Howard Lune

Stigma Management Among Gay/Bisexual Men with HIV/AIDS

People with HIV infection are subjected to prejudice, discrimination and hostility related to the stigmatization of AIDS. To manage the stigma of their disease, they mount complex coping strategies. This paper reports results from a qualitative study that examined gay/bisexual mens experiences of living with HIV infection. Unstructured interviews from a diverse sample of 139 men were analyzed to examine how men coped with AIDS-related stigma. We discerned a variety of stigma management strategies that could be arranged along a continuum from reactive to proactive based on the extent to which they implicitly accepted or challenged the social norms and values that underlie the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS. Reactive strategies to cope with stigma involve defensive attempts to avoid or mitigate the impact of stigma, but imply acceptance of the underlying social norms and values that construct the stigma. Examples of reactive strategies include hiding ones HIV status, presenting ones illness as a less stigmatizing one (e.g., cancer), or distancing ones self from more damaging aspects of AIDS-stigma (e.g., attributing infection to blood transfusion). Proactive strategies challenge the validity of the stigma and imply disavowal and resistance of the social norms and values that underlie the stigma. Examples of proactive strategies include engaging in public educational efforts that address misperceptions about HIV transmission and social activism to change the social and political conditions that affect PWA/HIV.

Street Codes in High School: School as an Educational Deterrent

Elsewhere we have documented how conflict between adolescents in the streets shapes conflict in the schools. Here we consider the impact of street codes on the culture and environment of the schools themselves, and the effect of this culture and on the students’ commitment and determination to participate in their own education. We present the high school experiences of first–generation immigrants and African American students, distinguishing between belief in education and commitment to school. In an environment characterized by ineffective control and nonengaging classes, often students are not socialized around academic values and goals. Students need to develop strategies to remain committed to education while surviving day to day in an unsafe, academically limited school environment. These processes are sometimes seen as minority “resistance” to educational norms. Instead, our data suggest that the nature of the schools in which minority students find themselves has a greater influence on sustaining or dissuading students’ commitment to education than do their immigration status or cultural backgrounds.

How Values Shape and Are Shaped by Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations The Current State of the Field

To advance understanding of the relationship between values and organizations, this review synthesizes classic and recent organizational and sociological research, including this symposium’s articles on voluntary associations. We argue that all organizations reflect, enact, and propagate values. Organizations draw on culture, which offers a tool kit of possible actions supported by institutional logics that delineate appropriate activities and goals. Through institutional work, organizations can secure acceptance for unfamiliar practices and their associated values, often under the logic of democracy. Values may be discerned in any organization’s goals, practices, and forms, including “value-free” bureaucracies and collectivist organizations with participatory practices. We offer suggestions for enhancing understanding of how collectivities advance particular values within their groups or society.

Doing syringe exchange: Organizational transformation and volunteer commitment

The authors examine the organizational transformation of Prevention Point, the San Francisco-based syringe exchange program. Their purposes are to explore the processes of organizational change, focus on the impact of formalization on members and organizational goals, and contextualize these in light of belonging to an underground organization. They highlight the volunteers’ motivation and commitment, and their responses to the organizational changes. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 56 service providers, conducted from 1993 to 1995, the authors document the changes in the organization and the members’ perceptions of it as it moved from an illegal, deviant group to a socially sanctioned service organization. This transition is shown to have ultimately undermined much of the basis for volunteer commitment, reinforcing the shift in responsibility from the membership to a new management structure. These findings have implications for the larger problem of maintaining volunteer engagement in volunteer work.

Embedded Systems: The Case of HIV/AIDS Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

In this paper the notion of an embedded system is developed as an analytic model to examine how state–nonprofit relations develop and become differentiated, using the case of HIV/AIDS nonprofit organizations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among three prominent HIV/AIDS nonprofit organizations in New York City, this paper shows how the kinds of relationships these nonprofit organizations are likely to form with state agencies are based on their embeddedness in the state–nonprofit system of relations. Three forms of embeddedness are distinguished according to the type and regularity of state–nonprofit contact—direct, outsider, and mediating. Importantly, it is shown how the configuration of relations within which an organization is embedded determines many of the organizations constraints and opportunities.

