Social Work Commons^™

Break Even Analysis: A Tool For Budget Planning (Revised), Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Applications of the tools of modern business and public management to human service administrative problems has become increasingly sophisticated. In this article, the author presents Break-Even Analysis (BEA) as one such management tool useful for financial planning in nonprofit and public human services organizations, particularly those with multiple sources of funding. The original article, published in 1976, was the first-ever presentation on this topic in human services, and the core of the author's 1980 first-ever book on financial management in nonprofit human services. In this revision of the original article, Break-Even Analysis is presented as a compact, easily administered “early …

And Lettuce Is Nonanimal: Toward A Positive Theory Of Voluntary Action, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Much recent conceptual and theoretical effort to identify and define the kinds of voluntary action that take place outside households, economic markets and governments has a consistent emphasis on negation: It seems to define these matters by what they are not: not for profit, or nonprofit, nongovernmental, unproductive, inefficient, examples of contract failure, market failure, government failure and more. This paper is a beginning effort to shift the emphasis to the positive and the describe and explain what voluntary action is and what it consists of. It proposes the beginnings of an economics of common goods production, and differentiates such …

Lindblom County: Philanthropic Insufficiency, Amateurism And Paternalism, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In this fictionalized case study, a group of friends from graduate school compose a community elite with responsibility for human services decision-making in rural Lindblom County. They must deal with issues of insufficient resources, amateurism among other community officials, and challenges posed by opposing and emergent groups of aspiring community leaders. Discussion questions and questions of strategy and calculation are posed for further examination of the issues raised.

Simon Nelson Patten, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

A brief biographical article on Simon Patten, the German-trained social economist who coined the term social work and continued to make contributions to social work and social welfare throughout his career.

The Principles Of Organizational Inaction, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Organization inaction and the absence of change are seriously understudied topics. This article (a spoof) reports on a research problem that identifies and studies four principles of organizational inaction: The time, subject matter, group size and controversy theorems together and separately explain a great deal of committee and organizational inaction. The article also introduces innovative techniques of invariant statistics and mystery sampling. The article is an extensive rewrite of a 'research report' that originally appeared in a peer-reviewed administrative humor journal, The Bureaucrat, in 1979.

Father-Daughter Incest: Comparison Of Treated Cases To Untreated Control Subjects, Keith W. Beard, Jason E. Newsome, Karen V. Harper-Dorton, Stephen L. O'Keefe, Debra H. Young, Sam Swindell, Walter E. Stroupe, Kerri Steele, Megan Lawhon, Shih-Ya Kuo

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Treatment of father daughter incest (FDI) survivors using the victim advocacy/child welfare approach to FDI that predominates today in the US has never been compared to results in untreated control subjects in any published report. In the present study, thirty-two survivors of FDI who received treatment based on the victim advocacy/child welfare approach to FDI were compared to 32 control subjects who did not receive treatment. No significant differences were found using analysis of variance on 21 scales and subscales. Statistical analysis of the data from all 64 of the FDI survivors showed that items reflecting a poor self-image and …

Deliberation And Dialogue In A Quiet Place, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This article recounts the story of the rise and fall of the public deliberation and sustained dialogue mission of the Nova Institute in the (now defunct) School of Applied Social Sciences of West Virginia University. The concept of political quiescence in Appalachia is used to characterize some of the resistance to public discussion that was encountered. The article appears in a volume of essays around the theme of university-community relations in Central Europe and published in Budapest, Hungary.

Arthur J. Altmeyer, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Arthur J. Altmeyer (1891-1972) was a key figure in the design and implementation of the U.S. Social Security system. Appointed to the original Social Security Board by President Franklin Roosevelt, he advocated expansion of the program and expanded benefits for many years. His career also involved advocacy in the civil service system and opposed political patronage in the Social Security system.

