Nonprofit Organizations,Community, and Shared Urgency: Lessons from the Arts and Culture Sector

Mainstream arts management and stakeholder research highlights the relationships between nonprofit organizations and community, yet empirical research on how those interactions result in outcomes is limited. This article looks at the stakeholder attribute “urgency” and the impact on and by the stakeholder group “community.” Building on a comparative case study of five cultural organizations and their capital intensive facility projects, our research finds that both new and existing organizations embrace a community-wide process whereby internal and external stakeholders are identified, relationships nurtured, social and emotional bonds strengthened, and shared urgency between community and organization is created towards specific outcomes.     

An Exploratory Framework for Community-Led Research to Address Intimate Partner Violence: a Case Study of the Survivor-Centered Advocacy Project

This case study discusses the Survivor-Centered Advocacy (SCA) Project, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project that convened anti-violence advocates from culturally specific communities to design and implement research. The project used a unique approach to build grassroots research capacity and center survivors of intimate partner violence from historically marginalized communities. This approach coalesced into the creation of an exploratory Community-Led Research (CLR) framework that incorporated trauma-informed, research justice and language justice principles. The CLR framework responded to community members’ desire to lead, rather than simply participate in, the research process. As a result, five studies were designed and executed by practitioners turned community-based researchers, most of whom had never before engaged in research, except as subjects. The CLR framework integrated the skills and experiences of community-based and external researchers, and led to high levels of engagement, rich data, more equitable research processes and innovative research projects.     

Global standards and outcomes of a legal education: how rubrics can help to deliver objectivity,transparency, verifiability and consistency

Rubrics may be time-consuming to create but they are superior to the usual method of evaluation: a number scrawled at the bottom of an essay without any context, feed-back or feed-forward. The author has used rubrics at Kuwait International Law School since 2012 and found them useful in at least four ways: they allow students to understand what is expected of them before they attempt a task; they take the “mystery” out of marks; they encourage fairness and promote a culture of trust between student and teacher; and they allow the teacher to engage in post-task meaningful discussions with students – they create “teaching moments”. Grading becomes more transparent and the faculty becomes more accountable to their students. A group of law deans adopted the “Singapore Declaration on Global Standards and Outcomes of a Legal Education” in 2013. This article addresses how the values in that Declaration are directly met by the use of rubrics. Transparency, accountability and authenticity in law teaching are all part of the Declaration: this article argues that rubrics deliver all three. The article addresses the research behind rubrics, the connection between the Singapore Declaration and rubrics and some “lessons learnt” from the author’s teaching experiences.     

Ethical Implications of Methodological Settings in Arts Management Research: The Case of Performance Evaluation

In this article, we analyze research on the evaluation of the artistic outcome of arts organizations. Inspired by Wicks and Freeman's new pragmatic approach to organization studies, we give an ethical question a central role in our analysis: to what extent is current research able to serve the needs of individual arts organizations and their communities? Our results highlight the influence of research traditions on the ethical implications of performance evaluation research. To serve the arts world, further research should aim at in-depth understanding of the specific complexity of different contexts rather than at decontextualized generalization of simplified universal principles.     

Are Congressional Leaders Middlepersons or Extremists? Yes

Infuential theories of legislative organization predict that congressional leaders will be selected from the center of their parties. Yet previous research has generally rejected the “middleperson hypothesis,” finding leaders to be extremists. We challenged these findings by testing more‐appropriate null hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulation. We found that congressional leaders (and leadership candidates as a whole) tend to be closer to their party's median than would occur by chance, but leaders also tend to be selected from the left of the median for Democrats and to the right for Republicans. Compared to the pool of announced candidates for leadership positions, winners are not ideologically distinctive. This result suggests that factors affecting the ideology of leaders tend to operate more at the candidate emergence stage.     

中间层级何以保障政府运转? ——政府过程中的副职领导研究

【问题】中国副职领导官员通过怎样的机制介入政府过程?作为中间层级的政府群体,他们如何处理政府运行中的组织目标和执行能力的关系?副职领导官员对于理解政府治理有着怎样的理论与实践意义?【方法】论文基于田野调查和访谈,重点关注政府中的互动“事件”,依据“条条—块块”“上层—下层”“重要—日常”维度获得了19个案例,并进行了扎根理论分析。【发现】副职领导官员凭借分管、集体化和复杂性特征成为兼顾组织目标和执行能力的“保障性耦合枢纽”,并表现出三种机制:其一,方案转化机制,即结合价值目标和能力水平议定行动方案;其二,激励统率机制,即在上级授权之下动员、组织和引导下属官员;其三,调适纠偏机制,即对组织运行的潜在问题进行调节。这些机制使政府过程富有层层过渡的弹性,把压力化指标不断转化,并将激励链条贯穿于组织网络之中。【贡献】组织不会一直保持均衡结构,而中国情境中的副职领导官员能够使政府组织实现动态平衡,启示了中间层级研究的价值。论文审视了副职领导官员群体的重要性,揭示了他们在中国科层组织中的独特作用:作为积极的集体性行动者,副职领导官员串联协同各个层级,将政府有效运转起来。     

Niche crime: The Columbus gangs study

Even though researchers have studied gangs for many years now, very little is known about the criminal activity of gang leaders. The purpose of this study is to examine the types of criminal activities in which gang leaders participate. Analysis of the criminal histories of 83 gang leaders from Columbus, Ohio, suggests that gangs there specialize in certain types of crime. These data imply that gang suppression policies might be more effective if they target specific niches of the crime market. The Office of Criminal Justice Services of the State of Ohio funded this research under Grant No. 91-JJ-C010682. The author wishes to thank Dr. Michael R. Sutton of Nottingham Trent University for his contributions to this article.     

