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The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution of a common approach to impact assessment across the Global Libraries (GL) portfolio of grants. It presents an overview of two systems, the Performance Metrics (PMs) and the Common Impact Measurement System (CIMS). By providing a standard set of definitions and methods for use across countries, these systems enable grantees to collect data that can be compared and aggregated for the purpose of collective learning, improvement, accountability, and advocacy.

The PMs offer a standard methodology to collect library project performance management data, whereas the CIMS is a standard survey of public library users. The paper describes how the PM and CIMS data are being visualized and used, with examples of findings and lessons learned.

The paper cites examples of the type of PM and CIMS data available, with a focus on employment, gender, and case studies from Botswana and Indonesia. These highlights illustrate how libraries’ user demographics differ from other types of public internet access venues and how libraries can contribute to strong employment and growth.

The measurement systems rely on different partners collecting data for the same metrics across different countries; while each grantee adheres to a standard methodology, small procedural, and methodological differences are inevitable. Future research could focus on conducting similar studies elsewhere, outside the cohort of countries in the GL portfolio of grants.

The paper offers insights and lessons for library agencies or institutions interested in implementing a common measurement system. Recognizing that few library projects have the resources to track a comprehensive set of indicators, a case study is presented about how smaller initiatives can adapt these systems to their needs.

The indicators described in this paper enable public libraries to shift their focus from services provided to the outcomes they help individuals and communities realize, potentially increasing the potency of their programming and advocacy.

Common measurement systems are not new, but their application in the public library field is novel, as is the Data Atlas, a platform grantees use to compare results across metrics, track progress, and conduct advocacy.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the informal micro-level mechanisms through which caregivers maximize their health literacy and caregiving skill-set, particularly in cases of emergent, pervasive health disorders. Specifically, I investigate how important micro-level social factors, such as lay self-education and local community networks, mitigate extensive experiences of medical uncertainty that are associated with caring for a child with autism. This study theorizes a series of processes of becoming lay health care professionals (HCP), which serve as effective health care interventions and ways to secure vital resources for patients and their families.

This study uses qualitative research methods in the form of 50 individual intensive interviews with primary caregivers of at least one child under the age of 18 with an official autism diagnosis, as well as two years of participant-observation at two primary sites that are autism parent and caregiver resource meetings, both located in Northern California.

This study first demonstrates the major institutional limits and gaps involved in health-related caregiving for children with autism. Next, I define the processes through which caregivers challenge these institutional constraints and fight for life altering resources for their families, which include becoming a lay diagnostician and expert caregiver. Here, I demonstrate a sophisticated set of health literacy skills and key local community-based ties that caregivers develop and rely on, which affords families the tools to overcome diverse institutional obstacles in health-seeking and health care access.

The families in this study are predominantly white, middle-class, and reside in California. For future research, the scope of the study could be expanded by increasing the sample size and including greater geographic and demographic diversity.

This study contributes vital, yet missing, pieces to the autism puzzle, which currently focuses on prevention, the fight for a so-called “cure,” and the role of vaccines in disorder prevalence. In the meantime, families are living with autism each day and are struggling for understanding and knowledge, and to secure adequate support services. In doing so, this study sheds light on current institutional gaps and limits in health care and delivery for children with autism, and suggests specific effective health care interventions applicable to other cases of emergent illnesses and disorders.

Anyone who has recently watched television or movies can tell you that transgender, gender nonbinary or gender expansive people are becoming more visible in these media. This trend reflects the reality that younger generations are increasingly identifying with more fluid and nonbinary gender and sexual identities and are progressively expressing those identities in a more flexible and changing manner (Herman et al., 2022; Wilson & Meyer, 2021). Unsurprisingly then, those individuals are also more visible at work, including in workplaces with employer-mandated dress codes. Indeed, in 2020 the US Supreme Court decided a case involving a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who was fired because her employer, a funeral home, required her to conform to its gender-binary dress policy and wear clothing mandatory for people assigned male at birth, rather than appropriate for her female gender identity ( Bostock v. Clayton County, 2020).

