Abstract: Donors' ability to attach strings to their contributions has become increasingly prevalent in the nonprofit sector. Using the case of workplace charity, this article examines the determinants of nonprofit organizations' adoption of donor choice as a mode of fund-raising. Drawing from a nationwide survey, it tests three competing tenets to explain United Ways' implementation of donor choice. Employing logistic regression analysis, the findings indicate that United Ways allow for donor control when facing donors' demands for choice, regardless of the composition of the local market or fund-raisers' organizational characteristics.
Notes: PT: J; CT: 101st Annual Meeting of the American-Sociological-Association; CY: AUG 11-14, 2006; CL: Montreal, CANADA; TC: 0
Abstract: Literature on the nonprofit sector focuses on charities and their interactions with clients or governmental agencies; donors are studied less often. Studies on philanthropy do examine donors but tend to focus on microlevel factors to explain their behavior. This study, in contrast, draws on institutional theory to show that macrolevel factors affect donor behavior. It also extends the institutional framework by examining the field-level configurations in which donors and fundraisers are embedded. Employing the case of workplace charity, this new model highlights how the composition of the organizational field structures fundraisers and donors alike, shaping fundraisers' strategies of solicitation and, therefore, the extent of donor control.
Abstract: This review essay addresses Richard Swedberg's recent attempt to redefine the field of economic sociology. Grounding his position in Max Weber's work, Swedberg advocates a type of economic sociology that not only focuses on social relations but also considers culture and interests, arguing that it is interests that drive action but that they are shaped by culture and enacted through social relations. We conclude our analysis with a consideration of the practical and empirical implications of this new approach for the study of economic life.
Abstract: The National Congregations Study (NCS) was conducted in conjunction with the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS). The 1998 GSS asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation, thus generating a nationally representative sample of religious congregations. Data about these congregations were collected via a one-hour interview with one Key informant - a minister, priest, rabbi, or other staff person or leader -from 1236 congregations. Information was gathered about multiple aspects of congregations' social composition, structure, activities, and programming. This article describes NCS methodology and presents selected univariate results in four areas: denominational ties, size, political activities, and worship practices.
Abstract: Various substantive literatures in sociology seek small regularities in sequences: turning points in the life course, catalytic moments in organizational change, sharp turns in occupational trajectories, and the like. Commonly these are turning points, but they may also be simple local patterns. This paper reports a method for discovering such regularities even when they are quite faint, applying that method to rhetorical regularities in sociological articles. The paper begins by analyzing the overall sequence structure of such articles and then gives a basic introduction to Gibbs sampling, one member of the broader class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. It then reports an algorithm employing Gibbs sampling to find local sequence regularities and applies that algorithm to demonstrate the subsequence regularities present in sociological articles. Substantively, the paper shows that the rhetorical structure of sociological articles changed from one pattern to another in the period 1895-1965 and that certain faint but standard rhetorical subsequences became characteristic of articles in the later period. Methodologically, it introduces a broad class of methods that provide effective approaches to a number to a previously intractable statistical questions.
