Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines a form of state social provision that has been neglected by current sociological theory: publicly funded supportive services. Federal policies of privatization and devolution, embraced since the Reagan years, have made private, nonprofit organizations the primary deliverers of these services. Public supportive services are distributed via competitive state- and local-level allocative processes that send government contracts to specific nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs), which in turn serve specific neighborhoods and individuals. I describe a model by which CBOs generate greater contract revenues by adding electoral politics to their more traditional roles of providing services and building communities. This model produces a new kind of CBO: the machine politics CBO. By reciprocally distributing services to residents and binding residents to the organization, machine politics CBOs create reliable voting constituencies for local elected officials. These officials trade these constituencies at higher levels of the governmental system and steer government human service contracts to favored CBOs. Through this process, nonprofit CBOs can influence the allocation of service-based social provision in cities and therefore impact individuals' ability to access these services.

Drawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the production of new findings and new theories, we show that in the context of fellowship competitions, peer reviewers in the social sciences and humanities define originality much more broadly: as using a new approach, theory, method, or data; studying a new topic; doing research in an understudied area; or producing new findings. Whereas the literature has not considered disciplinary variation in the definition of originality, we identified significant differences. Humanists and historians clearly privilege originality in approach, and humanists also emphasize originality in the data used. Social scientists most often mention originality in method, but they also appreciate a more diverse range of types of originality. Whereas the literature tends to equate originality with substantive innovation and to consider the personal attributes of the researcher as irrelevant to the evaluation process, we show that panelists often view the originality of a proposal as an indication of the researcher's moral character, especially of his/her authenticity and integrity. These contributions constitute a new approach to the study of peer review and originality that focuses on the meaning of criteria of evaluation and their distribution across clusters of disciplines.

Robert Putnam comprehensively analyzes the multidimensional nature of social capital and makes a persuasive argument for its relevance to various community social problems, including violent crime. However, systematic empirical evaluations of the links between the multiple dimensions of social capital and violence are limited by the lack of adequate measures. Using data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey, the authors model the relationships between several dimensions of social capital and homicide rates for 40 U.S. geographic areas. Their findings show that many forms of social capital highlighted in the literature as having beneficial consequences for communities are not related to homicide rates. Two dimensions of social capital, social trust and social activism, do exhibit significant associations with homicide rates, net of other influences. However, in the latter case, the relationship is positive, and in both cases, simultaneous equation models suggest that these dimensions of social capital are consequences as well as causes of homicide. The results underscore the importance of examining the different dimensions of social capital and assessing their reciprocal relationships with homicide and other social outcomes.

This study advances a social constructionist view of financial market behavior. The paper suggests that the market's reaction to particular corporate practices, such as stock repurchase plans, are not, as financial economists contend, simply a function of the inherent efficiency of such practices. Rather, stock market reactions are also influenced by the prevailing institutional logic and the degree of institutionalization of the practice. The theory first predicts that the emergence of the agency perspective on corporate governance in the mid-1980s represented a powerful new institutional logic that would lead the market to reverse its prior aggregate reaction to stock repurchase plans in the United States. The paper then considers the potential for institutional decoupling of repurchase plans and develops competing hypotheses about how the market value of these policies might have changed as more firms formally adopted, but did not implement, the plans over time. In contrast to a financial economic perspective on market valuation, which suggests that markets should discount the value of a policy as evidence of non-implementation accumulates, this study posits that institutionalization processes might increase the market value of a policy as more firms adopt it, despite growing evidence of decoupling. Implications for institutional theory and theoretical perspectives on capital markets are discussed.