Michael Aiken

Organizational Structure, Work Process, and Proposal Making in Administrative Bureaucracies

This paper examines the effect of organizational structures and processes on the reported proposals of innovation by middle and lower echelon officials in 44 Belgian bureaucracies. Technical and ad...

Communication in Administrative Bureaucracies1

This paper examines the structural constraints on the frequency of both department head and subordinate communication within 44 local government bureaucracies. The effect of organizational size, sh...

Community Structure and Innovation: The Case of Public Housing

Innovation can be defined as . . . the generation, acceptance, and implementation of new ideas, processes, products, or services.1 We mean here an activity, process, service, or idea that is new to an American city. We do not restrict it to mean only the first appearance ever of something new (i.e., an invention) or only the first use by one among a set of social actors.2 We are concerned neither with the diffusion of innovation nor with internal stages in the adoption process, but rather with the characteristics of cities that have successfully implemented innovations in federally financed public housing. We focus on three aspects of community innovation: (1) the presence or absence of a federally

Job Mobility and the Social Integration of Displaced Workers

Company closed its Detroit plant in 1956. Emile Durkheim was the first to advance and test a series of hypotheses concerning individual status changes and the implications of such changes for the stability of group attachments and loyalties. From his studies, Durkheim concluded that such changes frequently weakened individual ties to accepted groups and values. The insight that a change in individual status, specifically the sudden or prolonged loss of work, weakens group attachments and loyalties has long been recognized in unemployment research. The Great Depression stimulated a number of research efforts

Comparative Cross-National Research on Subnational Units in Western Europe Problems, Data Sources, and a Proposal

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a revision of a paper originally presented at the CAG/CUNYColloquium on Comparative Urban Politics, New York, May 14, 1971. Part of the information in this report is contained in a 1972 report published by the Council for European Studies entitled: The study of cross-national and comparative research on urban and other subnational units in Western Europe appears to be in a &dquo;takeoff ’ stage. In the past five years or so, there has been a growing number of social scientists, both in the United States and in Europe, who have become interested in the comparative study of local urban units. What is interesting about this development is that a number of spontaneous and independent efforts attempting to encourage, support, coordinate, or otherwise abet such research efforts have been made.

Urban Social Structure and Political Competition: A Comparative Study of Local Politics in Four European Nations

The purpose of this article is to examine the hypothesis that cleavages and heterogeneity in the social structure of cities is linked to their degree of interparty competition. This hypothesis is tested by carrying out separate analyses among the largest cities in four European nations: France, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands. Among other factors, these nations have in common the fact that each has a multiparty system; each is characterized by strong class, religious, and/or ethnic cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967); each has one or more mass-based socialist or left-oriented, &dquo;programmatic&dquo; political parties (Lowi, 1967); each uses or has used a system of proportional representation in municipal elections among larger cities;’ and municipal elections are not held concurrently with legislative or national-level elections, although in one instance they are held concurrently with provincial elections. Such factors make these nations particularly propitious settings for examining this hypothesis.