Suchergebnisse

Much attention to revitalization in central urban neighborhoods focuses upon economic development and the infusion of economic capital. Throughout the United States, many organizations and communities have sent their "best and brightest" representatives to various types of leadership training programs. Leadership training, through promising as an investment in human capital, warrants greater attention as a catalyst for social capital. This study explores the potential for social capital development in an ethnically diverse community facing rapid growth, high levels of poverty, unemployment, severe economic disparity and serious environmental threats. Will individuals identified as community leaders, if exposed to general leadership skills training and substantive information about current problems facing the community, develop consensus over goals and a unified a commitment to work together to addressed community problems? Although preliminary results suggest orchestrated cohorts may play less of a role in evolving value consensus than previous personal affiliations like ethnicity, participants reported enhanced relationships.

The management of conflict in organizations and communities is intrinsic to the policy development process. Many communities across the United States are searching for more effective ways of building consensus and managing conflict. A variety of training programs in conflict management are available, but there is little evidence either supporting or disputing the long-term utility of these interventions. Will an intensive training effort in collaborative conflict management influence the personal styles of community leaders in addressing the variety of contentious issues facing their communities? Much of the existing research on conflict management styles and personal attitudes toward conflict has been conducted in lab/experimental settings. Because the context of community is often either artificial or nonexistent in such controlled settings, methodologies such as the fieldwork-based comparative case study may provide valuable, additional evidence for researchers to consider in this area. This article examines the methodological issues raised in a multiple-case framework spanning a 2-year longitudinal analysis of attitudes and self-reported behaviors related to a community training intervention in which collaborative conflict management training was experienced by 150 community leaders representing public, nonprofit, and private organizations.

Increasingly, public sector organizations are creating flexible and innovative benefit packages to augment low salaries. While it is commonly perceived that the public sector has had an edge in benefit packaging, little research has been done to determine the level of importance that employees assign to various benefits and to the putative differences existing between the public and private job sectors. Using survey data from a sample of employees from public and private sector organizations in El Paso, the authors explore the perceptions public sector and private sector employees hold about the importance of various benefits in a compensation package. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the perceived importance of different benefits does not differ dramatically between public and private sector employees in this study, though some differences are notable for merit or incentive benefits and convenience benefits