Civic Enterprise Research Articles

FAFSA and Beyond: How Advisers Manage Their Administrative Burden in the Financial Aid Process

Access to financial aid is crucial in ensuring that students can afford college. Students must file the FAFSA to access federal financial aid and usually the FAFSA is also required for state and institutional aid (U.S. Department of Education, n.d). Prior research has shown, however, that the FAFSA is complicated and burdensome to complete and often acts as a barrier instead of an entry point to college (Bettinger et al., 2012; Bird & Castleman, 2016; Dynarski & Scott-Clayton, 2006, 2008; Dynarski et al., 2013). Given these barriers in accessing aid, some high schools employ college advisers or other school staff to assist students in the financial aid process (Civic Enterprises, 2011; Dunlop Velez, 2016). This single case study explores how College Advising Corps (CAC) advisers perceived their role in the financial aid process and how they discuss college expenses, financial aid, and debt with students. Guided by social capital theory (Coleman, 1988) and administrative burden framework (Herd & Moynihan, 2018), we find that CAC advisers, in their role as a social capital resource, experience learning, psychological, and compliance costs when assisting students to navigate the financial aid bureaucracy. They employ different strategies to overcome, manage, and cope with these costs.

Resisting Resolution: Enterprise Civic Systems Meet Community Organizing

Notions of the smart city look to mobilize information technology to increase organizational efficiency, and more recently, to support new forms of community engagement and involvement in addressing municipal issues. As cities turn to civic enterprise technology platforms, we need to better understand how that class of system might be positioned and used to collaborate with informal community-born coalitions. Beginning in 2019, we undertook an embedded collaborative research project in Albany Georgia, a small rural city, to understand three primary research questions: (1) How do community organizing practices take shape around joint initiatives with local government? (2) What data, tools, and process are needed to support those initiatives? (3) How do the affordances of City-run enterprise platforms support such community-born initiatives? To develop insight into these questions, we deployed a mixed-methods study that interwove participant observation, qualitative fieldwork, and participatory workshops. From this, we point to several mismatches that arose between the assumptions of a managed enterprise environment and the complex needs of establishing and supporting a multiparty community coalition.

Citizens’ Governance Spaces: Democratic Action Through Disruptive Collective Problem-Solving

This article investigates the practical form of citizen engagement that occurs in collective problem-solving efforts such as civic enterprises, grassroots initiatives and self-help groups. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence from diverse policy fields, it articulates the distinct experimental and disruptive policy work that citizens enact in these citizens’ governance spaces and challenges dominant interpretations which view them as either (i) a testament to the capacity of citizens to effectively solve complex public problems or (ii) a symptom of advanced neoliberalism where states off-load complex problems onto citizens. The article moves beyond this dualism to consider the motivations, challenges, available resources and distinct democratic work enacted by citizens in these spaces of bottom-up governance. Citizens’ governance spaces, the article concludes, offer important lessons – both in terms of potential benefits and risks – for the project of deepening the quality and reach of citizen participation in modern systems of democracy.

Unilateralism and Polarization: How Changes in Our Structural Constitution Have Caused Political Divisiveness

