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Using the perspectives of dramaturgy and symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Carl Couch this study focuses on paid sex work in the hypermodern, virtual world of Second Life. Using seventeen semi-structured interviews and six months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that the employment of sexual scripts, carrying off a successful erotic scene, and the creative use of communication and embodiment are highly valued in escorts’ performance of Second Life sex work. Escorts craft an online persona that is a digital representation of the self, which is manifested in the embodiment of their digital body or avatar. In addition to digital representations of the physical self, Second Life allows for multiple methods of computer-mediated communication, and escorts are able to re-embody the first life body through the trading of first life pictures, voice cybersex, and web cam cybersex. The data allow the conclusion that most escorts are unwilling to re-embody the first life body for reasons of personal safety and the desire to restrict access to the first life self. I find, however, that there is a porous boundary between first life and Second Life in which the first life self comes through in the Second Life persona. In the concluding remarks, I explore the implications this study has for the negotiation of privacy for new social media actors who are reluctant to fully disclose their lives yet perform a persistent, archived persona for friends and followers on the Internet. This study contributes to a small, but growing, body of literature on Second Life and expands the existing work on embodiment and privacy in the digital realm.

Much progress has been made in public opinion regarding drug prohibition. The policy has been an utter failure, very expensive, and increasingly disliked by people around the world. As a result, several states have passed drug reform legislation that reduces penalties for the production, distribution, and consumption of previously prohibited substances such as narcotics and marijuana. Other states have placed more resources in drug treatment programs (demand reduction) instead of drug interdiction efforts (supply reduction). In North America, several states in the US and Canada have passed medical marijuana legislation to take advantage of the well-known medical benefits of marijuana (Piper, Matthew, Katherine, & Rebecca, 2003).

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.

The growth of research on the cognitive origins of market performance has focused on the impact of categories as a primary cognitive mechanism by which exchange occurs. In this research, performance outcomes are typically reduced when firms and products fail to meet audiences’ expectations about membership into categories. The ensuing literature has focused on spanning categories as evidence of not meeting audience expectations while largely ignoring the specific study of expectations themselves. This chapter argues that expectations for market behavior are important in their own right, and can impact market outcomes even when categorical boundaries are respected. Using the market for engagement rings as a setting, I show how lack of adherence to expectations can both increase and decrease market value even as the engagement rings adhere to categorical boundaries. Rather than simply focusing on category spanning as evidence that audience expectations have not been met, the findings suggest that expectations should be considered explicitly, with implications for competitive strategy.

The objectives of the current interim report are to measure the extent of the access to care problem, identify and compare the types of patient- and system-based barriers experienced by Vietnam veterans at risk for suicide when seeking care for physical, psychiatric, and substance abuse conditions, analyze patient-perceived quality of care for individuals who obtained access to care, and identify how the care-seeking experience effected future care seeking. This study is based on a longitudinal sample of 494 Vietnam veterans discharged from military service in September 1971 and subsequently identified as at risk for suicide (306 low risk; 188 high risk). Seventy-one percent (350) of 494 participants completed an extensive qualitative and quantitative interview covering, among other topics, physical conditions, psychiatric conditions, substance use, barriers to care, facilitators of care, and quality of care. Barriers, satisfaction, and effect of the experience were compared by type of condition and suicidal risk category using χ2 analysis and Fisher's as appropriate. The analysis is based on 257 interviews (73 percent) with qualitative data transcribed thus far. Results: Of the 195 patients with self-reported health conditions, 76 (39.0 percent) and 45 (23.1 percent) expressed system-based barriers to care, respectively. The group at higher risk of suicide was significantly more likely (p<0.01) to report patient-based barriers to care and system-based barriers to care (p<0.05), and more likely (p<0.05) to experience negative effects of the care-seeking experience. Both self-perceived and system-based barriers to care pose obstacles for patients at high risk of suicide. Targeted interventions are required to reach out to these patients to address needs for care currently unmet by the health care system and to reduce negative effects of the health care experience.

Despite recent advances, neither organizational studies nor the scholarship on economic resilience has systematically addressed how the ecologies of organizations that populate local economies can serve as infrastructures for responding proactively to economic shocks. Using county-level data, this study analyzes relationships between the prevalence of organizational alternatives to shareholder value-oriented (SVO) corporations within a particular locality and its unemployment levels during and after the Great Recession. The results support the hypothesis that the presence of such alternative organizations can enhance the capacities of local economies to resist and recover from recession shocks. Cooperative, municipal, and community-based enterprises, research universities, and nonprofits more generally were associated with greater resistance to the recession shock and stronger recoveries – specifically, lower surges in unemployment rates from 2007 to 2010 and greater reductions in unemployment rates from 2010 to 2016. By contrast, SVO corporations were associated with greater surges in unemployment and perhaps weaker recoveries. Providing a proof of concept, this study opens up new lines of inquiry for organizational studies by linking organizational ecologies to the promotion of collective efficacy and a more broadly shared prosperity in economic life.