Partnerships between government and community-based development organizations (CBDOs) have proven to be central to long-term neighborhood revitalization in many settings. These successes, coupled with the political popularity of community-driven projects, have stimulated further reliance on this approach. Unfortunately, scant research has been done on the organizational capacity of local community-based development organizations to administer these projects. It may be that many of them do not have the capacity to do the job. This article examines elements of organizational capacity in CBDOs developing affordable housing in a United States-Mexico border community. Evidence of capacity was limited, raising serious questions about the implementation of public policy in the hollow state. In their haste to contract with not-for-profits to create affordable housing, government officials may not be considering the serious possibility that CBDOs do not have the capacity to deliver services or effectively administer projects over time
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
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.