Planning Function of Management Discussion Paper
preparing a presentation for the board of directors about their organization’s
Imagine you are an executive for BP, and you are preparing a presentation for the board of directors about the organization’s direction.
Create a 10- to 15-slide Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation, with speaker notes, in which you address the following:
• Evaluate the planning function of management as it relates to the organization’s goals and strategies. Use steps in the planning process outlined in the text.
• Analyze the influence that legal issues, ethics, and corporate social responsibility have had on management planning at BP. Provide at least one example for each.
• Analyze at least three factors that influence the company’s strategic, tactical, operational, and contingency planning.
Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.
Home>English homework help>urban homework
C H A P T E R
9
METROPOLITAN PROBLEMS
Racism, Poverty, Crime, Housing, and Fiscal Crisis
ntil recently, urban problems were city problems. That is no longer the case as the
issues once associated with the large, compact settlement form have spread out, like
the metropolitan population and its economic activities, to characterize the entire urban
region. In the late 1960s and 1970s, especially during President Johnson’s Great
Society, urban problems were defined almost exclusively as those involving racial segregation,
poverty, violent crime, and drugs. Now, in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, and homelessness, as well as the severe
economic recession itself, are particular issues of concern. As the attention of the federal
government in Washington, D.C., focuses on the major issues of the economy
and health care, the nation’s state governments seem to be ignored. Consequently,
adding to our other urban ills, we currently face more intense fiscal crises and their
impact on local public services and infrastructure.
Was there ever a baseline in America against which the problems of today can be
measured? As in the other industrialized capitalist countries of Europe, the quality of
urban life with the advent of capitalism in the 1800s was severe for all but the
wealthy. Early photographic images of American cities at the turn of the last century
feature overcrowding: immense traffic jams of primitive Model-T automobiles mixed
in with horse-drawn carts, tenements teeming with immigrants, and crowds of children
swarming across city streets. Until after World War II, city life in the United
States was plagued by frequent public health crises such as cholera outbreaks, high infant
mortality rates, alcoholism, domestic violence, street gang activity, and crime. For
much of our history, then, city life has been virtually synonymous with social problems.
Yet we know now that these same problems—crime, disease, family breakup—
are experienced everywhere.
The sociologists of the early Chicago School, in the 1920s and 1930s, believed that
the move to the city was accompanied by social disorganization. While subsequent research
showed that this perception was inaccurate, people in the United States still
rank small and middle-size cities or suburbs as providing the highest quality of life and
209
U
remain overwhelmingly interested in living in suburbs, especially for couples with
small children. The negative perception of the large city provides the basis for varying
mental images of place. Yet we have also seen that there are many positive aspects of urban
living and that the early belief in the loss of community among migrants to the
city was unfounded.
In previous chapters, we have tried to show that problems that appear to afflict
individuals are caused in part by factors that we cannot readily see. Consequently, an
explanation for the social disorganization often viewed in an individual’s fate lies in
the particular combination of adverse life decisions, personal circumstances, and more
structural social factors, such as lack of adequate education, racism, poverty, and the
specific effects of spatial segregation and uneven development. This chapter applies
the sociospatial approach to metropolitan problems. One purpose of our discussion is
to explore whether or not large cities in particular and metropolitan regions in general
possess unique features that might propagate specifically “urban” problems.
T H E S O C I O S P A T I A L A P P R O A C H
T O S O C I A L P R O B L E M S
Social problems are ubiquitous across the metropolitan areas of the United States.
Cities do not have an exclusive hold on divorce or domestic violence, and suburbs are
now almost as likely as cities to be afflicted with family disorganization, deviant subcultures,
drug use, and gang activity (Barbanel, 1992). Many suburban areas have
crime rates comparable to those of the central city. As the suburban settlement spaces
have matured, differences in poverty levels, crime rates, and other measures of social
disorganization have become less. If it appears clear that urbanism by itself is not a
generator of social problems, it is also clear that cultural approaches can no longer
identify unique differences between city life and life in other developed places.