Semiotics and the Spectacle of Transformation in Copyright Law

Copyright law is often premised on the identification of an author of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work, and then giving this author exclusive rights for a limited period to control the commercial exploitation of his or her intellectual creation. However, the hegemonic modernist position of the romantic authorial text has been challenged by numerous scholars who have argued that the meaning of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination. Roland Barthes’ work, controversial at the time of publication with its assault on modernity and the primacy of authorial control, has nonetheless laid the groundwork for an important body of scholarship on interpretive communities. Whether one adopts the position of neoconservative postmodernism or poststructural postmodernism, this article argues that a semiotic analysis of works of copyright as “signs”, “myths” and “polysemous texts” will nonetheless offer an important framework to understand the full reach of the transformative use doctrine in the United States today.     

Public Art as a Tool for Environmental Outreach: Insights on the Challenges of Implementation

Artistic works can be utilized in an environmental-focused educational capacity, particularly when installed in the public realm. While some research on “ecological art” has been conducted in other countries, little attention has been paid to its application in Canada. This article addresses insights derived from in-depth interviews with members of three not-for-profit art organizations in the City of Toronto that are engaged in producing public artworks intended to provoke thought about the environment. Our findings reveal three key impediments to the application of public art as a tool for environmental outreach.     

Demographic changes in european industrializing towns

Large databases assembled for industrializing European cities now permit crosscultural comparisons of populations that underwent demographic changes as a result of the industrialization process in the nineteenth century. The article draws into a comparative framework communities in France, Sweden, and Belgium, and compares their population development during early industrialization when population growth was rapid (paroxysmal). Special attention is paid to household structure, infant, and child mortality, and differential behaviors of “immigrant” and “native” populations. Finally, the article offers a general model population change during early industrialization as a comparative framework for future research.     

Demographic changes in european industrializing towns: Examples and Elements for Comparison

Large databases assembled for industrializing European cities now permit crosscultural comparisons of populations that underwent demographic changes as a result of the industrialization process in the nineteenth century. The article draws into a comparative framework communities in France, Sweden, and Belgium, and compares their population development during early industrialization when population growth was rapid (paroxysmal). Special attention is paid to household structure, infant, and child mortality, and differential behaviors of “immigrant” and “native” populations. Finally, the article offers a general model population change during early industrialization as a comparative framework for future research.     

DIRECT PARENTAL CONTROLS AND DELINQUENCY*

Until recently, “direct controls” by parents have been summarily dismissed by delinquency researchers as theoretically and empirically unimportant. Although prior research indicates that various measures of direct parental controls (e.g., the amount of time spent interacting with parents) are related to delinquency, the correlations are uniformly weak and often not significant. However, when the term “direct control” is reconceptualized to include specific components—normative regulation, monitoring, and punishment—the results indicate that direct controls by parents have as great an impact on delinquency as that of “direct controls” or parental “attachments.” Further, the results suggest that the form of the relation between direct controls and delinquency is not simple, direct, and linear. Depending on which specific component of direct control is examined, its relationship to delinquency may be either linear or nonlinear, positive or inverse.     

The Aesthetic Account of Everyday Life in Organizations: A Report on Recent Developments in Organizational Research

This article examines recent advances in organizational studies that disputed the dominance of conventional-positivist paradigms by addressing everyday life in organizations through the lens of aesthetic principles. First, I discuss developments in theory and methods, focusing on the “strong” version of Organizational Aesthetics that defends new conceptions about the nature of organizations and experiences of organizational life. Then, I illustrate this new account using two relevant studies. My research finds that the aesthetic account of organizations provides concepts and modes of analysis able to better respond to current conceptual and practical challenges both in organizational research and arts management.     

Nation as Partnership: Law, "Race," and Gender in Aotearoa New Zealand's Treaty Settlements