However, as the description of Aimee Stephens's own experience illustrates, often these employer appearance codes are based on a binary and fixed conception of gender and gender identity and expression at odds with the increasing number of workers who do not identify within those rigid parameters. Moreover, even when an employee, like Aimee Stephens herself, could have fit within her employer's dress code, the improper application of that policy to her, or employer concerns about customer or co-worker discomfort with an employee's appearance under the policy may mean that a worker's identity and expression may still conflict with a workplace appearance code. For gender nonbinary or nonconforming individuals, these complications are magnified.

This chapter explores the practical problems and barriers that employer dress codes have on employees whose gender identity and/or presentation move beyond the traditional male/female binary. Using insights from queer theory, gender expansive employees serve to interrogate fundamental assumptions behind workplace dress policies and the formal and informal ways in which these policies are policed. The chapter will explore that discordance, examine possible employer resolutions, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of those responses.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the sanist microaggressions that peer workers face working in mental health and proposes ways in which peer workers and institutions may begin to challenge sanist practices within the sector.

The paper is written as a personal narrative. It explores a “moment” in the life of the author as a peer support worker.

Peer workers are often faced with sanist microaggressions on the job which can significantly affect peer workers’ capacity over time. Sharing our stories, identifying points of resistance and working collectively to challenge microaggressions are important to peer worker survival within the mental health system. Organisations that train or employ peer workers should be aware of sanist microaggressions and learn how to strategically respond to them.

The paper documents the experiences of the author. There is limited academic literature documenting peer worker experience of microaggressions.

A large body of literature focuses on ways that learning experiences in colleges of education can combat racist stereotypes while promoting cultural competence. However, because limited research investigates how student research projects (e.g., master's theses and doctoral dissertations) can accomplish these same purposes, additional studies are needed. For this reason, the current exploratory mixed methods study addressed the following research question: “How does the racial identity development of doctoral students from colleges of education align with their experiences of conducting dissertation studies focusing on racial and/or ethnic dynamics in schools, universities, or human service agencies?” The research team used well-established scales to measure the racial identity development of Black and White participants. The team also conducted a series of three interviews with each participant to learn about how racial identity statuses contributed to and responded to the experience of conducting dissertation research with a focus on racial and/or ethnic dynamics. Analysis of interview data pointed to the salience of “advocacy” in the experiences of participants. Advocacy connected to doctoral research by affording opportunities for personal advancement and by affording opportunities to promote social change. Further interpretation revealed differences in the importance of the two types of advocacy for White and Black participants, especially in consideration of their racial identity statuses. Despite such nuances, the experience of conducting dissertation research reinforced all participants’ previous commitments to social justice and advocacy, but it did not help them develop more wide-ranging and systematic strategies for working as advocates of social justice.

Part of a larger multicase ethnographic research project, this case study examines the experience of transgender youth and their teachers at a school that uses restorative practices as an alternative to school suspension.

The current study focuses on interviews from one transgender student, her teachers, and her administrators.

Taken together, these interviews expose complex mechanisms through which transphobia undermines an ostensibly democratic discipline practice intended to promote social justice. The restorative concept of “accountability” framed staff’s efforts to create a more gender-inclusive school, but this frame inadvertently placed the burden of inclusion largely on the transgender student, as staff expected her to educate peers and teachers and enforce gender inclusive practices.

Restorative practice trainings should be integrated with trainings on inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals.

Existing research examines the impact of zero tolerance policies on transgender students. This study demonstrates that even when alternatives to zero tolerance policies are in place, teachers and administrators easily slip holding transgender youth accountable for their own safety. A school-wide commitment to “inclusion” does not negate the need for educating staff and students about LGBTQ identities and inclusion.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between countries’ values of individualism/collectivism and organizations’ top management team (TMT) pay structures. Individualistic countries are expected to prefer more hierarchical TMT pay structures and collectivist countries are expected to prefer more egalitarian TMT pay structures. The manuscript also investigates the international implications of the relation between TMT pay structures and organizational performance. Specifically, it is proposed that a country’s level of individualism/collectivism will mediate the relation between TMT pay structure hierarchy and organizational performance.

A pooled sample of data from 56 organizations in 12 countries was used to investigate the research questions. Individualism/collectivism was measured using country specific individualism/collectivism scores and top management pay structures were operationalized using Gini coefficients. Organizational performance was evaluated using return on assets.

