Binational Vital Signs: A Quality of Life Indicator Program for the San Diego–Tijuana Metropolitan Region1

This is a study of a binational community indicator program for the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan area (SDTMA). The key objective of the research was to produce a citizen-generated community indicator program (CIP). The study is closely based on the work of the two focus groups held in the two cities and offers a small program that has immediate practical potential for implementation. The program consists of a suite of thirty-five indicators for which data has been identified and provided. Fifteen of the indicators apply to Tijuana, twenty to San Diego. The program is built around principles of community well-being or quality of life (QOL). It is the first subregional attempt at the scale of the United States-Mexico Bi-National Region (BNR) to integrate existing environmental, social, and economic data into a single coherent program to inform community leaders about the condition of the SDTMA. The region covered by the CIP generally consists of the urbanized core of metropolitan Tijuana, the city of San Diego, and associated cities like Chula Vista and El Cajon within the southern part of San Diego County.     

Using network sampling in crime victimization surveys

Since crime victimizations are statistically rare events, surveys to estimate rates of victimization are difficult and expensive. In this paper, we examine the advantages of network sampling over traditional methods for conducting crime victimization surveys. Network sampling links population households in specified ways, for reporting purposes, in order to increase the probabilities of locating households with particular characteristics. We conducted a reverse record check field experiment to test whether a telephone survey using network sampling is feasible to collect crime victimization data. Three types of crimes-burglary, robbery, and assault-were tested along with two types of networks-relatives and co-workers/close friends. This paper examines the extent to which victims report their victimization experiences in a general crime and victimization interview and the extent to which a randomly selected relative or close friend will report the same victimization incident in an identical interview. A number of multiplicity counting rules are compared in terms of reporting errors and a mean square error analysis.     

Women's self concept and belief: A feminist approach to empowerment symbolism

Because most cultures use the metaphor of Male Godhead to legitimate male control of earthly objects, their women are led to internalise a self-image in which their natural purpose is read as the primary and ultimate bearers and carers of life. This cosmological task is defined as inferior, thus masking the fact that women develop an identity in which their self-evaluation includes the needs and contentment of others. Prevented from operating the same ethical values as their men, their minds and bodies mediate the pain caused to them and others by the limited moral responsibility required of men whose goals must be competitive and instrumental. The effort to articulate symbols to convey the female experience of personal identity as communal identity has involved the international women's movements to provide images unifying materials and spiritual purposes, and simultaneously to force men to see this as superior intersubjective praxis. Empowering women by asserting their interpersonal self-image as the norm is prerequisite for rationalising economic legal and scientific thinking.     

Organizational turnaround: moving beyond one-size-fits-all solutions

Abstract

Literature on organizational turnaround has frequently suggested, but rarely investigated, the possibility that turnaround strategies for failing organizations must be matched to the specific needs of the organization. Building on work related to causes of decline in private sector literature, this study offers a framework for matching strategic interventions to the current state of an organization’s functioning in terms of resources (material and human), coordination (horizontal and vertical), and the environment. Using a panel dataset of New York City schools, we find that two understandings of turnaround that often appear mutually exclusive—that an organization can improve performance by shoring up weaknesses and that an organization should play to its current strengths—can complement each other and may both appropriately describe different types of organizational challenges.     

The Politics of Higher Education: University President Ideology and External Networking

While the importance of networking is increasingly recognized by practitioners and scholars alike, little is known about why significant variance is observed in how often and with whom organizational leaders network. Further, while we know that political ideology plays a critical role in shaping decision making within public organizations, current models of networking have largely failed to consider the importance of ideology in driving networking efforts. Using data from a 2012 survey of U.S. university presidents and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, this article explores the role that president ideology plays in shaping networking behavior with political principals. Findings suggest that the effect of ideology on external networking efforts is moderated by state policy maker ideology.     

The Social Value of Self-Esteem

This essay reflects upon the current cultural skirmishes over the parenting practices of Americans, which have pitted “Helicopter Parents” against “Free-Range Kids”; “Tiger Mothers” against “Panda Dads;” and at-risk communities “Waiting for Superman” against privileged students in the “Race to Nowhere.” Despite the exaggerated claims of difference in these and other popular representations of the parenting wars, a common theme of building children’s self-esteem is evident as a cornerstone of contemporary American parenting practices. Through different means, the relatively privileged parents who write child-rearing memoirs (or confessionals) pursue a similar end: to build and enhance their children’s self-concept and emotional competence. In particular, professional-class parents who are anxious about their own prospects for continued success in a risky economy turn toward emotional capital as a necessary supplement to educational and extra-curricular success to ensure inter-generational transmission of advantage. The goals of emotional competence and self-esteem replicate the mechanisms of control to which elite parents are subjected in professional careers and therefore represent an important form of cultural capital in the reproduction of class advantages.     

On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts,Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.