To advance understanding of the relationship between values and organizations, this review synthesizes classic and recent organizational and sociological research, including this symposium’s articles on voluntary associations. We argue that all organizations reflect, enact, and propagate values. Organizations draw on culture, which offers a tool kit of possible actions supported by institutional logics that delineate appropriate activities and goals. Through institutional work, organizations can secure acceptance for unfamiliar practices and their associated values, often under the logic of democracy. Values may be discerned in any organization’s goals, practices, and forms, including “value-free” bureaucracies and collectivist organizations with participatory practices. We offer suggestions for enhancing understanding of how collectivities advance particular values within their groups or society.

Elsewhere we have documented how conflict between adolescents in the streets shapes conflict in the schools. Here we consider the impact of street codes on the culture and environment of the schools themselves, and the effect of this culture and on the students' commitment and determination to participate in their own education. We present the high school experiences of first-generation immigrants and African American students, distinguishing between belief in education and commitment to school. In an environment characterized by ineffective control and nonengaging classes, often students are not socialized around academic values and goals. Students need to develop strategies to remain committed to education while surviving day to day in an unsafe, academically limited school environment. These processes are sometimes seen as minority "resistance" to educational norms. Instead, our data suggest that the nature of the schools in which minority students find themselves has a greater influence on sustaining or dissuading students' commitment to education than do their immigration status or cultural backgrounds.Measuring differences in academic performance among minority students, especially those between new immigrants and American-born, has become a prominent theme in the field of urban education over the last two decades. One goal implicit in such research is to distinguish between higher-and lower-performing minorities and to link poor performance with unfavorable student attitudes and behaviors in a seemingly causal model. In this study, we seek to "bring the school back in" by measuring how students perceive and experience their school environments. We explore how new immigrant and American-born minority students in one inner-city high school negotiate their commitment to education in a troubled school environment. Interview and observational data indicate that while the teens' social identities as students compete with the "street" identities of some, the school environment draws out the latter more effectively than the former.We posit that what is often labeled as antisocial or undisciplined behavior, as a social problem that students bring into the school, is often a response to an unsafe, "disorganized" school environment (Gottfredson, 1989;Welsh, Greene, and Jenkins,

In this article we explore the interrelationship between school and neighborhood violence through an ethnographic study conducted over a two‐year period in a New York City middle school. This article presents a bidirectional flow of adolescent conflict by analyzing incidents taking place outside the school that originate in the school setting, and incidents of conflict occurring in the school that were initiated in the surrounding neighborhood. The research shows the effect of school and neighborhood structures on adolescent violence, concluding that school violence is a highly contextual and dynamic process. Adolescents do not choose their fights in a vacuum, but instead, in their selection of peers, allies, and conflict groups, they mirror the organizational and cultural settings of both their school and neighborhood.

The authors examine the organizational transformation of Prevention