Support was found both for a preference for more hierarchical TMT pay structures in individualistic countries, and that a country’s level of individualism/collectivism mediates the relationship between an organization’s top management’s pay structure and company performance.

Findings demonstrate that organizations use pay structures consistent with their environments. Results suggest cultural dimensions can contribute to understanding cross-national TMT pay structures and that national culture plays a significant role in the relationship between TMT pay structure and company performance.

A growing stream of consumer research has examined the intersection of family dynamics, consumption practices and the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the complex nature of family for senior families (adult children and their elderly parents) who employ the use of elder care services and facilities.

This research analyses data gathered from in-depth interviews with adult siblings and their elderly parents through the lens of assemblage theory.

This paper advances a conceptulisation of the family as an evolving assemblage of components, including individual members; material possessions and home(s); shared values, goals, memories and practices; prominent familial attributes of love and care; and marketplace resources. Three features of the assemblage come to the fore in senior families: the fluid meaning of independence for the elderly parent, the evolution of shared family practices and the trajectory of the assemblage that is a function of its history and future.

This research focuses on a stage of family life that has been under-theorised; applies assemblage theory to the family collective, demonstrating that a family can be conceptualised as an ever-evolving assemblage of human and non-human components, and this is a useful lens for understanding how senior families “do” family; and argues for a broader notion of family – one that is not household-centric or focused on families with young children, that encompasses members and materiality and that foregrounds the dynamic, evolving nature of family life.

The long-term financial stability of hospital systems represents a “grand challenge” in health care. New ownership forms, such as private equity (PE), promise to achieve better financial performance than nonprofit or for-profit systems. In this study, we compare two systems with many similarities, but radically different ownership structures, missions, governance, and merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies. Both were nonprofit, religious systems serving low-income communities – Montefiore Health System and Caritas Christi Health Care.

Montefiore's M&A strategy was to invest in local hospitals and create an integrated regional system, increasing revenues by adding primary doctors and community hospitals as feeders into the system and achieving efficiencies through effective resource allocation across specialized units. Slow and steady timing of acquisitions allowed for organizational learning and balancing of debt and equity. By 2019, it owned 11 hospitals with 40,000 employees and had strong positive financials and low reliance on debt.

By contrast, in 2010, PE firm Cerberus Capital bought out Caritas (renamed Steward Health Care System) and took control of the Board of Directors, who set the system's strategic direction. Cerberus used Steward as a platform for a massive debt-driven acquisition strategy. In 2016, it sold off most of its hospitals’ property for $1.25 billion, leaving hospitals saddled with long-term inflated leases; paid itself almost $500 million in dividends; and used the rest for leveraged buyouts of 27 hospitals in 9 states in 3 years. The rapid, scattershot M&A strategy was designed to create a large corporation that could be sold off in five years for financial gain – not for health care integration. Its debt load exploded, and by 2019, its financials were deeply in the red. Its Massachusetts hospitals were the worst financial performers of any system in the state. Cerberus exited Steward in 2020 in a deal that left its physicians, the new owners, holding the debt.

This chapter contributes to the discourse of difference by problematizing the sameness/difference trope through the lens of the exceptional. It explores the nature of being exceptional with an expectation that its nature is contingent and variable. At the heart of understanding what constitutes exceptional is its implicit comparison with the average. While exceptional is defined to include both individuals who achieve in extraordinary ways and individuals with a physical or mental impairment, the two definitions are consonant in that both describe individuals who deviate from expected norms. Relying on the insights from pragmatism, this chapter considers community habits exceptional individuals must confront in forming their choices. In this way, it further adheres to the lessons from pragmatism for norm change. The strategies individuals use to alter the effects of being perceived as exceptional contribute to the overall discourse in equality and equal protection and potentially constitute the individual action that formulates change. It examines some approaches to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) derived from civil rights and from economic perspectives and the relevant matrix of choices available to the exceptional to understand the potential for productive change. With this foreground, it examines the choice of exceptional individuals to cover or convey matters of their identity. This chapter pays particular attention to these choices in seeking accommodations under the ADA. Ultimately, this study strives to participate in the conversation seeking to maximize human potential.