An organizational analysis of political action committees

As the number and putative importance of political action committees have grown, so too has scholarly attention to this new breed of political organization. Yet this attention has been uneven. Although much is now known about the aggregate spending patterns of PACs, much less is known about their internal lives. The present study attempts to open the PAC black box to empirical inquiry. Drawing on interviews with the managers of 70 Washington-based political action committees, we suggest how theoretical perspectives about formal voluntary associations may be usefully applied in explaining the behavior of PACs. After examining the relationships among several variables — organizational goals, constituency relations and decision making, strategy, and interorganizational relations — we show how these forces affect the behavior of corporate, trade/membership, labor, and nonconnected PACS.     

SITUATED IDENTITIES OF YOUNG, AFRICAN AMERICAN FATHERS IN LOW-INCOME URBAN SETTINGS

Young, low-income, African American fathers have been at the center of research, practice, and policy on families over the past decade. This article uses a "voicing" analytic technique to examine identities among young, low-income, African American fathers living in an urban setting; the intersections of these identities; and the fathers' perceptions of the influences of familial, peer, and legal systems as barriers and resources in their development as fathers and the sustainability of their fathering roles. The primary questions addressed urban fathers' representations of their transition to fatherhood, intergenerational relationships, transformative events, and visions of a possible self. Results from a survey, focus groups, and interviews suggest that the fathers seek to reinvent themselves and reconstruct their identities by separating from street life, redefine home as a place of stability, and challenge the practices of social and legal systems that appear to work against their responsible fathering.     

Ethical Considerations in the Conduct of Electronic Surveillance Research

The extant clinical literature indicates profound problems in the assessment, monitoring, and documentation of care in long-term care facilities. The lack of adequate resources to accommodate higher staff-to-resident ratios adds additional urgency to the goal of identifying more cost-effective mechanisms to provide care oversight. The ever expanding array of electronic monitoring technologies in the clinical research arena demands a conceptual and pragmatic framework for the resolution of ethical tensions inherent in the use of such innovative tools. CareMedia is a project that explores the utility of video, audio and sensor technologies as a continuous real-time assessment and outcomes measurement tool. In this paper, the authors describe the seminal ethical challenges encountered during the implementation phase of this project, namely privacy and confidentiality protection, and the strategies employed to resolve the ethical tensions by applying principles of the interest theory of rights.     

East Africa--Its Difficulties and Possibilities

Mr. Hunter was, until recently, the East African manager ofMessrs. Dalgety and Co., Ltd., the well-known farmers' agents.He was also a Member of many East African war-time committees.This article is a reprint of the latter part of a lecture hegave, under the chairmanship of Lord Cranworth, at a combinedmeeting of the Royal African Society and the Royal Empire Societyon the 29th March. In the first part, he had briefly describedthe East African war effort. He then went on to give his viewson the racial situation in Kenya, starting with the problemsof white settlement.