This article uses postcolonial theory to analyze the dynamic convergence of two significant international trends in Aotearoa New Zealand: the movement for reparations for historical colonial injustices, and the economic reform process known as “structural adjustment,” or Reaganomics in the United States, which was intended to produce a competitive nation of individual entrepreneurs. It argues that analysis of the interrelationships of law, “race,” gender, and nation in this convergence illuminates the reproduction and reshaping of colonial tropes, or historical racial configurations produced through colonization, in these current trends. In Aotearoa New Zealand, claims by indigenous Maori activists for self‐determination and redress of historical injustices spurred the emergence of alternative imagined communities with the potential to transform the nation. These alternative visions for the nation were shaped and limited by the economic law and policy reform of structural adjustment, producing a new official nationalism of partnership, implemented in settlements of breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi 1840. These partnerships resulted in a new individual identity of Maori men as entrepreneurs in a competitive nation. It produced a symbolic alliance of men across race that silenced and erased Maori activists' demands, and the leadership of Maori women, at the national level. The high profile partnerships, the erasure of Maori women, and relentless media attention to claims of sexism in Maori culture reproduced colonial tropes with images of the “progress” of the partnerships “saving” brown women from the sexism of brown men and “traditional” cultures. In this complex process the settlements were rational exercises of agency by the new Maori entrepreneurs with the goal of achieving economic autonomy, and worked to silence and erase the leadership of Maori women at the national level, even while women continued to be recognized as leaders at the local and regional levels. This analysis suggests that realization of the transformative potential of claims for redress of historical racial injustices requires attention to the repetition of raced and gendered dynamics of imagined communities that shape and limit that potential.     

Constructing Achievement in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal’s public discourse (notably its case law and Annual Reports) can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has “irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law” and lists six specific achievements: “Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law”. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of ‘achievement’ actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY.     

Regulation and In-Company Environmental Management in the Netherlands*

This paper addresses the relationship between preventive systems of social control and regulation of the behavior of public bodies and private organizations. Illustrated with material on new developments in self-regulation concerning environmental management in companies in the Netherlands, the author argues that a combination of stimulated (or “regulated”) self-regulation and stringent enforcement policies is feasible and should lead to company compliance with environmental regulation. The article discusses the assertion that to reduce the social distance between government and individual citizen, between regulator and regulated, a mixture of policy instruments is needed, ergo: by involving societal groups of interested people in policy formation and self-regulation, enhancing the creation of normative systems (involvement “by association”) on the one hand and the availability of adequate law enforcement procedures on the other, corporations, through responsive government regulation, could promote an adequate and successful preventive system of social control.     

Mapping Police Organizational Change: From a Mechanistic Toward an Organic Model

Community police organizations have been the focus of substantial research since the 1960s. Recommendations from this research have frequently suggested some degree of reform. This reform effort has been directed in part at the oragnizational design of police departments, emphasizing movement away from a mechanistic to more of an organic approach. This article describes mechanistic and organic model constructs and relates them to both continuum and matrix change perspectives and a change problem-intervention strategy typology. The matrix and typology are used to “map” the change process associated with team policing, which is one example of attempts to make police organizations more organic.     

Using Reasonable Efforts Determinations to Improve Systems and Case Practice in Cases Involving Family Violence and Child Maltreatment

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 reinforced that the safety, permanency, and well‐being of the child should be the primary concerns when making decisions about child protection interventions, child placement, and efforts at reunification. The court's role in oversight of agency practice in individual cases through the requirement of specific judicial findings as a condition of receipt of certain funding was also maintained and strengthened by ASFA. Based on the recognition of the number of cases where there is a co‐occurrence of domestic violence and child maltreatment, there is a need for communities and agencies to set reasonable expectations of good practice for responding to the issues raised. As the community sets the expectations of good practice through agency policy, training, and service delivery, the judiciary, through the findings regarding “continuation in the home” or “reasonable efforts” in each individual case, provides the oversight of practice required by ASFA. This article will explore the current applications of reasonable efforts, discuss ways that courts and communities are defining the concept, and examine the need for the development of a reasonable efforts protocol.     

Protecting Rural Church-Going Immigrant Women from Family Violence

Rural Latino immigrant women at risk of family violence may perceive churches as their only source of help. However, immigrant church leaders may be poorly equipped to address family violence in their congregations. This article describes a project designed to stimulate and support appropriate responses to family violence by rural immigrant churches, including those identified with conservative theological views on women. The primary goal was to provide rural Latino church leaders with culturally sensitive materials and resources they were willing to use with their congregations. We collaborated with local service providers who assisted in recruiting the church leaders for the pastors’ workshops where the resource materials were presented. Survey data indicated most of the pastors were receptive to the content and planned to incorporate it into their church work. Suggestions are made for future research on this culturally sensitive approach to addressing family violence in the immigrant community.     

The Force of International Law: Lawyers' Diplomacy on the International Scene in the 1920s

Where does international law (IL) draw its authority from a still weakly institutionalized international scene deprived of the warrants of a state? To address this classical debate, the article draws from a case study on the social and professional structure of the “international legal community” as it emerged during the 1920s as part of the rise of multilateralism and international organizations. It focuses on the “situation of the international lawyers” of the time, starting with the multiple and often antagonistic roles they play (as legal advisers, scholars, judges, diplomats, politicians, etc.) and the variety of interests and causes they defend (states, international organizations, professional interests, etc.) in international politics. It argues this heteronomy of international lawyers helps understand the autonomization of international law. Far from being opposed to one another it has often been assumed—realism and idealism, national loyalty and international loyalty, political logic and learned logic—actually gain when analyzed as various modes of affirming a single cause—that of an international rule of law. This attention given to the “situation of international lawyers” and to the way they manage their various allegiances also accounts for the particular vision of the “International” and of “Law and Politics” relationships that are encapsulated in this emerging international corpus juris.