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.
Toronto researcher finds strong patterns of personality traits across neighborhoods
October 27, 2009 at 4:35 pm | Posted in creative class, data, neighborhoods, personality, what to read | 1 Comment
Are Chicago’s South Siders more agreeable than their North Side neighbors? In which neighborhoods are Chicagoans most open to new experiences? University of Toronto’s Kevin Stolarick has taken personality data from a study of more than 2,500 Chicagoans who took “The Big Five Personality Test” and mapped the data onto Chicago neighborhoods. The data reveal strong patterns across neighborhoods. For example, people who see themselves as extroverted appear to cluster on the South Side; those with higher neurotic scores, on the far North Side. Stolarick works in Richard Florida’s Martin Prosperity Institute, which has seen controversy in recent months. See articles Chicago Tribune and Chicago Redeye.
Michael McQuarrie and Nicole Marwell publish new paper on “The Missing Organizational Dimension in Urban Sociology”
August 22, 2009 at 9:14 am | Posted in reading list, what to read | 1 CommentUrbanOrgs members Michael McQuarrie and Nicole Marwell have a new paper coming out in the September issue of the journal City and Community. The paper, “The Missing Organizational Dimension in Urban Sociology,” takes issue with the treatment of organizations in much urban sociology. The authors argue that both Marxian political economists and Chicagoan ethnographers and quantitative analysts treat organizations as derivative rather than productive of urban social relations. McQuarrie and Marwell do not see this problem as epistemological or methodological. Instead, they argue that it is rooted in the objects of analysis that urban sociologists choose. Drawing on key elements of structuration theory, these scholars attempt to lay the groundwork for improving the treatment of organizations in urban sociology by flagging some of the key insights in the sociology of organizations. They do not view this intellectual borrowing as a one-way street and emphasize that urbanists have a contribution to make to sociological thinking about organizations. Correcting these problems, the authors point out, is essential if we are to understand the link between contemporary institutional transformations and urban neighborhoods. The article appears in the September 2009 issue of City and Community (Volume 8, Issue 3).
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.
Study finds racial difference in prevalence of political advocacy organizations
July 9, 2009 at 10:26 am | Posted 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 | 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 paper finds that fast food restaurants in neighborhood may increase child obesity
February 17, 2009 at 8:38 pm | Posted in amenities, food deserts, neighborhoods, obesity, what to read | Leave a comment“The Effect of Fast Food Restaurants on Obesity,” by Janet Currie and her colleagues, was recently released by the NBER. Using a massive dataset, the authors find a strong association between proximity to a fast food restaurant and obesity levels among school children. From the abstract: “We investigate the health consequences of changes in the supply of fast food using the exact geographical location of fast food restaurants. Specifically, we ask how the supply of fast food affects the obesity rates of 3 million school children and the weight gain of over 1 million pregnant women. We find that among 9th grade children, a fast food restaurant within a tenth of a mile of a school is associated with at least a 5.2 percent increase in obesity rates. There is no discernable effect at .25 miles and at .5 miles. Among pregnant women, models with mother fixed effects indicate that a fast food restaurant within a half mile of her residence results in a 2.5 percent increase in the probability of gaining over 20 kilos. The effect is larger, but less precisely estimated at .1 miles. In contrast, the presence of non-fast food restaurants is uncorrelated with obesity and weight gain. Moreover, proximity to future fast food restaurants is uncorrelated with current obesity and weight gain, conditional on current proximity to fast food. The implied effects of fast-food on caloric intake are at least one order of magnitude smaller for mothers, which suggests that they are less constrained by travel costs than school children. Our results imply that policies restricting access to fast food near schools could have significant effects on obesity among school children, but similar policies restricting the availability of fast food in residential areas are unlikely to have large effects on adults”
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