Report finds reduction of Chicago’s “food desert” between 2006 and 2009
July 13, 2009 at 9:07 pm | Posted in food deserts, grocery stores, health, neighborhoods, organizational density, poverty, what to read | Leave a commentThe Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group has released a follow-up of its 2006 report on “food deserts”—areas deprived of grocery stores selling high quality foods—in Chicago. The researchers find that, on average, the total Chicago food desert became smaller by 1.4 square miles. However, the change was uneven, and in some neighborhoods conditions worsened. The study finds that most neighborhoods deprived of quality grocery stores are located on the West and South sides.
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.
New paper finds that vertical ties among organizations needed for economic reform
January 15, 2009 at 12:16 am | Posted in neighborhoods, non-profits, organizational networks, poverty, what to read | Leave a commentIn “Collaboration Is Not Enough: Virtuous Cycles of Reform in
Transportation Policy,” Margaret Weir, Jane Rongerude, and Christopher K. Ansell analyze the vertical and horizontal networks of development organizations in Chicago and Atlanta. From the abstract: “Over the past two decades, a burgeoning literature has touted the promise of regional collaboration to address a wide range of issues ranging from economic development to poverty and sustainability. This article challenges the premise that horizontal collaboration alone can empower regional decisionmaking venues. By analyzing the organizational networks that emerged in Chicago and Los Angeles in the wake of federal transportation policy reforms in the early 1990s, we show that vertical power is essential to building regional capacities. Only by exercising power at multiple levels of the political system can local reformers launch a virtuous cycle of reform that begins to build enduring regional capacities.” Forthcoming in Urban Affairs Review.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