We know from our earlier explorations of the sociospatial approach that the spatial
environment plays an important role in human interaction. The social background
factors associated with population groups are also important. The variety of lifestyles
found across urban and suburban settlement spaces result from social factors such as
race, class, and gender. Social problems in particular are caused by poverty, racial exclusion,
gender differences, and the severe patterns of uneven development within settlement
space that results in differential access to resources and determines a person’s
life chances. On the other hand, spatial forms still matter. Environments intensify or
dissipate these compositional effects of uneven development. In short, ways of life result
from an interaction between social factors and spatial organization.
Cities are not unique in having acute social problems, but the spatial nature of
large cities and densely populated suburbs make the uneven development resulting
from the inequities of race, class, gender, and age particularly severe. According to the
sociospatial approach, the following factors are the most significant.
210 9 : M E T R O P O L I TA N P R O B L E M S
First, the principal effect of the city as a built environment is that it concentrates
people and resources (Lefebvre, 1991; Engels, 1973). Thus, social problems such as
drugs and poverty have a greater impact in large central cities and densely populated
suburbs than in less dense areas. In confined urban space under the jurisdiction of a
single municipal government, it is the sheer numbers, such as the frequency of murders
and rapes or the number of “crack babies,” that turn social problems into grave
concerns.
Second, over the years urban populations have been disproportionately affected
by the internationalization of the capitalist economies. For example, large metropolitan
regions such as Los Angeles or New York are the destinations of choice for most
immigrants from poorer nations who have left their countries in search of a better
life. With the flow of immigrants comes specific problems, such as the need for bilingual
education, that affect these areas more than other places.
Changes in the global cycles of economic investment also affect metropolitan regions
because of the scale of activities in the largest places. For example, after Wall
Street stocks plunged in October 1987, more than 100,000 trained professionals were
laid off from brokerage and financial service firms in Manhattan, and throughout the
1990s, staggering job losses occurred in many areas as U.S. companies sought to increase
their profits and earnings. Job loss on this scale presents a particularly acute
problem for cities.
Finally, social problems are caused by the allocation of resources, which may be accentuated
in dense, built environments. For example, large cities are major centers of
the global economy. Extreme wealth is created within their boundaries, and the signs
of that money are highly visible in the city, such as expensive restaurants, upscale department
stores, luxury housing, and limousines. Close by, in the concentrated space
of the city, are people who suffer the most terrible consequences of abject poverty, such
as homelessness, malnutrition, and chronic unemployment. Because this contrast is so
visible, the issue of uneven development is particularly oppressive to inhabitants.
In summary, social problems that can be considered uniquely urban derive from
the concentrated nature of metropolitan space and the scale of changes in compositional
factors. In this chapter, we consider a number of problems often associated
with urban life, including racism and poverty, crime and drugs, fiscal problems such
as declines in educational quality and infrastructure problems, and, finally, housing
inequities and homelessness.
R A C I S M A N D P O V E R T Y
Racism
The most extreme and continuing effects of racism have been felt by African Americans,
who have been systematically discriminated against in employment and in the
R A C I S M A N D P O V E R T Y 211
housing market. As a consequence, their social mobility has been severely constrained.
The most powerful indicator of continuing institutional racism in the
United States is population segregation. In Chapters 10 and 11, when discussing
cities around the globe, we will also encounter the phenomenon of population segregation.
But nowhere is the racial nature of this sociospatial effect as clear as in metropolitan
areas across the United States.
The classic study of segregation is by the Taeubers (1965). They compiled statistics
on American cities with regard to the relative locations of whites and blacks. To
measure segregation, they constructed a very useful concept, an “index of segregation.”
If a city had a 30 percent African American population as a whole, they expected,
in the absence of segregation, that the black population would be evenly
distributed across space. The index of segregation refers to the percentage of African
Americans who would have to move in order for all neighborhoods to reflect the 30
percent black composition of the entire city. If a neighborhood were 90 percent
black, 67 percent of the black population would have to move, resulting in an index
of .67.
