Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data

This paper explores the costs and benefits of four avenues for achieving open Form 990 data: a mandate for e-filing, an IRS initiative to turn Form 990 data into open data, a third-party platform that would create an open database for Form 990 data, and a priori electronic filing. Sections also discuss the life and usage of 990 data. With bibliographical references

Ideology, Sociological Theories, and Public Policy

Excerpt from the full-text article: It is important that my basic assumptions about social theories be made explicit at the very outset. 1. Every social theory has implicit, if not explicit, assumptions about the nature of man/woman. 2. Every social theory has implicit, if not explicit, assumptions about the nature of society or the collectivity. 3. Every social theory has implicit, if not explicit, assumptions about the relationship of man/woman to society or to the collectivity. These assumptions in the theories are not empirical but normative and hence social theory is ideologically based. The fact that the social theories are ideologically based does not diminish their usefulness in helping us organize our knowledge of the social world. Rather, it becomes incumbent upon us as social scientists to explicate our assumptions in the three areas noted whenever we do research and/or participate in assisting groups of people in the formulation of social policies

Humanism and Social Work Paradoxes, Problems, and Promises

Although social work is viewed as a human service profession, with the implicit assumption that it is humanistically oriented, an examination of some of the theoretical orientations, practice settings and practice methodology will reveal a number of paradoxes, problems, and potential promises. I do not claim to provide more than a sampling, to provide a more exhaustive analysis would require considerably more time than is available

A Few Parting Words

The publication of this issue brings to an end thirteen years of my involvement with this Journal as Managing Editor, Publisher, and Editor. Ralph Segalman and I put the first issue together in the backyard of my house in West Hartford in 1972. The issue was printed in 1973 and marked the beginning of an adventure that has lasted all these years. We advanced the money to pay for the printing of that first issue. The subscriptions that came in enabled us to pay back the advances and to be self-supporting

The Anatomy of Burn-Out; The Love Paradigm as Antidote

The phenomena, burn-out, contains all of the factors of disappointment, disillusionment, fatigue, hopelessness, and powerlessness that a person experiences when coming face-to-face with the inherent contradictions between a desire to help fellow human beings and the structural demands and limitations of a social service enterprise wherein control is the central concern

Transcending Despair: A Prelude to Action

The central thesis of this essay is that in order to feel empowered to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons, persons need to face and transcend their despair when they contemplate the nuclear destruction of the planet. The repression of fear of nuclear disaster results in a sense of powerlessness to do anything about the inevitable destruction and consequently nothing is done, thereby allowing the Lovers of Death (Fromm, 1964) to build bigger and better ways to destroy the planet

Conflict Theories and Social Work Education

How one defines the world has consequences for one\u27s actions in the world. Sociology has attempted to utilize the scientific method to help human beings understand their social world. However, in the process of its development, sociology has reflected the ideological bias of its practitioners. (Mills, 1943). Irving Zeitlin (1968, pp. vii) claims Much of classical sociology arose within the context of a debate - first with eighteenth-century thought of the Enlightenment, and later with its true heir of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx. The central theme of this paper is that social work education makes extensive use of conflict theory in selecting the social science concepts we teach. The concepts are selected to fit the practice technology, which developed prior to the formalization of social work education. The conflict theories most prevalent in social work education are direct descendents of the conflict ideology developed in the name of business groups in modern society.. .which lies close to the mainstream of sociological development - Social Darwinism (Martindale, 1960). Social Darwinism is a polemic with the conflict ideology developed in the name of the proletariat-Marxism. We further maintain that the derivatives of Social Darwinism are an integral part of the prevailing ideas of society and reflect the continuing debate with Marxism. We will explore briefly the contrasting positions of Marxism and the mainstream sociology in the areas of stratification theories, alienation, and power and politics. Throughout we contend that we select from the body of social science theory and ideology those concepts which provide an intellectual rationale for our existing practice skills and technology

Social Welfare as Coercive Social Control

The key concepts which require some basic definitions in the title are social welfare, social control and coercion . For the purposes of this paper, social welfare is defined as those public programs designed to provide an individual who is in financial need with the resources (financial and/or in kind) to exist in our society. Social control refers to the entire range of actions and pressures which are designed to lead the individual to function within society without threatening to disrupt the social order. These actions and pressures are embodied in sanctions for enforcing group norms as well as in formal sanctions formulated through laws or administrative rulings. The sanctions are physical, material and/or symbolic [Etzioni, 1964]. Coercive refers to situations in which individuals either have no viable options available to them in making decisions or are required to conform to a specific classification or perform specific actions or desist from specific actions in order to obtain that which is an entitlement to resources and/or services. Kallen contends that coercion obtains whenever the action or thought of one individual or group is compelled or restrained by another through some form of physical or moral compulsion [Kallen, 1933]. There can be little doubt that the action of welfare recipients are frequently compelled or restrained through physical means, i.e., the level of assistance; and moral compulsions, t.e., the myths which define them as inferior

Quantum spacetime and the renormalization group: Progress and visions

The quest for a consistent theory which describes the quantum microstructure of spacetime seems to require some departure from the paradigms that have been followed in the construction of quantum theories for the other fundamental interactions. In this contribution we briefly review two approaches to quantum gravity, namely, asymptotically safe quantum gravity and tensor models, based on different theoretical assumptions. Nevertheless, the main goal is to find a universal continuum limit for such theories and we explain how coarse-graining techniques should be adapted to each case. Finally, we argue that although seemingly different, such approaches might be just two sides of the same coin.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of "Progress and Visions in Quantum Theory in View of Gravity: Bridging foundations of physics and mathematics", Leipzig, 201