The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

In the context of the apparent closure of neoliberalism, I can think of no more profoundly humanist statement than “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dom...

A Sociological Imagination

This chapter focuses on the geographic dimensions of knowledge spillovers. The starting point comes from the economics of innovation and technological change. This tradition focused on the innovation production function however it was aspatial or insensitive to issues involving location and geography. However, empirical results hinted that knowledge production had a spatial dimension. Armed with a new theoretical understanding about the role and significance of knowledge spillovers and the manner in which they are localized, scholars began to estimate the knowledge production function with a spatial dimension. Location and geographic space have become key factors in explaining the determinants of innovation and technological change. The chapter also identifies new insights that have sought to penetrate the black box of geographic space by addressing a limitation inherent in the model of the knowledge production. These insights come from a rich tradition of analyzing the role of both localization and urbanization economies, by extending the focus to the organization of economic activity within a spatial dimension and examine how different organizational aspects influence economic performance. While the endogenous growth theory emphasizes the importance of investments in research and development and human capital, a research agenda needs to be mapped out identifying the role that investments in spillover conduits can make in generating economic growth. It may be that a mapping of the process by which new knowledge is created, externalized and commercialized, hold the key to providing the microeconomic linkages to endogenous macroeconomic growth.

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Knowledge Spillovers and the Geography of Innovation

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2011/nrs_2011_pickett_001.pdf

Urban ecological systems: Scientific foundations and a decade of progress

Semi-Structured Interviewing

This article examines residential vacancy patterns in Buffalo, NY, using data from a unique data set. It includes variables from HUD Aggregate USPS Administrative Data on Address Vacancies, the Ame...

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Dawn of the Dead City: An Exploratory Analysis of Vacant Addresses in Buffalo, Ny 2008–2010

Increasingly, scholars and policy makers have become interested in the relationship between entrepreneurship and upward mobility, particularly as it pertains to the poor, minority group members, an...

Timothy Bates, Race, Self-Employment and Upward Mobility: An Illusive American Dream (Washington, Dc; the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press) Lisa J. Servon, Bootstrap Capital: Microenterprises and the American Poor (Washington Dc: Brookings, Institution Press)

Chapter 1: Qualitative Research for Students and Professionals Chapter 2: Qualitative Analysis as an Iterative Process Chapter 3: Field Notes and Observations Chapter 4: Semi-structured Interviewing Chapter 5: Focus Groups Chapter 6: Content Analysis Chapter 7: Dissemination of Qualitative Findings

Qualitative Research Methods for Community Development

This article examines the role of citizen participation in community development corporations (CDCs). It is argued that CDCs are caught between two distinct forms of participation: instrumental participation that focuses on activities that support project and program activities of CDCs, and grassroots participation that focuses on expanding the role of citizens in local decision-making processes. A continuum based on these two forms of citizen participation is introduced. It is suggested that CDCs are often in the middle of the continuum where they must balance pressures to expand the scope of grassroots participation against the need to use citizen participation techniques to facilitate project and program implementation. The article is based on a series of in-depth interviews with the executive directors of CDCs in Detroit. Michigan. Recommendations growing out of the research focus on how the tendency toward conflicts between the instrumental goals of CDCs and the longstanding value of grassroots activ...

/pdf/caught-in-the-middle-community-development-corporations-cdcs-oyma7f6zz2.pdf

Robert Mark Silverman

Papers

Semi-Structured Interviewing

Dawn of the Dead City: An Exploratory Analysis of Vacant Addresses in Buffalo, Ny 2008–2010

Qualitative Research Methods for Community Development

Caught in the Middle: Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and the Conflict between Grassroots and Instrumental Forms of Citizen Participation