Associations, Movements, Dialogues, Social Problems And News: Voluntary Action And The Life Cycles Of The Third Sector, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This is one of two summation papers presented at the conclusion of the 2012 Queensland University conference on the third sector, looking to the future. The focus initially is on the concept of the social imaginary as offered by the Canadian social philosopher, Charles Taylor. Much of the previous conceptual and theoretical work in third sector studies during the past few decades has been focused on questions of the best ways to imagine the community and national social configurations of increasingly large numbers of nonprofit, voluntary and nongovernmental organizations. The concepts of nonprofit organization and nonprofit sector have been most …

Stretching The Paradigm: Crisis As A Problem In Mental Health Research, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Crisis intervention is an established paradigm of community mental health theory and practice in which the nature and circumstances of crises are assumed to be well understood and the subject of established research findings and theory. Review of existing crisis research literature fails to support such assumptions. There is, in fact, little current evidence available on the nature and circumstances of mental health crises, despite the importance of crisis intervention in contemporary practice. This paper presents descriptive findings of a study of the frequency, duration and severity of mental health crises, based on analysis of more than 500 crisis incidents …

Edwin E. Witte, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Edwin E. Witte was a Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin and Chairman of the Committee on Economic Security, which oversaw the drafting of the original Social Security Act. Witte is generally acknowledged as the principal author of the Social Security legislation as it went to Congress. In later years, he consulted on the National Labor Relations Act and continued to teach and supervise Ph.D. students.

The Children's Bureau: Research Note, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This research note brings together some of the well-known facts about one of the very first national public human service agencies in the U.S., together with a variety of lesser-known aspects. This unpublished research note includes information gathered from the National Archives.

Out Of Philanthropy And Into Social Enterprise? Probably Not, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Deliberation, Dialogue And Deliberative Democracy In Social Work Education And Practice, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Ideas of public talk were central in various aspects of the history of social work and professional education. Social work has never just been a consumer of deliberative ideas. Several fundamental ideas associated with deliberative democracy theory arose directly out of social work education and practice and continue to function in different forms within contemporary social work theory and practice.

Giving Circles, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

A giving circle is a group of members pool their funds and information in collective or joint donations to organizations, causes or individuals. The article reviews some of the research on giving circles in the first decade of the 21st century.

Spontaneous Order, Symbolic Interaction And The Somewhat-Less-Hidden Hand, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Commons, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The commons is a theoretical formalism that is useful in understanding many diverse problems of civil society. A common (or commons) is an economic, political, social, and legal institution that enables joint, shared, mutual or collective natural or social action by agents using a “pool” of shared or jointly held or mutually controlled resources. A substantial body of work exists detailing natural common resource pools acted upon by physical or biological agents. Another large body of work on humanly-directed natural resource pools study the human-natural environment interface, interspecies conflict and population density. Studies of social commons have also looked at …

The Growth Of Nonprofit Accounting And It's Impact On Human Services, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Changes in nonprofit accounting standards and practices have spearheaded a quiet revolution in financial management practice in social agencies and the delivery of human services during the past three decades. These changes have gone hand-in-glove with other changes in the political arena to dramatically transform the ways in which human services are organized and delivered. At the core of this transition has been the movement from fund to enterprise accounting, together with such larger political developments as the expansion of grant-based relations with government into the performance management environment of purchase of service contracting.

Financial Management: Social Agency, Social Enterprise And Social Economy, Roger A. Lohmann, Nancy Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

There has been a quiet revolution in financial management practice in social agencies in recent decades, symbolized by the transition from fund to enterprise accounting and increasing recognition of the ‘third sector’ of the social economy. The traditional voluntary agency model of donations has been joined by grants, performance contracts, ‘managed care’ and an array of other options, and traditional voluntary agency based and public agency practice now exist alongside corporate for profit service delivery and various forms of private practice. Social enterprise and entrepreneurship are a common theme in all this diversity, as social agencies must aggressively seek out …

