Suchergebnisse

The growth of black fraternal associations is closely intertwined with the larger history of voluntary associations in American society. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, compared to its European counterparts, the United States soon gained a reputation as "a nation of joiners." As early as the 1830s, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville described the proliferation of voluntary associations as a hallmark of American democracy. In his view, such associations distinguished America from the more hierarchically organized societies of Western Europe. "The citizen of the United States," Tocqueville (1947 [1835]: 109) declared, "is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it." Near the turn of the twentieth century, a writer for theNorth American Reviewdescribed the final decades of the nineteenth century as the "Golden Age of Fraternity" (Harwood 1897).

A MODEL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S POLITICAL THOUGHT STEMS FROM A PHILOSOPHY THAT CREATES EMPOWERMENT FROM WITHIN THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF EMPOWERING A PERCEIVED COMMUNITY ONE INDIVIDUAL AT A TIME THROUGH THE POWER OF SELF DEFINITION. AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S POLITICAL THOUGHT IS ABOUT HAVING THE DETERMINATION AND CREATIVITY TO UNCOVER WHAT CAN BE DOME IN A WOMAN'S CIRCLE OF POWER. IT IS NOT ABOUT BECOMING PART OF THE PRESENT POWER STRUCTURE, BUT IT IS THE RE-DEFINITION OF POWER AND THE REORGANIZATION OF THE CENTER OF ANALYSIS.

Abstract
Oral narratives are increasingly used in speech and language evaluations for measuring language skills, and to measure children's organizational skill within a broader communicative context. Because of this, oral-narrative analyses are applied to diverse age ranges and populations. However, there are few studies examining the production of narratives of child speakers of African American English (AAE), and these previous studies offer conflicting views on the nature of narratives in this population. Because of this, the purpose of this study was to investigate the production of narratives of AAE speaking children using elicitation procedures that were standard across participants. Fifteen partici-pants were selected from a predominantly African American low-income com-munity of Springfield, Massachusetts. Highpoint and story-grammar analyses-two analyses that are often applied narratives in previous studies- were applied to the samples gathered from these participants. The results indicated that (a) subjects produced a greater number of more advanced (com-plete and complex) structures than lower level structures within story grammar analysis at all age levels, and (b) the most advanced structure (classic structure) was observed more often than any other structures within highpoint analysis. (Speech/Hearing/Language Pathology)

This study examines causes of black/white gaps in business ownership and self-employment rates by analyzing small-business entry and exit patterns. We proceed by recognizing heterogeneity in business ownership across different industry groups: a classification of firms by human- and financial-capital "intensiveness", or entry barriers, we find, is useful for explaining racial differences in entrepreneurship. The barriers facing aspiring entrepreneurs seeking entry into low-barrier industries differ substantially from those limiting entry into high-barrier industries. Higher entry and lower exit rates typifying whites, relative to African Americans, are traditionally interpreted as reflections of the greater financial- and human-capital resources possessed by non-minorities. This consensus view, however, is simplistic. While education background is a powerful predictor of self-employment patterns in the low-barrier industries, advanced educational credentials actually predict lower entry: college graduates are less likely to select into low-barrier small business ownership. In the high-barrier fields, in contrast, college-educated individuals are more likely than less educated persons to enter into self employment. Overall, black presence in high-barrier fields is held down by lower net asset holdings and weaker educational credentials of potential and actual entrepreneurs. In the low-barrier industries, where the majority of black-owned businesses operate, net worth levels and educational backgrounds are trumped by the racial characteristic: low black entry and high exit rates are powerfully predicted by one's race. -- Self-employment ; entrepreneurship ; entry barriers ; African American

PurposeThe aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between mentoring, job satisfaction and organizational commitment among African‐American males.Design/methodology/approachAn online questionnaire was completed by 359 African‐American males in a business setting.FindingsJob satisfaction and organizational commitment were higher for those who were being mentored versus those who were not. The multiple regression results suggested mentoring was a statistically significant predictor of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Further, the relation between mentoring and organizational commitment was mediated by job satisfaction.Research limitations/implicationsCurrent organizational research is limited, in that it tends to focus on majority culture where findings can be inappropriately generalized to minority groups. Future mentoring research should include more minorities that can provide a new window for interpreting the contributions of minorities to organizational competitiveness.Practical implicationsMentoring programs should be continued and/or expanded upon to reduce the likelihood of poor job satisfaction and organizational commitment for African‐American males.Social implicationsOrganizations through their human resource efforts can contribute to the learning and development of African‐American males and other minorities by designing and implementing quality mentoring programs. Such programs could lessen the likelihood of costly under‐performance and turnover.Originality/valueThis is one of the relatively few organizational studies designed specifically for a minority group. The results have implications for how human resource professionals and managers might improve mentoring experiences for minorities.

Although much of the urban violence literature focuses on the link between urban disadvantage and crime rates, in this article we explore the relationship between African-American entrepreneurship and rates of juvenile violence, net of the effects associated with labor market shifts and the concentration of disadvantage within these areas. That is, Black-owned businesses have increased considerably over time but have largely been neglected in the criminological literature. After generating two distinct measures of Black entrepreneurship, we test to see if Black-owned businesses were significant to the documented decline in juvenile violence in larger U.S. cities from 1990 to 2000. We find an inverse relationship between entrepreneurship and juvenile arrests involving violence across multiple cities in 1990 and 2000. Furthermore, when estimating a pooled cross-sectional time-series design, the growing presence of African-American businesses is a significant contributor to the change (decline) in Black youth violence during the period of the 1990 crime drop, while the rate of paid employees in Black firms remained unrelated to Black youth violence. In changing economic times, we discuss the importance of exploring ways to capture the presence of African-Americans in the urban economy.

This study examines the narrated life experiences of 11 African American intellectual-activists. An intellectual-activist is defined as a person whose education has provided him or her with a body of knowledge to which he/she is continually adding (intellectual self) and who works daily for, or has a career dedicated to, the betterment of African American people (activist self). The voices of the subjects focus on the events in their lives that contributed to their development as intellectuals and activists. Discussions of the individuals' backgrounds illuminate the forces that influenced thei