accessible to poor populations and looks at the profound impact of unstable funding on assistance programs. Allard argues that the new system has become less equitable and reliable, and he concludes with practical policy recommendations that address some of the more pressing issues in improving the safety net.
New book by Ramakrishnan and Bloemraad
September 29, 2008 at 10:14 am | Posted in immigrants, new books, what to read | Leave a comment
Civic Hopes and Political Realities, edited by S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Irene Bloemraad, examines the role of community organizations in the political engagement of immigrants. From the publisher: For many Americans, participation in community organizations lays the groundwork for future political engagement. But how does this traditional model relate to the experiences of today’s immigrants? In Civic Hopes and Political Realities, experts explore how civic groups are shaping immigrants’ quest for political effectiveness. Civic Hopes and Political Realities shows that while immigrant organizations play an important role in the lives of members, their impact is often compromised by political marginalization and a severe lack of resources.
New book by Sandra Smith
September 24, 2008 at 8:16 pm | Posted in job centers, job search, new books, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment
In Lone Pursuit:Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor, based on interviews with jobs seekers and job holders and on observations in a state job center, Smith examines the use of personal and institutional social capital among the black urban poor. From the publisher: Myriad theories have been put forward to explain the persistent joblessness among the black poor. In Lone Pursuit, Smith cuts through this thicket of competing explanations to examine the actual process through which the black poor search for jobs. Based on in-depth interviews with 105 low-income and low-skilled African American men and women, Smith reveals that pervasive distrust between black poor jobseekers and their labor market intermediaries makes the activation of personal and institutional forms of social capital for job-finding unlikely.
New book by Martin Sanzchez-Jankowski
August 9, 2008 at 2:47 am | Posted in barbershops, beauty salons, gangs, grocery stores, neighborhoods, new books, what to read | Leave a comment
Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (University of California Press), based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in New York and Los Angeles, examines how several types of local organizations—the grocery store, the barbershop and beauty salon, the local high school, the gang, and the housing project—structure order and stability in urban neighborhoods.
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