Analysis of The Black Fairy by Fenton Johnson

This essay examines a rare early twentieth-century children’s story about and geared towards African Americans: “The Black Fairy” by Fenton Johnson. “The Black Fairy” was published in The Upward Path (1920), an anthology designed as a “Reader for Colored Children” that contained poetry, essays, short stories, folklore, biographical sketches, and drawings by prominent African American writers, educators, and other personalities of the time. Through a four -part analysis, including how the story fits into literary history, the ways in which the story responds to its historical and cultural context, the “cultural work” of the text, and an exploration of the way that the culture regarded children, the essay shows how this fantasy story helped children of this era to understand the history of slavery and encouraged feelings of brotherly love among all races

Comments on War and Peace

[Excerpt] In War and Peace, Baron, Dobbin, and Jennings provide an integrative analysis of the role of internal organizational requirements and external environmental forces in structuring the personnel function in modern organizations. To appreciate fully the scope of this contribution to organizational theory and research, it is useful to consider briefly the general development of studies of formal organizations over the last four decades

The Impact of Working at Home on Career Outcomes of Professional Employees

This research examines the claim that working at home adversely affects employees\u27 career progress, by comparing the career achievements of professional employees who work at home and those who do not. The findings contradict assertions of negative consequences of working at home. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Occupations, Organizations, and Boundaryless Careers

[Excerpt] The central premise of this chapter is that, as organizations become less important in defining career pathways and boundaries, occupations will become increasingly more important. While occupational demarcations have always had a significant, albeit often unacknowledged, impact on individual career patterns, the significance of such demarcations for careers is likely to be heightened by current trends in employment relationships. In this chapter, then, I review the sociological literature on occupational labor markets and on the structure of professional occupations, in an effort to shed light on a number of issues associated with occupationally based careers. Of specific concern are three questions: What kinds of job and occupational characteristics foster such careers? When occupations become the major locus of careers, what are the consequences for organizations? And finally, what are some of the key career-management issues for individuals pursuing occupation-ally based careers

In Pursuit of Affordable Health Care: On the Ground Lessons From Families in Massachusetts

Based on focus group discussions, compares the coverage and healthcare costs of families with employer-sponsored insurance and those without after the state's 2006 healthcare reform. Draws lessons on eligibility rules, enrollment procedures, and outreach

Approaches to Covering the Uninsured: A Guide

Explains the main options for expanding heath insurance coverage -- strengthening the current system, making it more affordable or more accessible, and changing how it is financed -- and their potential impact. Compares current reform proposals

The Institutionalization of Institutional Theory

[Excerpt] Our primary aims in this effort are twofold: to clarify the independent theoretical contributions of institutional theory to analyses of organizations, and to develop this theoretical perspective further in order to enhance its use in empirical research. There is also a more general, more ambitious objective here, and that is to build a bridge between two distinct models of social actor that underlie most organizational analyses, which we refer to as a rational actor model and an institutional model. The former is premised on the assumption that individuals are constantly engaged in calculations of the costs and benefits of different action choices, and that behavior reflects such utility-maximizing calculations. In the latter model, by contrast, \u27oversocialized\u27 individuals are assumed to accept and follow social norms unquestioningly, without any real reflection or behavioral resistance based on their own particular, personal interests. We suggest that these two general models should be treated not as oppositional but rather as representing two ends of a continuum of decision-making processes and behaviors. Thus, a key problem for theory and research is to specify the conditions under which behavior is more likely to resemble one end of this continuum or the other. In short, what is needed are theories of when rationality is likely to be more or less bounded. A developed conception of institutionalization processes provides a useful point of departure for exploring this issue

Introduction to the Demography Volume

[Excerpt] This volume represents another effort by Research in the Sociology of Organizations to focus on a crucial issue in organizational sociology. In some of the previous volumes, we concentrated on organizations and professions (Volume 8, 1991), the structuring of participation in organizations (Volume 7, 1989), and the social psychological processes in organizations (Volume 3, 1984). This volume concentrates on one of the most important emerging issues in organizational sociology—the issue of organizational demography

Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution

Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a process are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the other hand, largely remains a process theory of such abstraction that it has generated few empirical studies. This paper discusses the similarities between the two theories, develops an argument for why a fusion of the two would enable institutional theory to significantly advance, develops a model of institutionalization as a structuration process, and proposes methodological guidelines for investigating the process empirically