Suchergebnisse

While shrimp-loving consumers have benefited from the lower cost of shrimp, domestic shrimp farmers have suffered, particularly in Louisiana. Jill Ann Harrison portrays the struggles that Louisiana shrimp fishers endure to remain afloat in an industry beset by globalization

Research and journalistic accounts on the Rust Belt consistently focus on population decline and its consequences. As a result, we know little about the growing trend of return migration of young professionals and knowledge workers to the region. Why have these individuals chosen to return to a place that they once left? I answer this question using in–depth interviews with young professionals who have moved back to Youngstown, Ohio. Results indicate that return migrants chose to return despite reporting alternative and perhaps more economically rational work opportunities elsewhere. While some reasons can be anticipated from the literature, such as family need, I emphasize how place–specific considerations worked in combination with economic and social factors to pull them back. Findings hold implications for the literatures on place and return migration and for city planners who believe that return migration presents an opportunity for economic growth of legacy cities.

Setting sail : what we can learn from Louisiana shrimp fishers -- Identity : the struggle to stay afloat -- Loss : jumping ship for higher ground -- Innovation : changing course on choppy waters -- Coming back ashore

Neoinstitutionalists have long recognized that organizations must negotiate complex organizational fields to survive. Yet, this ever-sharpening focus on external environments comes at the expense of attending to how micro-level dynamics facilitate or inhibit organizational survival. In this article, and building on insights from research focusing on shop-floor contestation, we reexamine decoupling—that is, possible divergence of formal procedures and everyday practices—and draw on our own case study work on the United Steelworkers. Our analyses show that reforms directed toward restructuring the Steelworker's organizing program were thwarted by organizational members with a stake in the old order that no longer serves the union's long-term organizational interest. This offers some needed correctives and insights, namely, that (1) decoupling may be maladaptive and (2) that it should be understood as a contingent outcome of local power struggles over work within organizations as they respond to changing institutional fields. These conclusions have clear implications not only for the study of labor unions but also for a more general understanding of how situated organizational actors respond to structural shifts in historically constituted institutional fields.