Weathering the Storm: Nonprofit Organization Survival Strategies in a Hostile Climate

This study examines strategies for organizational survival among community-based nonprofit organizations operating in a political environment antithetical to their missions. Qualitative fieldwork is drawn upon to examine how syringe exchange programs in New York City manage to operate despite government hostility and the disenfranchisement of drug users from policy making. This work examines the presentation of forms chosen by the groups in question, their political machinations and interorganizational relations, and the manner of claims made or not made by representatives of exchange programs in the political arena. Programs are found to have altered their outward appearance and forms away from the needs of their constituents toward protection of state interests, but they have not received very much in return.

A Cultural Impact of Needle Exchange: The Role of Safer-Injection Mentors

We examine one way in which needle-exchange services in the San Francisco Bay Area have affected needle-sharing and sexual-risk behaviors for injection drug users. We interviewed, qualitatively and quantitatively, 244 participants. Our analysis focuses on comparisons in HIV/AIDS-risk behaviors for a subcategory of “new” injectors: those initiating after the introduction of needle-exchange services in 1988 (n=57). We found that some new injectors benefited from the presence of “safer-injection mentors.” That is, those with someone to teach them harm reduction from their initiation of injection drug use were somewhat more likely to report safer injection practices at the time of interview. We also found that the mentoring process included sharing of information about needle-exchange services. Our results point to evidence of the effectiveness of needle-exchange services in contributing to a culture of harm reduction for injection drug users.

Old Structures, New Relations: How Community Development Credit Unions Define Organizational Boundaries

Studies of organizational dynamics examine the manner in which an organizations immediate environment defines the “rules and requirements to which individual organizations must conform in order to receive legitimacy and support” (Scott, 1992:132). In this paper we consider the question of how an organization can achieve legitimacy and support without necessarily compromising its organizational forms or practices to isomorphic pressures. We frame the question in terms of the boundaries between organizations and their environments. Where the population ecology studies show the survival value of adopting known organizational forms and practices, and neoinstitutionalism addresses the need to display compliance with accepted forms, our case study demonstrates the possibility of removing an organization or set of organizations from the familiar interaction by naming it as a subfield of the organizational field, sharing the environment, but “out of the way” of predefined norms and practices.

“Darker than any prison, hotter than any human flame”: Punishment, choice, and culpability in A Clockwork Orange

Contemporary textbooks in criminal justice use A Clockwork Orange to illustrate issues of correctional and sentencing practices. This article challenges criminal justice faculty and students to use the film to explore the political and social realities of punishment, in particular the examination of the moral question of “voluntariness” and the implications for “treatment” as a mechanism of social control. This paper explores the moral questions of state sponsored social control and using the film satire invites the student to examine their beliefs about the political and social realities of punishment and rehabilitation.

Transnational Nationalism: Strategic Action Fields and the Organization of the Fenian Movement

Abstract How do transnational social movements organize? Specifically, this paper asks how an organized community can lead a nationalist movement from outside the nation. Applying the analytic perspective of Strategic Action Fields, this study identifies multiple attributes of transnational organizing through which expatriate communities may go beyond extra-national supporting roles to actually create and direct a national campaign. Reexamining the rise and fall of the Fenian Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century, which attempted to organize a transnational revolutionary movement for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain, reveals the strengths and limitations of nationalist organizing through the construction of a Transnational Strategic Action Field (TSAF). Deterritorialized organizing allows challenger organizations to propagate an activist agenda and to dominate the nationalist discourse among co-nationals while raising new challenges concerning coordination, control, and relative position among multiple centers of action across national borders. Within the challenger field, “incumbent challengers” vie for dominance in agenda setting with other “challenger” challengers.