Beyond the three-component model of organizational commitment

This article offers a conceptual critique of the three-component model (TCM) of organizational commitment (Allen & Meyer, 1990) and proposes a reconceptualization based on standard attitude theory. The authors use the attitude-behavior model by Eagly and Chaiken (1993) to demonstrate that the TCM combines fundamentally different attitudinal phenomena. They argue that general organizational commitment can best be understood as an attitude regarding the organization, while normative and continuance commitment are attitudes regarding specific forms of behavior (i.e., staying or leaving). The conceptual analysis shows that the TCM fails to qualify as general model of organizational commitment but instead represents a specific model for predicting turnover. The authors suggest that the use of the TCM be restricted to this purpose and that Eagly and Chaiken's model be adopted as a generic commitment model template from which a range of models for predicting specific organizational behaviors can be extracted. Finally, they discuss the definition and measurement of the organizational commitment attitude. Covering the affective, cognitive, and behavioral facets of this attitude helps to enhance construct validity and to differentiate the construct from other constructs

State-Dominated Civil Society and Migrant Children's Education in Beijing

In China, the ‘tidal wave’ of rural migrant workers has created unique challenges for the government, one being migrant children's education in cities. Despite central policies emphasising the roles of receiving governments and public schools in providing compulsory education for these children, many migrant children in Beijing still attend privately run, often unlicensed migrant schools. Though migrant children's education is attracting increasing government and societal attention, questions concerning the extent to which this decentralisation of responsibilities has created space for civil society in the policy process remain unexplored. This article examines the role of the civil society actors involved and draws on qualitative interviews and the author's fieldwork experience to show that their limited capacity to significantly impact the situations of these schools is shaped by a lack of state–civil society interaction, as well as limited collaboration between key civil society actors and low levels of interaction amongst the schools themselves