Community‐Based Organizations and Institutional Work in the Remote Rural West

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long‐dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community‐based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California–based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state‐ or industry‐led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions.     

Interstate Spillovers,Fiscal Decentralization,and Public Spending on Medicaid Home‐ and Community‐Based Services

This article examines the interstate spillover effect of Medicaid expenditures for home‐ and community‐based services (HCBS) and tests the relationship between fiscal decentralization and public spending. Based on the theory of interstate strategic interaction, an empirical model is specified that explicitly accounts for interdependence in states’ spending decisions. The model is estimated by applying spatial econometric methods to panel data for the 50 U.S. states for 2000–2010. Findings show a positive interdependence in state HCBS expenditures that is contingent on similarity in citizen ideology between states. Fiscal decentralization, measured by transfer dependence and revenue autonomy, is positively related to Medicaid HCBS spending.     

How Do Career Strategies,Gender, and Work Environment Affect Faculty Productivity Levels in University‐Based Science Centers?1

Recent studies have shown that in many science and engineering fields, almost 40% of faculty are affiliated with university‐based research centers ( Corley & Gaughan, 2005 ). As major science funding organizations continue to increase annual levels of funding for interdisciplinary science centers, it is likely that this number will increase significantly over the next decade. Moreover, some scholars have argued that the rise of university‐based science centers has already led to the development of a new institutional form for the execution of university‐based research ( Bozeman & Boardman, 2004 ). Yet, interestingly few researchers have studied the impacts of this new institutional form on the productivity of individual researchers. The purpose of this article is to begin to address how individual career strategies and perceptions of scientific work environments within university‐based science centers relate to the productivity of academic scientists who participate in these centers. In particular, this article investigates the relationships between productivity, individual career strategies, and perceptions of scientific work environment across gender. The results of the study demonstrate that university‐based science centers might serve as an equalizing mechanism for male and female productivity levels. Yet, women scientists affiliated with these centers are significantly more likely to feel discriminated against—and they are less likely to embrace the most promising career strategy for the current structure of these centers.