Community coalitions promote empowerment by providing pathways for residents and organizations to gain and apply new skills, grow in leadership, and play an active role in calling for and creating community change. Coalitions create synergy through strategic pooling of diverse and complementary perspectives, connections, and resources. This chapter provides a brief overview of coalitions and how they operate as a community change mechanism by providing a structure to create changes in policies, systems, and environments. We present a case study of the California Healthy Cities and Communities initiative in which leaders in twenty communities with underserved or vulnerable populations were empowered to address environmental and structural determinants of community well-being. Next, we review the literature on how coalitions have been studied as a mechanism for community empowerment across disciplines and levels of empowerment. We conclude with recommendations for future research, including a greater focus on equity and understanding community change processes.

Civil society has been lauded for its ability to act as a social glue that is critical to healthy and functioning democracies. Despite their centrality to US society, nonprofits have lacked legitimacy commensurate with the criticality of their civic purposes. Drawing upon the publicness debate in which government functions under a political authority and business operates within a market authority, Robichau and Fernandez propose a normative “Nonprofitness Framework” that accounts for the moral authority by which nonprofits operate, which is necessary for contributing to a vibrant democracy. A Nonprofitness Framework considers charitable and voluntary organizations in terms of degrees of moral authority and their expression of nonprofit ethos and missions in which some organizations move closer to public or private orientations. Understanding how nonprofits and their agents are conditioned by history and values in turn preserves and cultivates a thriving sector, generating the flexibility to enhance society and provide balance among a dominant private sector and an influential public sector.

Ressler introduces a sociological theory of transformative symbolic reality to illuminate a specific, but often overlooked, impact of the nonprofit sector that is directly tied to improving the quality of life for individuals and groups within society. Grounded in the sociology of communities and nonprofit theory, transformative symbolic reality states that society reproduces itself or changes through social reality, and that social reality can be purposefully manipulated to challenge the forces of inequity. Specifically, individuals or organizations can create both the physical and metaphysical spaces in which people manifest and manipulate social norms, expectations, and behaviors in an inter-relational way that generates transformative social capital. Through the lens of transformative symbolic reality, the chapter conceptualizes the nonprofit sector as a wellspring of this overlooked public good and argues that it is this transformative aspect of the nonprofit sector that undergirds connections between nonprofit organizations and any long-term social impact.

The book concludes with a discussion of the current state of gender-based violence in the United States while highlighting the specific landscape of advocacy organizations that are working in this space to serve intersectionally marginalized populations. The chapter elaborates on the challenges that remain for intersectional advocates as they intervene in this issue, as well as the possibilities that lie ahead for their advocacy efforts. These findings are not just applicable to policies and laws related to gender-based violence but are also valuable for identifying policy gaps in U.S. political institutions more generally. The chapter then gives a call-to-action to policymakers, advocacy organizations, foundations, and individuals to critically evaluate the current structure of U.S. policy institutions—who they benefit, who they represent, and to what extent they are ineffective for resolving some of our most pressing social issues. The call is accompanied with tangible examples of how these stakeholders can practice and support intersectional advocacy to change U.S. policy institutions to be more effective, equitable, and representative of an increasingly diverse democracy.

What explains why these groups take on the practice of intersectional advocacy? In Chapter 5, this question is answered from an organizational perspective. Drawing again from the qualitative analysis of interviews with organizational leaders, the chapter presents the features of organizations that practice intersectional advocacy. There are four constitutive features of their organizations that were related to their engagement in intersectional advocacy. Despite a commitment to intersectional feminism, one of these organizations did not have all of these features and it also did not fully participate in intersectional advocacy. By discussing this case, the chapter demonstrates how an analysis of the four organizational features also help identify why groups such as these do not fully take on this practice. It then ends with how organizations with commitments to intersectionally marginalized groups but have not actualized them through intersectional advocacy, can change their varying organizational structures to take on this approach. This chapter is written in a way that scholars and organizational practitioners can both understand and appreciate the practice of intersectional advocacy.

