Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reviews the development of the ASEAN Free Trade Area in the recent years. I?ll ask the question whether AFTA could be a building block or a blocking block to a global free and more multilateral trade regime.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is an ethnomethodologically-informed ethnographic analysis of product innovation management practices in a large, complex corporation. We explore the organizational dynamics resulting in the outcome that management repeatedly rediscovers the same innovation problems and lessons with unsatisfactory evidence of improvements. In spite of an awareness of the problems they want to address and repeated efforts over several decades to address these problems, the corporation has not been able to change the company’s culture around the management of new product innovation. Our preliminary results suggest that there is an unwritten “code of behavior” which unnecessarily limits the potential for success of cultural change efforts designed to promote new product innovation orientations. In this paper we will describe elements of this code of behavior, and show that they are deeply embedded in managerial work practices at various levels of the hierarchy. We will show that even when managers are aware of these counter-productive attitudes and beliefs, they still guide work practices in the corporation. The data site for this study is a large corporation with several divisions. Data include observations of meetings, interviews, and internal documents. In addition, the workplace practices involved in management’s role in new product innovation will be directly examined, using one division of the corporation as a case study. This paper is a preliminary draft of ongoing research prepared for consideration for presentation at the ASA’s 2004 Annual meeting.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: That parents have an impact on what work roles their children assume has been shown in numerous studies across place and time. Why this is true, however, is still largely unknown. Previous arguments have proposed multiple tangible and intangible mechanisms to explain the phenomenon. While headway has been made in assessing the former, little work has focused on adjudicating between sub-forms of the latter. In this research I address this issue by determining whether children are more likely to expect to become business owners because of the way they are socialized by their parents or just the information they get from them about their work roles. Two forms of social capital are thus contrasted. I also propose and test a combinatory theory encompassing these two mechanisms. Hypotheses consistent with each argument are tested using data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey (1988-1992). Findings show that, net of an array of human capital, psychological, and social structural controls, information about business ownership from a father in early adolescence has a positive direct effect on business ownership expectations at that point in time, and an indirect effect on subsequent expectations in late adolescence that operates through those earlier expectations. Socialization has a positive direct effect on early expectations, as well both an indirect and direct effect on latter expectations. Maternal socialization effects are only found in terms of fostering later expectations. Finally, the combinatory model for fathers has a strong, positive direct effect on early expectations and indirect and direct effects on expectations in later adolescence.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Within the academy, modern African American history is nearly synonymous with Civil Rights Era history. Both the Movement’s transforming impact on American society and historian’s material connections with progressive activism has focused scholarly interest on African American political involvement in the fifties and sixties. Even as some historians call for geographical expansion of Civil Rights Era narratives to include activism in the north and the unique racial politics of urban areas like Chicago, work remains focused on struggles surrounding housing desegregation and electoral politics. The unfortunate by product of this political focus is that moments of community organization and cultural development unrelated to the integrationist battles of the Civil Rights Era remain obscured. This paper is about the struggle of the Chicago Urban League to inspire community organization around the cause of home grown urban renewal as a reaction to the city’s attempts to stigmatize and geographically isolate the black belt within “urban redevelopment.” By creating a contest called “Block Beautiful” in the mid-forties, the Urban League was able to inspire every day Black Chicagoans to organize themselves into mini-political groups focused on beautifying their homes, porches and apartments as well as lobbying city government for street and neighborhood maintenance. In an era when white Chicago’s anxieties over the deleterious effect of urban blight on the individual were directly linked to the perceived threat of an increasing African American population, the League’s Block Beautiful contest should be interpreted as a brilliantly discrete political project that directly involved more African Americans than the work of the NAACP and other more radical northern groups. In addition, the popularity of the contest indicates that these kinds of seemingly apolitical community activities within Black urban neighborhoods should move to the center of African American historiography rather than existing on the periphery because they produce rich source material that deals with unique class and gender issues within the community. The majority of primary sources are from the Chicago Urban League’s archives which contain pages of minute meetings on the contest, contest entry forms from nearly every year, Urban League and Chicago Planning Commission correspondence as well as contest material including flyers and pamphlets. Along with urban league material I work with Planning Commisison documents including neighborhood evaluations and maps from the late forties and fifties.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Previous research on CDBG programs (Kettl 1980, Dilger
1989) focused on the policies and processes of program initiatives,
rather than the calculated strategies of elected officials attempting
to enhance their re-election prospects. This paper examines the
allocation of CDBG funding in four Pennsylvania cities (Pittsburgh,
Philadelphia, Altoona, and Sharon) from 1975 to 2002 to determine if
CDBG allocations vary according to the electoral cycle.
I propose that big city mayors often redirect huge sums of CDBG money
from targeted, low-income neighborhoods to community-wide projects to
gain popular support during and prior to election years. The projects
funded with CDBG dollars tend to be highly visible and popular among a
broad constituency, but are allocated at the expense of programs in
poorer neighborhoods, which CDBG dollars were meant to support. This
reallocation of CDBG dollars is not as prominent in smaller cities
because the circumstances and issue areas surrounding these localities
are organizationally and structurally different (Carsey 2000). This
paper utilizes a gaming model (Gates and Humes, 1996) and a symbiotic
or iron triangle approach to explain the big and small city mayors'
behavior and decision-making strategies.