Political polarization is perhaps the great political problem of our time. While it has many sources, one of its most important causes, which has not been previously discussed, is the deformation of our governmental structure. That structure has been transformed from an arrangement where consensus was needed to enact important policy changes to one where the President or the Supreme Court can adopt such change unilaterally. This transformation has greatly contributed to political polarization. Congress’s delegation of authority to administrative agencies to make policy allows the President’s administration to make important regulations. Because the President represents the median of his party, not of the nation, his agents' decisions normally are more extreme than what would emerge from the congressional political process, particularly when, as is usually the case, the houses of Congress and the President are divided between the parties. Similarly, presidential claims of authority to engage in military interventions and to make substantial international agreements on their own – rather than with congressional authority as the Constitution requires – require no political consensus even on decisions of fundamental importance to the nation. Finally, the Supreme Court’s arrogation to itself of the power to create or eliminate rights also forestalls compromise, infuriating those who disagree with its ukases. These diverse constitutional departures have a common effect: They generate extreme outcomes, promote polarization, and block the dialogue that can lead to fruitful compromise. Understanding the institutional roots of polarization provides a roadmap to tempering our current discontents. Delegation should be curbed, forcing Congress to make the key decisions. The President's initiation of hostilities and executive agreements should be allowed only if they are swiftly ratified by Congress. The Supreme Court should refrain from creating or eliminating rights, leaving fundamental change to the constitutional amendment process. None of these reforms require us to begin the world anew, but instead to return to tried and tested structures. They would also transform our political culture. In a politics where compromise is routinely required, citizens would become less polarized, seeing each other less as targets or threats and more as partners in a common civic enterprise.

Manufacturing Process of Ductile Pipe using Casting Technique

In this paper, study the behavior of bendable iron which is used to the manufacturing of ductile steel pipe. Bendable Iron offers higher elasticity than mellow steel and holds the intrinsic consumption opposition of cast iron because of its spheroidal graphite small scale structure. Thus this bendable iron is utilized in the production of channels by Srikalahasthi Pipes Limited. The state of graphite in the microstructure of the metal ranges from 100mm to 1100mm measurement for ductile and cast iron. Channels produced using Ductile Iron give considerable advantages as far as weight bearing capacity, sway opposition and ability to continue outer static/unique stacking. These channels have adaptable push-on joints which don't spill at a high or low weight, notwithstanding when avoided and are prominently known as 'Prepared to utilize' funnels, because of the simplicity of jointing these channels. In the assembling procedure of Ductile Iron funnels water is utilized for cooling frameworks in different areas. Keeping in perspective on generally water necessity and to lessen groundwater tapping, a 5 MLD sewerage treatment plant has been set up in 2011 at a capex of Rs 20crores which is adequate for procedure water prerequisite of the plant, which helped in sparing water amid the assembling procedure. The investigation of utilization of Ductile iron in the assembling of channels by Srikalahasthi Pipes Limited is giving beneficiaries in different segments as these are provided to different water sheets, civic enterprises, military specialist administrations, railroads, and contractual workers the nation over for their water foundation ventures.

Making Sense of Civic Enterprise. Social Innovation, Participatory Democracy and the Administrative State

Civic enterprises (CEs) - groups of citizens, often organized as cooperatives, who produce social goods in a democratic way, responsive to local and individual needs – are a rapidly proliferating phenomenon in Europe, in fields as diverse as sustainable energy, social care and urban regeneration. Yet, we know relatively little about them. Using research on social care CEs in the Netherlands, I discuss them respectively as instances of the social economy, social enterprises and as a form of participatory democracy. CEs operate in a dense administrative environment. I show how CEs experience serious constraints from the laws, procedures, operating procedures and financial regimes of state organizations and business corporations that erode their democratic nature. I conclude that CEs suffer from a democratic paradox: although they demonstrate considerable innovative potential, this goes unacknowledged by dominant economic-political institutions.

The limits to openness: Co-working, design and social innovation in the neoliberal city

This article examines the emergence of ‘open’ urban economic projects that promote the transformative potential of social innovation and civic enterprise. By putting the burgeoning literature on an open paradigm of work and innovation within cultural economic geography into dialogue with scholarship on open cities, I problematize the inherently progressive framing of openness. The paper makes two contributions. First, it emphasises how open narratives encourage entrepreneurial communities that manifest as individualization-masked-as-collectivism. It argues efforts to design new spaces of social innovation through the blurring of boundaries simultaneously reproduce social and material exclusions. Second, it demonstrates how the championing of open ecosystems of social innovation intersects with austerity localism. New modes of state withdrawal are facilitated through co-creation, crowdfunding and social enterprise. Illustrated through research into a co-working space in London set up in response to the 2007–2008 economic crisis, I reveal the geographies of exclusion, enclosure and exploitation embedded in the pursuit of openness. Against the claims of enabling conditions for progressive civic futures, I establish the limits to openness whereby such ideas are easily assimilated into the processes of neoliberalisation that they seek to reject.

