Jon Miller

Responding to Skid Row Alcoholism: Self-Defeating Arrangements in an Innovative Treatment Program

This case study explores some major sources of ineffectiveness which plagued an innovative alcoholism treatment program located in a skid row mission. The findings identify ambiguous and competing goals, conflicting vested interests, conflicts over organizational resources, and a lack of treatment technology as major sources of ineffectiveness. The agencies sponsoring this venture contributed to these problems, especially by their lack of planning and the imposition of unrealistic success criteria. The study has implications for the problem of massive program failure. In this regard, a particularly surprising finding is the extent to which large public expenditure actually diverted the treatment program from servicing one segment of its target population and indirectly contributed to the skid row alcoholism problem by introducing men to the area who might not otherwise have found their way there.

Class Collaboration for the Sake of Religion: Elite Control and Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century Colonial Mission

The Basel Mission is a Pietist evangelical organization that was active in many areas of the colonial world in the nineteenth century. In addition to the intrinsic religious satisfaction it offered to all its members, the Mission provided its leaders with social honor and an arena in which to sustain useful long-term ties to others like themselves. For most of the rank and file, acceptance into the missionary life represented social ascendancy well beyond their modest material origins. I will explore how the prospect of this gain affected their decisions to participate and then go a step further by calibrating the extent to which they were able to pass on their newly acquired social advantages to their offspring. The discussion of the findings concentrates on the unintended secular consequences of such religiously motivated activities, and it speculates about the implications for the changing class structures of nineteenth-century Europe and the colonial world.

Decision-Making and Organizational Effectiveness: Participation and Perceptions

As a way of examining some of the underlying assumptions commonly made about participation in decision-making, data provided by 161 members of a white-collar organization were used to explore the relationship between the structure of influence and members perceptions of personal and organizational effectiveness. Separate analyses were performed for super ordinates and subordinates. The results showed that being allowed to participate was related to perceptions of effectiveness for subordinates but that allowing participation was not related to perceptions of effectiveness for superordinates. For the latter group, only perceptions of centralization were useful as a predictor of perceived effectiveness. The findings cast doubt on some of the social-psychological reasoning underlying many theories of participation and indicate that differences in organizational position need to be accounted for in assessing the organizational consequences of participation.

Institutionalized Contradictions: Trouble in a Colonial Mission

The Basel Mission is a Pietist evangelical organization that was active in many areas of the colonial world in the nineteenth century, including the Gold Coast of West Africa, now known as Ghana. The Missions impact was strong in spite of policies that discouraged creativity and undermined interpersonal trust among the missionaries. Its troubles and its persistence came from the same source, namely, a distinctive structure of authority that was anchored simultaneously in charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal understandings about discipline. This interpretive study isolates the elective affinities among beliefs, experiences, and interests that enabled the Mission to construct and reproduce that complicated structure; it describes the central contradictions that emerged out of the structure; and it documents how the organization survived despite those contradictions. The research encourages comparisons with missions and other kinds of commitment organizations that are participants in other historical circumstances.

Missions, Social Change, and Resistance to Authority: Notes toward an Understanding of the Relative Autonomy of Religion

In sociology, studies of social change in the non-Western world have not assigned a prominent role to missionary organizations. This relative neglect is the product of two assumptions: first, that missions abroad were ineffective as agents of fundamental social change; and, second, that their activities were shaped more by powerful secular agendas over which they had little control than by autonomous rehgious interests. Contrary to the first assumption, there is ample evidence that some missions were impressive agents of social transformation; contrary to the second, some of them took a stand in direct opposition to the secular political and economic interests to which they are often considered subordinate. Together the8e observations reinforce the concept of the relative autonomy of religion. I argue here that one key to understanding mission resistance to powerful nonreligious forces can be found in religious conceptions of the proper relationships among land, labor, and community stabilitv. When these are threatened, the symbiosis between rehgious and secular intests can give way to open and effective defiance.

Material traces of religious change in africa, asia and latin america

The international missionary organizations that emerged in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America established outposts in some of the remotest regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Missionaries were among the first to recognize the communications potential of the new medium of photography, in some cases as early as the 1840s. Photographs were useful for record keeping and reports and for the edification of supporting publics at home. But missionaries were curious beyond practicality; as they became more proficient with cameras they took pictures of everything around them. As a result, their collections provide invaluable evidence of cultural encounters and social change in non-Western cultures. Until recently, the usefulness of these collections was limited by their unorganized state and dispersion across many sites. Few investigators are able to move from one archive to another in search of visual documentation for a scholarly argument and thematically driven comparative visual research that spans regions, cultures and time periods has been especially difficult. It was with those limitations in mind that an international team of scholars and archivists created the Internet Mission Photography Archive (IMPA) at the University of Southern California (http://www.usc.edu/impa). IMPA is an open, searchable repository of digitized and cataloged pictures from the collections of several important missionary organizations, assembled and maintained by a partnership involving USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) and the Digital Archive of the USC Libraries. When the photographs are brought together in a single place, they become a resource for scholarship across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, including not only religious studies but also history, art history, economics, political science, area studies, anthropology, international relations and comparative sociology. This project has gone through three phases to date.

An Examination of the Subjective Rewards and Disadvantages of Rank in Law Enforcement Agencies

Law enforcement occupations have received some attention from researchers in the sociology of work and other areas (Niederhoffer, 1967; Bordua, 1967; Skolnick, 1966; Locke and Smith, 1970), but relatively little of this attention has dealt with differentiation among the ranks in police organizations in terms of the subjective variables that have long concerned researchers dealing with other areas of the work force. For example, the work satisfaction and job pressures of police officers have been explored (Reiss, 1967) and the process of attitudinal socialization has been documented (Van Maanen, 1975), but how the attitudinal rewards and disadvantages of police work vary according to the individuals location in the organizational structure of law enforcement has remained vague. The police science literature offers very little more on this topic, because investigators in that area usually are not interested in linking questions of morale, work strain, and alienation to variables that are of theoretical interest to sociologists, such as elements of organizational structure, patterns of influence on the job, and the like (see Olson, 1971; Watson, 1968). In this study we directed our attention to how the subjective rewards and disadvantages that characterize police work differ by rank. Specifically, we analyzed the work satisfaction and job strain expressed by sergeants and compared their responses with the responses of those above and below sergeants rank in the command structure. Our objective was to gain an initial impression of how police personnel compare