Community Centers And Settlement Houses In Appalachia, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Community centers were originally outside imports into an Appalachian culture that often placed much greater emphasis on individuality and family than on community but they continue to thrive in the region. Yet there have been important contributions from the region: L.J. Hanifan, Superintendent of Rural Instruction in the original WV Department of Education introduced the concept of social capital to the world. Miles Horton and the Highlander Center provide a direct link between Appalachia and the international settlement house movement. Senior centers may be the most pervasive type of community center in Appalachia today. Settlement houses, religious missions, senior centers, …

The Practice Of The Commons, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This paper

This paper lays out some of the basics of a language-based, person-centered, or agentic model of practice for nonprofit organizations, voluntary action and philanthropy within the emerging domain of commons theory. Six principles are identified for the practice of commons. Two threats to the production of common goods - bureaucratization and colonization of the life world - are discussed and evaluated as limitations of the practice of commons.

Multiple Roles Of A Rural Administrator, Roger A. Lohmann, Nancy Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Basic administrative procedures are similar in rural and urban areas. Even so, rural human service administrators are often not prepared for the many roles they must assume in small and underfunded rural agencies. The roles may include personnel director, budget officer, accountant, fundraiser, supervisor, building and maintenance supervisor, volunteer coordinator, group developer, community organizer, public educator, policy analyst, and director of public relations and marketing.

Comment On Boettke And Prychitko, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Partnerships Of Nonprofit Organizations And Business For The Development Of Community Social Welfare Activities: The American Experience, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Partnerships between traditionally non-profit social services (the theme of the conference), funded by various donative arrangements and subsidized by government contracts, and any type of commercial business ventures are still relative rare in the mainstream of U.S. social work today. We can identify three distinct positions on the question among scholars in the U.S. today: A general management perspective found in business schools, a public affairs perspective found in schools of public administration, and two perspectives among social workers. The vast majority of those social work have undoubtedly never heard of this issue. Yet, a very small portion of social …

Neighborhood Associations: The Foundation Of Community Development, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Neighborhood associations are one of the most ubiquitous types of voluntary organization. This paper reviews a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives on the concept of neighborhood and the various organized expressions of neighborhood organizing in rural and urban communities.

Beyond Trust: Other Dimensions Of Social Capital, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Many people in the mountain state are unaware that it was a West Virginian, Lyda Judson Hanifan, Superintendent of Rural Schools in the state department of education who introduced the concept of social capital to the world in 1916. Many of those discussing the concept of social capital today focus exclusively on the role of trust. A second important second dimension is networking, and an important third dimension can be called social skill repertories. This latter dimension can be illustrated with reference to the distinctive West Virginia activity of rafting and river craft. It is also evident that many people …

Practice In The Electronic Community, Roger A. Lohmann, John Mcnutt

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The Internet was at its inception a commons rather than a marketplace. Increasingly, however, communitarian notions have been overwhelmed by the internet as one huge shopping arcade. The potential is certainly there for this amazing technology to advance the causes of human freedom well-being and community. At the same time, however, this powerful set of technologies that in less than a decade have become nearly universal in scope and sweep, have the potential also to become simply another extension of the global economic marketplace. Far worse, there is also the potential to become a power tool for class domination or …

Community Practice And The Internet, Roger A. Lohmann, John Mcnutt

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This article examines several developments in electronic technology which appear to hold great potential for advancing human well-being and community organization and have already manifested some important portion of that potential in recent years. They are, in order of presentation, electronic communication and networking, electronic advocacy, fund raising support, geographic information systems and data base management. We conclude this brief article with a brief discussion of information poverty and the growing disparity of information haves and have-nots.

The New Philanthropy In The New West Virginia, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Although philanthropy is a very old concept, many authorities today see a new philanthropy, including dramatic increases in donations and the assets of foundations. Also a new West Virginia may be emerging from the past of the forest agriculture of buckskin-clad mountaineers and coal mining. This presentation examines the convergence of the new philanthropy and this new West Virginia.

Rural Social Work Bibliography (1999), Roger A. Lohmann, Nancy Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This bibliography was assembled in response to a request from OUP for a rural bibliography on their website prior to publication of our edited book on Rural Social Work Practice (Oxford University Press. 2005).