Treading Angels: Edinburgh and its Festivals

How did Edinburgh become ‘festival city’? Despite appearances, it was not always so, and it acquired the accolade by happenstance; in the view of one observer, a ‘strange amalgam of cultural banditry, civic enterprise and idealism’. The official Festival's survival was down to the City Council, and it was funded almost entirely by public bodies. This was the central structure around which The Fringe developed, and The Traverse prospered, along with smaller festivals and events to become Festival City. The story sheds considerable light on how Edinburgh ‘works’, its strengths and weaknesses combined.

Citizen Initiatives in the Post-Welfare State

Recently we have seen the emergence of citizen-led community initiatives and civic enterprises, taking over governmental tasks in providing public services in various sectors, such as energy, care, landscape maintenance, and culture. This phenomenon can be explained by a renewed interest in community, place, and ‘local identity’; the erosion of the welfare state; the privatization of public services; a re-emergence of the social economy; and tensions between ‘bottom-up’ initiatives and the changing role of the state. The co-production of governments and initiatives can potentially result in a shift from government-led to community-led planning. This, however, raises questions about their innovative potential, the democratic consequences, and the potential roles of governments in enabling these societal dynamics. This article discusses these issues theoretically, illustrated with empirical examples from Portugal, the Netherlands, and Wales, in a context of uncertainty regarding the future of the traditional European welfare state.

The Better Films Movement and the Very Notion of It

This essay considers the historical and conceptual framing of the American better films initiatives of the early twentieth century. Starting with the observation that the film betterment campaigns coincided with the moment women en masse began to be admitted to decision-making processes of government and civic enterprises, the article connects the advances achieved in both spheres with the downplaying of better films achievements by historians of cinema. In doing so, it calls for a more complex explanation of this so-called movement in order to understand women's active participation in their own social subordination. It proposes that women's well-documented exclusion from politics, and the systematic exemption of their collective and individual activity in matters of social organization and politics, should be taken into greater consideration by theorists of cinema.

Before Infrastructure: The Poetics of Paving in John Gay's Trivia

Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.

The transformative potential of civic enterprise

In the present economic and policy climate in Europe there is both a demand and an opportunity for community initiatives and civic enterprises to develop alternative ways of promoting development a...

City profile – Leeds

Leeds is the third largest Metropolitan District in the United Kingdom and the administrative and employment centre of the Yorkshire and the Humber region in the north of England. From being dominated initially by textiles and clothing manufacture, it has seen the development of engineering and the rise of services, notably business and financial services, to produce what remains a relatively diverse local economy. It has been transformed from an industrial to a services dominated city but one retaining important elements of its manufacturing past. A city in a unitary state, the profile traces developments in the city’s political economy through the lens of central–local state relationships and the recent transition from urban government to evolving forms of urban governance: from the entrepreneurial municipal city of Victorian times to the current attempts by the local council to reinvigorate ‘civic enterprise’ in the aftermath of recession and the current Government’s austerity programme and localism agenda.

Cultural Rights Versus Civic Virtue?

