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This paper aims to add information on how women's voices enriched American social entrepreneurship in the Progressive era. While most discussions of women as social entrepreneurs have centered on white middle class women, this article profiles two female agents for change and innovation who came out of the white working class and Boston's Black elite, respectively. These additions provide an analysis of female participation that takes account of issues of intersectionality and positionality, important concepts in contemporary critical theory.

This article extends our understanding of women's role as social entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century by offering biographies of Rose Schneiderman and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin based on extensive examination of sources from Progressive era documents to contemporary scholarly analyses. Inclusion of Progressive era sources enables the narrative to suggest how these social entrepreneurs were viewed in their own day.

Biographies of Rose Schneiderman and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin indicate the broad range of women who developed new organizations to serve traditionally marginalized populations in the Progressive era. The article shows the types of obstacles each woman faced; it enumerates strategies they used to further their aims as well as recording some of the times they could not surmount class- or race-based obstacles placed in their paths.

At a time when issues of intersectionality and positionality have become more prominent in management discourse, this article expands the class and race backgrounds of women specifically proposed as icons of social entrepreneurship. It represents an early attempt to link these concepts with the study of entrepreneurship.

Dirty workers occupy jobs and perform tasks that are unpleasant and considered distasteful or “tainted” to other members of society. However, while they experience challenges in managing stigma, they are generally successful in creating positive self-identities. Among these dirty jobs is prostitution. As dirty workers, women sex workers in American history have been treated with humor, ridicule and derision. This study aims to explain the social contexts and the limited economic choices these women faced and examine how they may have managed their dirty work’s stigma to create positive self-identities.

This paper uses primary and secondary sources to examine a 53-year period of American history and to frame these women’s stigma management within a “dirty work” perspective.

The author suggests that sex workers in riskier roles (e.g. street walkers, crib workers or “upstairs girls” in saloons) would have been less able to effectively manage stigma and create positive self-identities as compared to brothels workers, due to the brothel’s strong social support, healthier work culture and richer resources.

While sex work has changed significantly in the past century, the principles of identity management in this difficult and dirty work remain. Understanding the economic, social and individual challenges faced by these dirty workers will aid our understanding of the difficulties confronted by today’s sex workers.

Sex work is nearly absent from scholarly management literature. The lack of historical perspective and knowledge in this field limits a full understanding of how various types of dirty workers manage stigma.

A central tenet of Progressive era responses to prostitution was the alleged over-representation of white, US-born daughters of foreign parentage in the prostitution population. We detail a statistical error in an influential 1913 study from the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford as an important source of this tenet. Using archival data to more accurately reconstruct the Reformatory population, we find that Black women constituted the only over-represented group, but were all but ignored by reformers. We foreground how ideas about race and immigration informed the social response to prostitution in this period, highlighting the importance of critically analyzing historical sources.

Over 100 years ago, the bureaucratic compact and five professions were established: city/county management, city planning, civil engineering, landscape architecture, and architecture. In exchange for merit employment and independence from politics, these professions offered expertise and related values. To understand those values and changes in the compact from the 1900s to today, codes of ethics from the five professions were examined. Anticipated changes were a movement from traditional public values to business values including New Public Management. However, findings show traditional values persisting over time (e.g. public interest), but not many New Public Management values (e.g. innovation). Modern values do appear and expand professionalsʼ responsibilities into environmental protection, sustainability, and human rights, which influence what these professions offer as they seek to uphold their end of the bureaucratic compact.

The research on the positive effects of children’s learning in and with nature is persuasive yet a deeper examination of the contemporary and historical discourses suggests that the school garden has been neither welcoming nor accessible to all children. Its detrimental effects on groups of children have been masked within the discourses of urban children’s health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and children’s connection with nature. The school garden has been used historically to enact adult agendas to contain and protect urban children from the social ills of modernity; civilise and assimilate marginalised, impoverished, and immigrant groups; and make future industrial and agricultural labourers who would in turn, entrench the white affluent society’s economic and social positions. In this sense, the school garden was used to reinforce patriarchal, colonial, white supremacist, and eugenic aspirations. We consider the school garden movement in North America through a discourse analysis of historical school garden texts to explore how childhoods were culturally constructed and how these discourses have influenced children both in the past and present.

The purpose of this paper is to describe three foundational concepts that contribute to conceptual heritage of the field of public relations (publics, organizations and relationships). Conceptual heritage is positioned as a type of shared public memory, a dominant narrative, that encourages adherence to the past whilst recognizing that counter-narratives can pose useful alternatives to foundational concepts.

The approach is a selective literature review that describes three dominant concept categories and presents more recently developed alternative concepts and approaches to illustrate how public memory is subjective and evolving.

The concepts of publics, organizations and relationships have grounded the dominant narrative and development of the field of public relations. Though these concepts continue to be influential as researchers rely upon and expand upon their legacies, counter-narratives can spur the innovation of ideas, measurement and practice.

The paper focuses on only three major foundational concepts selected by the authors. The importance of these concepts as well as additional examples of the field’s conceptual heritage and evolution could be identified by different authors.

The analysis demonstrates how the public memory contributes to the development and evolution of the field of public relations. Counter-narratives can offer appealing, subjectively constructed challenges to dominant narratives.

This paper describes and critiques public relations’ conceptual heritage and argues that conceptually and methodologically-based counter-narratives have contributed to its evolution.