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An emerging literature examines "bridging work" that occurs when people cross occupational or professional boundaries. This study expands the theory of bridging work with two arguments. First, organizational structures can increase the likelihood that bridging work happens. Second, bridging work can promote organizational performance when it links workers that have disparate knowledge related to the organization's primary task. We test our hypotheses with data from interviews with 193 infection preventionists working in a random sample of US hospitals. We find that a hospital's size, infection control practices, and prior performance in infection control are associated with infection preventionists' working with medical doctors. We also find that relationships with medical doctors are correlated with reduced catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Thus, organizational context shapes bridging work and bridging work can have tangible consequences for organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways Mead's theory of time can be integrated with Goffman's conception of the moral career to explore the ways institutions shape individuals' understandings of their past, present, and future selves. I then bring this theoretical approach to bear on empirical data from interviews with homeless shelter residents, in order to understand how homeless shelter residents reconstruct their pasts in ways that allow them to both make sense of their present shelter stay and construct a self that is both eligible for and morally worth of the shelter's services. I also seek to highlight the creative ways residents make use of the cultural tools and discourses provided by the shelters' institutional culture. Residents cobble together a subjectively reconstructed past and a service-worthy self using the shelter's culture, but residents can exercise creativity and flexibility as they seek to navigate the tensions inherent in service-worthiness and piece together a service-worthy self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several educational reforms made in 1972, including the Title IX of the Education Amendments, school funding equalization and school vouchers and their significance after the desegregation efforts. It explores the ways ideas and institutions were affected during the three significant education reforms. The author concludes that what the 1972 education reforms showed was that there are institutional and cultural sides of policy legacies and that these legacies could affect the subsequent policy development.

This paper compares the claims, interests, and strategies of those who fought over a set of important reforms intended to promote greater educational equality during two distinct policy eras: the early 1970s, in the midst of an equality regime, and the middle 1990s, well over a decade into the achievement and accountability regime. The reforms we study are Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, intended to address problems of gender discrimination throughout education; school finance reform, intended to address problems of unequal funding in public schools; and the voucher movement, intended to provide equality through greater choice of schools. The discourse in favor of and opposition to each of these movements in the early 1970s was heavily influenced by the cultural and political legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Advocates of gender equality in education drew on legal victories secured by Civil Rights activists and borrowed the concept of "discrimination" from Civil Rights debates to name a heretofore taken-for-granted condition a gender-inequality problem that demanded policy redress. School finance reform originated in lawsuits in Texas and California decided in favor of the plaintiffs in the early 1970s. The cases were originally conceived as remedies for racial inequality. As with Title IX, the public call was for redistribution of funds to make educational opportunities more "equal." School vouchers, a policy proposal that had been floated intermittently since the 1950s, were given new life in the early 1970s when it became part of a vigorous anti-busing campaign backed by the Nixon administration. By the mid-1990s the discourse surrounding each reform had shifted in subtle but important ways. Proponents of Title IX called for gender "equity" instead of "equality" - a discursive shift that legitimated the long-standing practice of allocating disproportionate resources to males in athletics, undercutting calls for gender-proportionate resources and opportunities. The terms of the debate about school finance reform shifted from "equality" to "adequacy;" the new standard of adequacy required less resource redistribution than equality, weakening the public link between school finance reform and racial equality. Finally, school vouchers were transformed from a market solution used to oppose school reforms intended to benefits minorities to an "equality" reform intended to provide greater school choice to disadvantaged (and disproportionately black) families. Although these discursive arguments were still related to the discursive repertoire made possible by the Civil Rights Movement, each of the three reforms had become substantively decoupled from the political interests and policy goals of earlier Civil Rights activists. We illustrate in this paper the borrowing and connectedness among these three very distinct educational reform movements. We trace the changes between the early 1970s and the mid-1990s in the discourse used by proponents and opponents of each reform to changes in the legal environment, changes in the values and claims legitimated in popular political culture, the decline of the Civil Rights Movement, and the gradual reframing of equality claims produced by the discursive struggles between proponents and opponents during this time period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]