National Survey Of Organizations Research Articles

Do Peace Movement Groups Condone Violence in the Pursuit of Justice?

Responses to a comprehensive national survey of peace movement organizations belies claims that pacifist groups have abandoned their commitment to nonviolence and condone revolutionary violence. Rather, the peace movement can be divided into four segments based on the strength of commitments to nonviolence and pursuit of social justice: pacifist/social justice, pacifist/not social justice, not pacifist/ social justice, and not pacifist/not social justice. Only the not pacifist/ social justice groups had any tendency to condone violence. Among pacifist groups, only a minority in the pacifist/social justice segment were ready to condone revolutionary violence in certain circumstances. These results suggest no consensus on the issue, but continued wrestling with the problem of trying to advance non-violence and social justice simultaneously.

Occupational Training, Unions, and Internal Labor Markets

A large majority of U.S. establishments provide formal job training programs, according to the 1991 National Organizations Survey. Most training is directed at core employees (who produce the company's main product or service) and their managers. But contrary to previous research, blue-collar core occupations receive as much company training as white-collar core workers. The more extensive an organization's internal labor market, the more likely it is to use formal training programs as mechanisms for enabling workers to advance to positions of higher prestige, pay, and responsibility. The presence of a labor union representing core workers in wage negotiations not only is associated with greater firm-provided training effort, but unions also seem to offset the adverse effects of an absent or poorly developed internal labor market for all types of workers. Unionized establishments are more likely than nonunionized workplaces to provide training to core workers recruited from outside the organization.

Cui Bono? Employee Benefit Packages

Recent difficulties in obtaining quality child care by Clinton administration nominees underscore the shortcomings in employee benefits available to the U.S. labor force. The author uses data from the 1991 National Organizations Survey to examine the extent to which employers provide various types of benefits. Factor analysis of 13 programs and services uncovers three underlying dimensions: (a) a personal benefits package consisting of medical, dental, life insurance, pensions, disability, and drug/alcohol abuse treatment; (b) a familial benefits bundle of maternity leave, sick leave, elderly care, child care, and job training programs; and (c) participant benefits comprising cash bonuses and profit sharing. Poisson regression and multicategory logistic regression analyses examine hypotheses about the organizational capacity, employee demand, and environmental factors associated with more comprehensive employee benefit programs. Implications of the results for understanding organizations' human resources practices and their social contracts with employees are discussed.

Organizational Adoption of Microcomputer Technology: The Role of Sector

Microcomputer and work-station technology is the latest wave in computing technology to influence day-to-day operations in business and government organization. Does sector affect adoption of this new information technology? If so, how? Utilizing the data from a large comparative national survey of data processing organizations, this proposition was examined. The results confirm that after controlling for other factors such as organizational size, experience with computer technology, current investment in computer technology, procurement practices, and the task environment of the organization, the sector an organization operates within has a major differential effect on adoption of microcomputer technology. Public organizations have more microcomputers per employee, a result that is potentially due to a more information intensive task environment and the potential use of microcomputer technology as a side payment in lieu of salary. The latter factor derives from lower wage rates faced by public employees.

Continuity and change in preferred provider organizations

This paper presents the results from a national survey of preferred provider organizations (PPOs) that was conducted in 1988. It is based on telephone interviews conducted by the authors with executives In over 170 PPOs in the United States. We compare the survey results with those obtained from similar surveys conducted In 1985 and 1986, allowing us to assess the extent to which PPOs have grown and changed. We found that PPOs have continued to grow at an extremely rapid rate. During the Summer and Fall of 1988, the time In which the survey took place, 37.6 million people were eligible to use PPO benefits, compared to the 16.5 million figure we obtained two years earlier. We did not find, however, that PPOs are moving in the direction of providing more Innovative forms of health care cost containment. Most PPOs still rely on discounts from providers and utilization review to achieve savings. There Is little trend towards using incentive reimbursement techniques and choosing preferred providers that have shown themselves to be cost-efficient. We conclude that in the coming years PPOs must demonstrate the ability to control rising health care costs. To accomplish this, they will need to put more pressure on providers to use resources more sparingly. Otherwise, they may lose their market share to other forms of managed care.