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The benefits and costs of organizational coupling have been actively debated for more than the last thirty years. While debate remains ongoing to the value of coupling structures, few studies have examined the processes that develop from units that are jeopardized by the coupling structures of organizations. This study compares two tuberculosis clinics in San Francisco that operated under a singular organization, but due to different internal organizational structures and interpretations of operative goals, negotiated their relationships to the parent organization with different techniques. As budgetary pressures forced the central hospital to appraise the value of these clinics, commitment to endogenous organizational cultures constrained and guided the decision -making processes that led to the net result of one clinic closing from extenuated decoupling and the other in an iteration of its previous form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comparative evaluation using Affect Control Theory and David Heise's Interact Modeling program to create an understanding in why tuberculosis and polio had such a different trajectory in the course of 20th century America. I use key identifying terms for each disease and generate an affilaitive identity schema and explain how these schemas, in collusion with the public imagery used in national propaganda produced very different outcomes for the victims of each disease was interpreted. The biology of each disease has different epidemiological predispositions, however, the public sympathy towards polio victims and antipathy towards tuberculosis inevitably hindered how much funding for research was allocated to each disease, and ultimately, the public impression of the victims of each disease. Through external impression semiotics, polio patients were associated with hapless and unfortunate victims, while tuberculosis victims were "getting their lot" as a social disease of stigma and poverty. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a look at Medical Technical Assistants (MTA) in California prison systems. MTAs were the topic of legislative debate in California in 2000 and have resurfaced periodically through legal matters. MTAs hold a questionable position in California prison; they are prison officers empowered with custodial authority, but MTAs are also entrusted with the duty of health service workers. The tension between caring and controlling for prisoners had caused MTAs to be the foci of scrutiny for various prison deaths and the California Department of Corrections healthcare as a whole. This paper looks at how individual MTAs manage the tension of controlling prisoners as officers and caring for their health as nurses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement organizations are often studied in terms of the success or failure of an organization in relationship to the fulfillment of organizational objectives rather than independently as an organism, evaluated on its ability to evolve and survive in a changing ecological terrain. This paper is a case study of a specific organization, the Grey Panthers, and examines the capacity for this organization to adapt and reorient to social and political environment within which it operates. The Grey Panthers have been able to fluidly adjust to the vacillating demands made by forces of agency and structure, both inside and outside of the organization. For organizations like the Grey Panthers that are capable of expansive readjustments to the objective orientation of the organization, the standard metrics of success and failure offered by traditional theories of collective action and social movement organizations fall short by relying on static interpretations of organizational objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]