Most scholars explicitly or implicitly build on the assumption that organizations have to be externally recognized as actors to become constituted as organizations. Although recently some scholars ...have reported on instances of organization without actorhood, the phenomenon still remains widely neglected. Moreover, so far, organization without actorhood is seen as something very limited in terms of complexity and permanency. In this paper, we will draw a different picture. Drawing on the concept of degrees of organizationality (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015) and a decision-based understanding of organization (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011; Luhmann, 2003), we develop a framework that allows us to explore how much organization is possible without actorhood. Drawing on a qualitative case study of an inter-organizational collective concerned with ensuring public safety, we illustrate that highly complex organization is possible without constituting an actor. Our study presents evidence contradicting the common assumption that complex organization relies on the external attribution of actorhood. We also add to debates on responsibility of organizations and inter-organizational relations by pointing out that organization without actorhood has certain implications, i.e. it allows for a specific avoidance of responsibility.
Today, America's nonprofit organizations seem caught in a force field, buffeted by four impulses -voluntarism, professionalism, civic activism, and commercialism. Too little attention, however, has ...been paid to the significant tensions among these impulses. Understanding this force field and the factors shaping its dynamics thus becomes central to understanding the future of particular organizations and of the nonprofit sector as a whole.
In this second edition of an immensely successful volume, Lester Salamon and his colleagues offer an overview of the current state of America's nonprofit sector, examining the forces that are shaping its future and identifying the changes that might be needed.The State of Nonprofit Americahas been completely revised and updated to reflect changing political realities and the punishing economic climate currently battering the nonprofit sector, which faces significant financial challenges during a time when its services are needed more than ever. The result is a comprehensive analysis of a set of institutions that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized to be "more deserving of our attention" than any other part of the American experiment.
Disparities in health care have been targeted for elimination by federal agencies and professional organizations, including the American Public Health Association. Although the Affordable Care Act ...(ACA) provides a valuable first step in reducing the disparities gap, progress is contingent upon whether opportunities in the ACA help or hinder populations at risk for impaired health and limited access to medical care.
Good Cop/Bad Cop Lyon, Thomas
2010, 20120625, 2012-06-25, 20100101
eBook
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play an increasingly prominent role in addressing complex environmental issues such as climate change, persistent bio-accumulative pollutants, and the ...conservation of biodiversity. At the same time, the landscape in which they operate is changing rapidly. Markets, and direct engagement with industry, rather than traditional government regulation, are often the tools of choice for NGOs seeking to change corporate behavior today. Yet these new strategies are poorly understood-by business, academics, and NGOs themselves. How will NGOs choose which battles to fight, differentiate themselves from one another in order to attract membership and funding, and decide when to form alliances and when to work separately? In Good Cop/Bad Cop, Thomas P. Lyon brings together perspectives on environmental NGOs from leading social scientists, as well as leaders from within the NGO and corporate worlds, to assess the state of knowledge on the tactics and the effectiveness of environmental groups. Contributions from Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund describe each organization's structure and key objectives, and present case studies that illustrate how each organization makes a difference, especially with regard to its strategies toward corporate engagement. To provide additional perspective, high-level executives from BP and Ford share their views on what causes these relationships between companies and NGOs to either succeed or fail. For students of the social sciences and NGO practitioners, this book takes an important step in addressing an urgent need for objective study of NGO operations and their effectiveness.
To determine the level of preparedness among New York City community-based organizations by using a needs assessment.
We distributed online surveys to 582 human services and 6017 faith-based ...organizations in New York City from March 17, 2016 through May 11, 2016. We calculated minimal indicators of preparedness to determine the proportion of organizations with preparedness indicators. We used bivariate analyses to examine associations between agency characteristics and minimal preparedness indicators.
Among the 210 human service sector respondents, 61.9% reported emergency management plans and 51.9% emergency communications systems in place. Among the 223 faith-based respondents, 23.9% reported emergency management plans and 92.4% emergency communications systems in place. Only 10.0% of human services and 18.8% of faith-based organizations reported having funds allocated for emergency response. Only 2.9% of human services sector and 39.5% of faith-based sector respondents reported practicing emergency communication alerts.
New York City human service and faith-based sector organizations are striving to address emergency preparedness concerns, although notable gaps are evident.
Our results can inform the development of metrics for community-based organizational readiness.