1. IntroductionThis paper will address the potential tension between two broadly stated policy objectives: one, the preservation of distinctive cultural traditions, often through the mechanism of formal legal rights, and two, the fostering of civic virtue, a sense of local and the advancement of common civic enterprises.Many political liberals have argued that liberal societies have an obligation to accommodate the cultural traditions of various subgroups through legal rights and a redistribution of social resources. The to cultural is now widely (if not universally) understood to be a basic human right, on par with rights to religious liberty and racial equality.Other theorists writing in the liberal, civic republican, and urban sociology traditions have expounded on the necessity of civic virtue, and common enterprises initiated and executed at the local or municipal level of government or private association. These theorists have argued that common projects, shared norms, and social trust are indispensable elements of effective democratic government and are necessary to the altruism and public spiritedness that in turn secure social justice.These two policy goals therefore may at times conflict. This conflict is especially severe in larger, culturally diverse cities, where social trust and civic virtue are most needed and often in shortest supply. Policies designed to counter cosmopolitan alienation and anomie by fostering civic virtue, social trust, and common social norms will inevitably conflict with the cultural traditions and subgroup identification of some minority groups. Accommodation of any and all subgroup cultural practices will make it difficult if not impossible to foster a common civic culture and social trust.Programmatically speaking, the paper will argue that such conflicts are often best confronted on the field of political debate and policy analysis, not in the language of civil rights. Rights discourse, with its inherent absolutism, is ill suited to the type of subtle trade-offs that these conflicts often entail. While local government and public institutions must be sensitive to the needs of all cultural groups that they affect, the need for civic enterprise and social trust should not be subject to absolute and nonnegotiable demands for the accommodation of cultural traditions. The accommodation of some cultural traditions wiU impose severe costs in terms of strife, conflict, and the inability effectively to pursue other important social goals - in at least some cases, the cultural traditions, and not the other social goals, should yield.2. Rights to Cultural Difference and Civic VirtueAvishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal begin their essay: Liberalism and the Right to Culture with this sentence: Beings have a right to culture - not just any culture, but their own.1 The rest of the essay is concerned, not with defending this proposition, but with exploring how it might be put into practice. This is only one example of a very widely held conviction. For many, one of the most crucial imperatives of a multicultural society is what one might call a to culture. Many argue that the statement in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to participate in the cultural life of the community, entails a right to cultural difference: the right of ethnic and cultural subgroups to retain and perpetuate the practices, norms, and mores of their culture.A right to culture may be a rhetorical figure meant to signal a significant ideological commitment. As an ideological commitment, the right to culture may take the form of a general commitment to learn about and respect the cultural traditions of various culturally distinct groups in a society. It would counsel tolerance of cultural difference and an embrace of a multicultural society; it would stand in opposition to the policies of national assimilation that have so often characterized the nation states of the West. …

The Adoption of Brick in Urban Staffordshire: The Experience of Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1665–1760

The study considers those practical factors which may have affected personal and community decisions to build in brick in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is generally considered that provincial brick production before 1760 was traditional in operation, hindered by transport costs and serving a market which was too small to act as a spur to capital investment. How did would-be builders therefore obtain bricks in communities which did not possess a resident brickmaker? A unique response by the authorities of Newcastle-under-Lyme was the financing of a municipal brick kiln. Paradoxically, this civic enterprise, together with the corporation's policy of restrictive housing leases and the lack of investment by the town's other major landowner, Lord Gower, proved disincentives to the employment of brick and coincided to restrict fashionable brick buildings to a small minority of independent townsfolk. In Newcastle therefore the transformation from timber-framed vernacular styles to the more uniform, brick-built, classically inspired style which nationally characterises so much urban building in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a slow and hesitant process.

Corporate Citizenship and Urban Problem Solving: The Changing Civic Role of Business Leaders in American Cities

ABSTRACT:Our concern in this article is corporate civic elite organizations and their role in social production and urban policy in the United States. Recent urban literature has suggested that the power and influence of CEO organizations has declined and that there has been some disengagement of corporate elites from civic efforts in many urban areas. Yet while these trends and their likely consequences are generally acknowledged, relatively little empirical research has been conducted on the nature and extent of the shifts in corporate civic leadership and on how these shifts have affected the civic agendas of central cities and metropolitan regions. In this study we obtain data from 19 large metropolitan areas in order to more systematically examine shifts in corporate civic leadership and their consequences. Our results suggest that the institutional autonomy, time, and personal connections to the central cities of many CEOs have diminished and that the civic organizations though which CEOs work appear to have experienced lowered capacity for sustained action. These trends suggest that while many CEOs and their firms will continue to commit their time and their firms’ slack resources to civic enterprises, the problems they address will differ from those tackled in the past. We discuss the important implications these shifts have for the future of corporate civic engagement in urban problem solving and for the practice of urban governance.