On the basis of the Taeubers’ study, all U.S. cities were discovered to be highly
segregated, that is, with indexes above .50 for African Americans. The Taeubers
replicated their study in the 1970s and found little change in the degree of black
population clustering. Some of the most segregated cities during the 1970s were Detroit;
Chicago; Buffalo, New York; Cleveland; and Birmingham, Alabama.
Some have argued that not all of the segregation observed in American cities is the
consequence of involuntary segregation; the spatial cluster of population groups can
also be voluntary. In the case of African Americans, however, we know that the urban
ghettos were created by a form of racism and violence designed to prevent blacks from
moving into “white” settlement spaces, federal housing policies that concentrated
public housing in the inner city while subsidizing “white flight” to the suburbs
through construction of the interstate highway system and home mortgage loans, and
other factors. Bullard and Feagin (1991), for example, discuss various techniques used
by housing-related institutions to prevent blacks from locating where they prefer,
thereby fostering involuntary segregation. This is an example of institutional racism.
Rental and real estate agents also use a variety of methods to prevent blacks from
locating in white-owned areas. One mechanism is called steering. When an African
American couple comes to a rental or real estate agent, the agent will steer the couple
to areas of the city populated by blacks. Agents may also simply refuse to divulge the
existence of housing opportunities in white areas. Despite gains in family income
earnings by a growing number of middle-class blacks, racial segregation remains a
fact of life for the majority of African Americans.
The sociospatial effects of racism on African Americans are also illustrated by
comparing their position with that of other minorities. In metropolitan areas where
minorities were at least 20 percent of the population—that is, where they were pres-
212 9 : M E T R O P O L I TA N P R O B L E M S
ent in sufficient numbers to perhaps overcome prejudice—Hispanic Americans were
highly segregated in only two of the thirty-three metropolitan areas. In contrast,
“blacks are highly segregated in 31—two-thirds—of the 47 metro areas where they
make up at least 20 percent of residents, including Detroit, Chicago, Miami, Bir –
mingham, Ala.” (USA Today, “Segregation: Walls Between Us,” 1991:A-2).
Since the time of the Taeubers’ study, researchers of spatial segregation have developed
more precise measures of population clustering. The most sophisticated of these
studies combine several different measures to arrive at overall estimates of segregation.
They found that black people not only continue to be segregated in significant numbers
within central cities, but their exclusion is now extreme. Those that remain ghettoized
are extremely isolated because for decades all Americans—black, white,
Hispanic—with the means and opportunity to move away from such areas have done
Consequently, rather than social conditions improving for poor Afri can Americans,
their extreme segregation in our nation’s cities is now described as “hypersegregation.”
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993), for example, used five different
measures of population clustering in their study of the causes and consequences of
racial segregation in Chicago and other cities while discovering the deteriorating conditions
of hypersegregation.
Unevenness: African Americans may be distributed so that they are overrepresented
in some areas and underrepresented in other areas.
Isolation: African Americans may be distributed so that they have little interaction
with other groups.
Clustered: Black neighborhoods may be tightly clustered to form one contiguous
enclave, or they may be scattered about in checkerboard fashion.
Concentrated: Black neighborhoods may be concentrated within a very small
area, or they may be settled sparsely throughout the urban environment.
Centralized: Black neighborhoods may be spatially centralized around the urban
core or spread out along the periphery.
These five dimensions define geographic traits that social scientists think of when
they consider segregation. A high score on any single dimension is serious because it
removes blacks from full participation in urban society and limits their access to benefits.
As segregation accumulates across multiple dimensions, however, its effects intensify.
The indices of unevenness and isolation we have discussed so far cannot
capture this multidimensional layering of segregation and therefore understate its
severity in American society. Not only are blacks more segregated than other groups
on any single dimension of segregation, but they are also more segregated on all dimensions
simultaneously; and in an important subset of U.S. metropolitan areas,
African Americans are highly segregated on at least four of the five dimensions at
once, an extreme isolating pattern that they call hypersegregation.