Evidence-based policing requires not only the production of high-quality research but also the implementation of those research findings as part of a police organization’s work. To date, there has been relatively limited empirical assessment of how to best achieve successful implementation. This chapter presents findings from the process evaluation of the EMUN reform in the Israel Police. The reform institutionalized several evidence-based policing approaches and has been demonstrated as effective in reducing and preventing crime. Our qualitative analysis uncovered three themes associated with a heightened capability to practice evidence-based policing: the ability to analyze data and reflect on it, organizational flexibility, and local engagement with the reform. These themes resonate with the existing literature in the field and are of broad relevance.

Working in applied settings presents unique challenges and complexities with respect to research. Researchers have often commented on the scientist–practitioner divide, but there is a lack of information about the specific challenges and constraints of doing applied work that may contribute to this divide. As a group of applied social and behavioral scientists, we discuss what individuals should know, understand, and expect regarding the work practitioners conduct in applied settings. We describe the challenges of applied work as they relate to some topics covered earlier in this volume and identify other unique aspects of applied work. We conclude by discussing how an individual can approach deciding whether applied work is a fit with one’s interests.

The US Army and Marine Corps’ (2006) Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency is the famous known and controversial military doctrinal document in recent memory. While it replicates many aspects of the Cold 1960s “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency of Galula and others, it differs in its form, style, tone, and ambitious detail. I show how a large writing team from a wide range of overlapping backgrounds, working rapidly in a distinct institutional context, produced it. The mostly uniformed authors and their civilian peers drew on past manuals, history, social science (particularly organizational theory), and their own professional experience. The result is an assemblage of overlapping but distinct ideas, deeply imbued with the organizational and managerial discourses. While often described as politically pragmatic or expedient, I show the manual internalizes a patchwork of ideological material. Its ideological orientation, while in large part liberal and managerial, is ultimately complex and opaque. It’s influence and contentious status were nonetheless exceptional.

There has been growing interest in the vertical integration of physicians and hospitals during the past decade, as evidenced by multiple literature reviews and research investigations.1 Historically, physicians operated small firms that provided “physicians’ services” to patients who sometimes used facilities provided by separate hospital firms at which many physicians would have “privileges.” This interest in combining the two types of organizations culminated in a December 2020 issue of Health Services Research devoted to the topic that expressed surprise (and disappointment) that integration is not “a miracle cure”.2 Just months earlier, two of the major proponents of vertical integration published a study in the August issue of Health Affairs that came to a similar, “startling” conclusion: the financial integration of physicians and hospitals (e.g., via employment) had no impact on their clinical integration (and perhaps none on quality).

Focusing on what are anomalies are and more specifically what are anomalies in the cybersecurity domain, this chapter discusses some of the features of anomalies.

This chapter explores the history of the unemployed workers' movement, analyzing the trajectory of piquetero organizations as part of a broader wave of contention in Latin America. The chapter shows how these organizations developed as networks of neighborhood groups coordinated by a central leadership, with extensive connections to preexisting instances of community life. Organizers were able to draw on established cultural and political traditions at the local level to develop an effective repertoire of contention, which in turn helped their groups become efficient problem-solvers. The chapter then explores how over the last two decades these groups succeeded in accumulating resources and developing cores of committed members, leading to an enduring presence in Argentina’s popular politics. The chapter ends by arguing that individual-level dynamics such as the engagement in practices associated with working-class life played a crucial role in the enduring influence of piquetero networks, by helping them recruit and, most importantly, retain participants.

News translation is generally meant for a broad, mainly lay audience. As Chapter 20 explores, the challenge here is less a divide between lay and expert text user, and more the fact that much news translation is undertaken by non-professional translators, namely journalists themselves. This particularity makes news translation an integral part of non-professional interpreting and translation. The chapter discusses the organizations that translate news and outlines the stages of text production at which translation occurs. Finally, it offers a glimpse into the past to the beginning of news translation, with the birth of newswires, and suggests a view of the future of news translation.