Civil Democracy Protection is an overview of attempts by organisations to oppose groups that are perceived to threaten democracy. The book traces the history of civil democracy protection actors from ...the establishment of democratic constitutional states up to the present day and develops a set of systematic and comparative approaches. The central question it explores is: What significance do civil actors have for the establishment and consolidation of democratic constitutional states, especially in relation to the protection of democracy by state institutions? The volume includes contributions from historians and social scientists, who combine idiographic approaches that focus on the specifics of individual cases with nomothetic approaches that aim to provide generalisable insights, incorporating historical experiences from various European countries and the USA in the 20th and early 21st century. This book will be of interest to scholars of democracy protection, civil society, consolidation of democracy, and anti- extremism. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Amnesty International and Oxfam to Greenpeace and Save the Children are now key players in global politics. This accessible and informative textbook ...provides a comprehensive overview of the significant role and increasing participation of NGOs in world politics.
Peter Willetts examines the variety of different NGOs, their structure, membership and activities, and their complex relationship with social movements and civil society. He makes us aware that there are many more NGOs exercising influence in the United Nations system than the few famous ones.
Conventional thinking is challenged in a radical manner on four questions:
the extent of the engagement of NGOs in global policy- making;
the status of NGOs within international law;
the role of NGOs as crucial pioneers in the creation of the Internet;
and the need to integrate NGOs within mainstream international relations theory.
This is the definitive guide to this crucial area within international politics and should be required reading for students, NGO activists, and policy-makers.
"A wise and amazingly succinct, scholarly, and highly readable analysis of the essential nature of NGOs and their increasingly prominent role in global politics. Willetts has made an insightful and constructive (in every sense) contribution to the literature on NGOs and, by extension, IR theory, international institutions, and global governance." - Yale H. Ferguson, Global Governance, Vol. 18, 2012
"A useful guide to NGOs and their roles in global politics." - Mariya Y. Omelicheva, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 34
Introduction 1. NGOs, Social Movements, and Civil Society 2. The Access of NGOs to Global Policy-Making 3. The Status of NGOs in International Law 4. NGOs, Networking and the Creation of the Internet 5. Understanding the Place of NGOs in Global Politics 6. The Creation of Global Governance
Peter Willetts is Emeritus Professor of Global Politics at City University, London. His previous publications on NGOs include Pressure Groups in the Global System (London: Pinter, 1982) and the edited volume ‘ The Conscience of the World :’ The Influence of Non-Governmental Organisations in the UN System (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1996).
Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are becoming a common payment and delivery model. Despite widespread interest, little empirical research has examined what efforts or strategies ACOs are using ...to change care and reduce costs. Knowledge of ACOs' clinical efforts can provide important context for understanding ACO performance, particularly to distinguish arenas where ACOs have and have not attempted care transformation.
The aim of the study was to understand ACOs' efforts to change clinical care during the first 18 months of ACO contracts.
We conducted semistructured interviews between July and December 2013. Our sample includes ACOs that began performance contracts in 2012, including Medicare Shared Savings Program and Pioneer participants, stratified across key factors. In total, we conducted interviews with executives from 30 ACOs. Iterative qualitative analysis identified common patterns and themes.
ACOs in the first year of performance contracts are commonly focusing on four areas: first, transforming primary care through increased access and team-based care; second, reducing avoidable emergency department use; third, strengthening practice-based care management; and fourth, developing new boundary spanner roles and activities. ACOs were doing little around transforming specialty care, acute and postacute care, or standardizing care across practices during the first 18 months of ACO performance contracts.
Results suggest that cost reductions associated with ACOs in the first years of contracts may be related to primary care. Although in the long term many hope ACOs will achieve coordination across a wide array of care settings and providers, in the short term providers under ACO contracts are focused largely on primary care-related strategies. Our work provides a template of the common areas of clinical activity in the first years of ACO contracts, which may be informative to providers considering becoming an ACO. Further research will be needed to understand how these strategies are associated with performance.
Jacqueline Best argues that the 1990s changes in IMF, World Bank and donor policies, towards what some have called the 'Post-Washington Consensus,' were driven by an erosion of expert authority and ...an increasing preoccupation with policy failure. Failures such as the Asian financial crisis and the decades of despair in sub-Saharan Africa led these institutions to develop governance strategies designed to avoid failure: fostering country ownership, developing global standards, managing risk and vulnerability and measuring results. In contrast to the structural adjustment era when policymakers were confident in their solutions, this is an era of provisional governance, in which key actors are aware of the possibility of failure even as they seek to inoculate themselves against it. Best considers the implications of this shift, asking if it is a positive change and whether it is sustainable. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Books Online and via Knowledge Unlatched.
The literature on development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) envisions an alternative form of social organization, one that is more altruistic, more cooperative, and less hierarchical than ...governments and for-profit organizations. We engage with the literature on quite different terms: NGOs and their donors are organizations, and much of what is distinctive about them as organizations derives from the special uncertainties they face due to the environments in which they operate, the goals they pursue, and the social and material technologies they employ. We conclude that there are unexplored issues in the literature on development NGOs that sociologists, with their toolkit of theories and practices, are uniquely qualified to address.
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