R A C I S M A N D P O V E R T Y 213
Thus one-third of all African Americans in the United States live under conditions
of intense racial segregation. They are unambiguously among the nation’s most spatially
isolated and geographically secluded people, suffering extreme segregation
across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Black Americans in these metropolitan
areas live within large, contiguous settlements of densely inhabited neighborhoods
that are packed tightly around the urban core. In plain terms, they live in ghettos.
Typical inhabitants of these ghettos are not only unlikely to come into contact
with whites within the particular neighborhood where they live; even if they traveled
to the adjacent neighborhood they would still be unlikely to see a white face;
and if they went to the next neighborhood, no whites would be there either. No
other group in the contemporary United States comes close to this level of isolation
within urban society. U.S. Hispanics, for example, are never highly segregated
on more than three dimensions simultaneously, and in 45 of the 60 metropolitan
areas examined, they were highly segregated on only one dimension. Moreover,
the large Hispanic community in Miami (the third largest in the country) is not
highly segregated on any dimension at all. Despite their immigrant origins, Spanish
language, and high poverty rates, Hispanics are considerably more integrated
in American society than are blacks. (Massey and Denton, 1993:74–77)
The negative effects of hypersegregation were amply illustrated when Hurricane
Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. Hundreds of thousands of poor black people were
living in that city in strict isolation. Their neighborhoods were also the site of the
lowlands and landfills that were below sea level and protected only by a series of
dikes and channels from being underwater. This area is poor land, a poor person’s
hyperghetto, and a very risky place to live. Hurricane Katrina devastated this area
when the dikes broke, leading to death and dispersal on an unprecedented scale in
this country. The total failure of the federal government under former president
George W. Bush to deal adequately with this crisis is a frightening example of how
little our society cares for poor minorities and the neighborhoods in which they live.
Box 9.1 summarizes the tragedy of Katrina and its indictment of our society.
From the information presented in these and other studies, it is clear that the
major determinant of racial segregation is not a person’s income, social class, or
length of time spent in the United States (as suggested by the assimilation model)
but rather racial background. African Americans confront the highest levels of segregation
while Asian Americans have the lowest levels. Racial background is also important
in determining segregation for various ethnic groups within these categories:
Puerto Ricans are more segregated than Mexicans, for example. Cultural factors such
as language and religion are associated with the level of segregation for particular
ethnic groups. For example, Asian Indian and Filipino immigrants are likely to speak
English and are familiar with American schools and government and consequently
encounter much less segregation than other Asian American populations.
RUBRIC
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Introduction
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The background and significance of the problem and a clear statement of the research purpose is provided. The search history is mentioned.
Literature Support
91-84 points
The background and significance of the problem and a clear statement of the research purpose is provided. The search history is mentioned.
Methodology
58-53 points
Content is well-organized with headings for each slide and bulleted lists to group related material as needed. Use of font, color, graphics, effects, etc. to enhance readability and presentation content is excellent. Length requirements of 10 slides/pages or less is met.
Average Score
50-85%
40-38 points
More depth/detail for the background and significance is needed, or the research detail is not clear. No search history information is provided.
83-76 points
Review of relevant theoretical literature is evident, but there is little integration of studies into concepts related to problem. Review is partially focused and organized. Supporting and opposing research are included. Summary of information presented is included. Conclusion may not contain a biblical integration.
52-49 points
Content is somewhat organized, but no structure is apparent. The use of font, color, graphics, effects, etc. is occasionally detracting to the presentation content. Length requirements may not be met.
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37-1 points
The background and/or significance are missing. No search history information is provided.
75-1 points
Review of relevant theoretical literature is evident, but there is no integration of studies into concepts related to problem. Review is partially focused and organized. Supporting and opposing research are not included in the summary of information presented. Conclusion does not contain a biblical integration.
48-1 points
There is no clear or logical organizational structure. No logical sequence is apparent. The use of font, color, graphics, effects etc. is often detracting to the presentation content. Length requirements may not be met
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Planning Function of Management Discussion Paper
Planning Function of Management Discussion Paper
