Collective Reputations Affect Donations to Nonprofits

Maintaining their organization's reputation is an important challenge for nonprofit managers. Organizations are often linked via a common reputation within their industry or sector such that publicity about one organization can spill over to affect how stakeholders view its peers. The linkages of common reputations may be particularly pronounced among nonprofits because important dimensions of their quality are difficult to observe directly. In this paper, we show that when the third‐party evaluator Charity Navigator rates nonprofits and displays ratings of their peers, it creates a collective reputation among groups of nonprofits performing similar functions in the same region. Through an analysis of 3,413 charities from 1993 through 2008, we find that donations to nonprofits rated by Charity Navigator rise and fall with the published Charity Navigator ratings of their peers. The effect appears to be due to the charity updating fundraising choices in response to the ratings rather than donor reactions. The presence of collective reputations has important implications for nonprofit management, such as collective self‐regulation programs.     

Jealousy,intimate abusiveness,and intrusiveness

An examination of self-report scales of 160 men and 76 of their partners or former partners found significant correlations between jealousy and abusiveness (for coupled dyads) or intrusiveness (for separated dyads). Jealousy was related to borderline personality and to MCMI-II measures of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Rejection sensitivity leading to pathological acts, such as abusiveness and intrusiveness, is seen as originating in early insecure attachment and exposure to shaming experiences.     

“Legitimate Strengths in Criminal Networks”

Extending from the organizing crime perspective, we study how legitimate world actors contribute to structuring a criminal network. This focus also underscores the facilitating role that some participants have in criminal settings. Based on a case study of an illegal drug importation network that was monitored by law-enforcement investigators over a two-year period, we find that although most legitimate actors (or non-traffickers) had nominal roles and contributed minimally to the criminal network's structure, a minority of these actors were critical to the network in two ways: (1) they were active in bringing other participants (including traffickers) into the network; and (2) they were influential directors of relationships with both non-traffickers and traffickers. The presence of such influential participants from legitimate occupational settings illustrates how upperworld figures can facilitate criminal enterprise beyond the mere contributions of legitimate status and expertise.     

Models of adulthood: An ethnographic study of an adolescent peer group

In this article a middle class adolescent peer group is studied in a community setting using ethnographic techniques. The purpose of the study is to describe the group's relationship to adults and to uncover the adult reference group after which the group modeled itself. Although this group was organized to help poor people in the United States and abroad and had extensive contact with adults who could be described as change agents working to close the economic gap between rich and poor, this group modeled itself after middle class adult managers. The youths were attracted to the change agent adults only in so far as they satisfied their desire for equal status interaction with adults. Attempts by the group to establish closer contact with their adult models were in conflict with their desire to maintain autonomy from adult domination. The concluding section compares the findings of this study to two ethnographic studies of adolescent groups that used secondary school sites.Received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Main research interest is applying ethnographic techniques to the study of educational process. Currently studying the urban principalship with a grant from the Spencer Foundation.