Can Nonprofit Management Help Answer Public Management’s “Big Questions”?

Are the fields of nonprofit management and public management naturally complementary, or are they substitutes? Briefly surveying the nonprofit literature on board governance, volunteer management, and performance measurement, the author shows that study of the third sector can help inform public management’s “big questions”. As such, nonprofit studies and scholarship should represent an improvement to public administration curricula and a fertile source of ideas for public managers.     

Two-man and two-sibling paternity cases.

Traditional genetic marker systems rarely fail to resolve paternity disputes when two or more men are accused, except when men are brothers. A sibling of the biologic father may not be excluded by these laboratory tests and sometimes yields calculated odds of paternity that are equal to or higher than the true male parent. Resolved two-brother cases were compared with resolved cases involving two unrelated men. In each case, the residual odds of paternity were determined for each man and the greater was divided by the lesser to produce a paternity fraction. The paternity fraction is a useful indicator of biologic parentage when it exceeds a value of 10 (log10 of-the-odds score greater than or equal to 1). Tests for alleles at highly heterozygous loci are indicated in initial laboratory evaluations of cases involving brothers. Human leukocyte antigen and variable number of tandem repeat polymorphisms appear suitable.     

In Search of True Public Arts Support

Most of the debate over government arts support focuses on direct subsidies to nonprofit arts organizations. In this article, however, I show that a much larger amount of public sector money comes from indirect aid, in the form of tax revenues forgone on tax-deductible contributions by individuals. Specifically, every dollar in direct federal arts funding is accompanied by about $14 in indirect aid. Analysis of the 1996 General Social Survey shows that private givers and supporters of direct government aid fit different demographic profiles, meaning that direct and indirect funding owe to distinct constituencies. These findings lead to a number of implications for nonprofit and public arts managers.

It is sometime proper for the state to encourage and protect dishonorable but useful professions, without those who exercise them being more highly considered for that.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau ¹

     

Lowering the Cost of Pollution Control Versus Controlling Pollution: A Comment

Dwight Lee (1999) shows that thecollectivity may be better, not worse off,when a technically ``inefficient'' pollutionabatement technology is adopted. Thepurpose of this note is twofold. First, toshow that once rent-seeking is incorporatedinto the analysis, Lee's qualified supportfor a technically inefficient pollutionabatement technology is at bestproblematic, and at worst flawed. Second,to demonstrate that it is possible to makea less problematic normative case in favourof the adoption of the technicallyinefficient abatement policy.     

"Won't You Please Help Me Get My Son Home": Peonage, Patronage, and Protest in the World War II Urban South

During World War II, young African Americans from southern cities left their homes for what appeared to be patriotic job opportunities harvesting sugar cane in Florida. When returning workers described peonage and slavery instead, parents worried about their children's safety. After attempting to contact their children directly, the parents appealed to the federal government. Their decision to mobilize the federal government and the strategies they used to do so reveal important aspects of wartime African American protest that historians have previously overlooked. This article focuses on families instead of atomized individuals, revealing the importance of families, neighborhoods, and communities to the emergence of rights consciousness. It also complicates the historiographical dichotomy between rights consciousness and patronage relationships. Patrons sewed as liaisons with law enforcement agencies and provided links to a law-centered rights consciousness. For many historians, until protest exits the realm of patronage ties, it is not really protest, and once interactions with government themselves become bureaucratized they cease to be protest any longer. The efforts of the peons' families challenge both ends of this narrow category of protest; they both used patronage relations to lodge their protests and also forged rights consciousness within the legal process itself.     

Government Assistance Protects Low‐Income Families from Eviction

A lack of affordable housing is a pressing issue for many low‐income American families and can lead to eviction from their homes. Housing assistance programs to address this problem include public housing and other assistance, including vouchers, through which a government agency offsets the cost of private market housing. This paper assesses whether the receipt of either category of assistance reduces the probability that a family will be evicted from their home in the subsequent six years. Because no randomized trial has assessed these effects, we use observational data and formalize the conditions under which a causal interpretation is warranted. Families living in public housing experience less eviction conditional on pre‐treatment variables. We argue that this evidence points toward a causal conclusion that assistance, particularly public housing, protects families from eviction.     

Dress and Distinction in Nursing, 1860–1939: ‘A corporate (as well as corporeal) armour of probity and purity’ 1

This article considers the uniform and uniform rules which formed an important part of the ‘reformed nurse’ in the latter years of the nineteenth century and remained central to the concept of the nurse in the twentieth. It will be shown that the rules and regulations of nurses’ garb continued long after the rules for women’s dress in general had relaxed. These dress codes were used by the reformers of nursing to provide a ‘space’ between the ‘new or reformed nurse’ and her morally suspect predecessor, the Sairey Gamp figure in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. The nurses’ garb was created to provide a common identity for the profession at a time of rapid social change. But within this context it also represented its distinctiveness; uniform was a metaphor for the class divisions and symbolic fractures within the profession.     

Confronting Law Affectively: Encounters of a Patpong Sex Tourist

When considering spaces of sex-work such as Patpong in Bangkok, Thailand, the inclination is to be drawn into habitual debates concerning the legitimacy of sex-work and the clear objectification of sex-workers. While these concerns are valid and real, there are significant absences in terms of the theoretical mapping of the space, such as the affect of the presence of law, bodies, space and the sexual encounter itself. Law emerges as the most significant presence, since it both forms the transactional surface of Patpong and produces the confusion and revilement that results from the confluence of cold legal exchange with the tactile intimacy of the sexual encounter. This text explores the ethnographic space of Patpong in order to understand ways in which law’s transactional, effective surface is both embodied through subjectivication and spatially emplaced, yet also disrupted through the affective agency of the bodies and spaces it enfolds in order to produce this surface. This exploration will point to the limitations of law’s effective surface and suggest ways in which law might be located within a regime of affect, which returns the law to the body it subjectivises.