CIVIC CAPITALISM: ENTREPRENEURS, THEIR VENTURES AND COMMUNITIES

Entrepreneurs and everyday businessmen and women have long engaged in different kinds of civic-minded activities. This study explores ways that urban entrepreneurs and managers engage in civic activities while pursuing business growth. In this preliminary analysis of owners and managers who have participated in a technical assistance program geared for entrepreneurs who are ready to take their existing venture "to the next level", we identify a kind of entrepreneur whose business model incorporates a social mission. These are not "social entrepreneurs" who engage in business practices in order to push their social agenda. Nor are they mimicking businesses that follow a "corporate social responsibility" model because they were shamed into it or believe it will be good for their bottom line. These are people whose ventures must make a profit if their social mission is to be achieved. They run what we call a "civic enterprise". Their behavior reflects a kind of "civic-minded capitalism".

Building Ventures through Civic Capitalism

An exploratory study of urban entrepreneurs participating in a technical assistance program finds that they focus on the bottom line and often have an explicit wish to improve their community. This integrated combination of economic and social values, a kind of civic-minded capitalism, guides their positioning for growth and yields a business that can best be called a “civic enterprise.” A descriptive analysis of qualitative and quantitative research yields propositions for future research on these hybrid business ventures.

Cultural Rights and Civic Virtue

This paper addresses the potential tension between two broadly stated policy objectives: the preservation of distinctive cultural traditions, often through the mechanism of formal legal rights, and the fostering of civic virtue, a sense of local community and the advancement of common civic enterprises. Many political liberals argued that liberal societies have an obligation to accommodate the cultural traditions of various sub groups through legal rights and a redistribution of social resources. The “right to cultural difference” is now widely (if not universally) understood to be a basic human right, on par with rights to religious liberty and racial equality. Other theorists writing in the liberal, civic republican, and urban sociology traditions expounded on the necessity of civic virtue, community and common enterprises initiated and executed at the local or municipal level of government or private association. These theorists argued that common projects, shared norms and social trust are indispensable elements of effective democratic government and are necessary to the altruism and public spiritedness that in turn secure social justice. These two policy goals therefore may at times be in conflict. This conflict is especially severe in larger culturally diverse cities, where social trust and civic virtue are most needed and often in shortest supply. Policies designed to counter cosmopolitan alienation and anomie by fostering civic virtue, social trust and common social norms will inevitably conflict with the cultural traditions and sub group identification of some minority groups. The paper argues that such conflicts are often best confronted on the field of political debate and policy analysis, not in the language of civil rights. Rights discourse, with its inherent absolutism, is ill suited to the type of subtle tradeoffs that these conflicts often entail.

Degrees East: The Making of the University of East London 1892-1992

When the University of East London was designated by the Privy Council in June 1992, it already had an institutional history of nearly 100 years. During that time the problems of higher education - problems of numbers, governance, standards, level of work, purpose and funding - received many different solutions in universities, polytechnics and colleges. No institution had a richer experience of these various solutions than the University of East London. The history of the University is thus an example of the changes, controversies and dilemmas of British higher education at large. Now an independent corporation, it began in two bursts of civic enterprise in Stratford and Dagenham. Its students at various times took the degrees of the University of London and the CNAA. Its academic work has been in both the autonomous and service traditions. It has been funded by local authorities and by central government. After 1970 it was a leading force in the establishment of a distinct idea of a polytechnic. Now, the University can be seen as a continuing solution to educational, social and economic problems.