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

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

Organizational Institutionalism and Sociology: A Reflection

[Excerpt] In 1991, DiMaggio and Powell observed: Institutional theory presents a paradox. Institutional analysis is as old as Emile Durkheim\u27s exhortation to study \u27social facts as things\u27, yet sufficiently novel to be preceded by new in much of the contemporary literature. (1991: 1) We argue that this paradox is, at least in part, the result of a long-standing tension in sociology between more materialist, interest-driven explanations of behavior and ideational, normative explanations, a tension that has often driven oscillating waves of sociological theorizing. It underlies many classical debates (e.g., between Spencer and Durkheim, Weber and Marx, and even Parsons and Mills), and the waves of theory associated with it have produced a variety of \u27neo-isms\u27, including neo-Marxist as well as neo-institutionalist theories. This distinction in explanatory approaches is linked to a more general theoretical problematic for sociologists: how to provide a single, coherent account of both stable, persisting patterns of social behavior, and the breakdown and elimination of what were once deeply-entrenched patterns. In this chapter, we examine the history of these distinctive explanatory approaches in sociology, and locate the origins of contemporary institutional work on organizations within this context. We also consider how more recent organizational analyses in the tradition of institutional theory have been driven by and reflect this basic tension

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

Procurement, Operation, and Relocation of the 16 Foot Millimeter Wavelength Antenna System Final Report, 13 Nov. 1961 - 13 Nov. 1966

Radiometer instrumentation of 16-foot millimeter wavelength antenna syste

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

Introduction to a Special Issue on Inequality in the Workplace (“What Works?)

[Excerpt] While overt expressions of racial and gender bias in U.S. workplaces have declined markedly since the passage of the original Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a half century ago (Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan 1997; Dobbin 2009), a steady stream of research indicates that powerful, if more covert forms of bias persist in contemporary workplaces (Greenwald and Banaji 1995; Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009; England 2010; Heilman 2012). In line with this research, high rates of individual and class-based lawsuits alleging racial and gender discrimination suggest that many employees perceive workplace discrimination to be an important, continuing employment problem (Hirsh 2009). Hence, to ensure workplace equity, prevent legal claims of discrimination, and/or rectify past and potential problems of bias, employers have implemented a growing array of organizational policies and practices aimed at reducing discrimination and increasing inclusion. Sometimes these efforts are voluntary; other times they are driven by specific mandates assigned to firms by courts as part of verdicts or settlements in cases involving charges of discrimination. Given the millions of dollars spent on making and monitoring such changes, surprisingly little evidence exists on the efficacy of various policies and practices adopted by organizations to address the problems and to capture the benefits of having a demographically diverse workforce. And even less evidence is available on the conditions that may moderate the impact of these policies and practices. Within the past decade, however, a limited but increasing body of research has focused on gauging how different practices associated with the label ‘‘diversity management’’ actually affect outcomes for women and minorities in organizations. The aim of this special issue is to bring together contemporary research that builds on this foundation in order to extend our understanding of the current variety of organizational arrangements that are intended to reduce bias and to promote more inclusive workplace

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