The Needy and the Neglected in Developing Societies.

By Zacchaeus Ogunnika and Joyce Moody Edwards

This book utilizes sociological imagination to analyze and describe the issue of the neglected majority in human society. It focuses on how the poor and underclass including women and the disable are perceived and treated by the society and the response of the dominant class to the condition of those neglected. It attempts to see through some approaches through which the affected and the neglected, especially women, can help ameliorate their own neglect by the authority. The book saw disability as not a liability but a challenge which can be overcome by the affected. The major interesting idea in the book is the authors belief that the neglect should not believe in the utopic idea that the social system as it is constituted will come to their rescue. The authors instead assert that the success of the neglected class remains with the neglected themselves. By a concerted effort, disability will become ability, and women by cooperating in women development organizations will overcome the limitation placed on them by the society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Sep 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781490771441

Zacchaeus Ogunnika

Dr Ogunnika obtained his doctorate degree from the prestigious New School for Social Research where he was introduced to critical thinking and social analysis by the renowned professors Stanford Lyman and Arthur Vidich. He also attended the New York University where he obtained the Masters degree in Sociology. He benefited a lot from his long time professor and friend, Professor Akinsola Akiwowo, who imbibed in him the sprit of unification of the ideographic and nomothetic methodologies in social science through the"indigenism" (Akiwowo's project) method of sociological perspective. Dr Ogunnika believes in methodological hybridization in opposition to methodological monism in the positivistic sense. He is presently a full professor at Virginia State University, Petersburg. He has published widely in the ares of Methods, Theories,Organization Ethnic and Race, Urban and Rural, Stratification and Inequality. He is presently the Editor of "International Journal for Social Science Research and Practice" and has served in the editorial board of "International Journal for Culture, Politics and Society".

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Copyright 2016 Zacchaeus Ogunnika.

Author Credits: Zacchaeus O. Ogunnika

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN

: 978-1-4907-7143-4 (sc)

ISBN

: 978-1-4907-7145-8 (hc)

ISBN

: 978-1-4907-7144-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904225

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

The Needy and the Neglected in our Hostile Society

Chapter 1 The Problems of Coordination and Control in Women’s Community Development Programs

Chapter 2 Principles and Methods of Vocational Guidance and Selective Placement for the Disabled

Chapter 3 Placement and Aftercare Resettlement Services of the Disabled in Nigerian Communities

Chapter 4 Bridging the Sociocultural Communication Gap between Patients and Health Providers for Effective Community Development

Chapter 5 Renewable and Sustainable Alternative Energy Sources and the Issue of Women’s Development in Third-World Communities

Chapter 6 The Sociocultural effects of Environmental Degradation on Communities

Chapter 7 Tension Centers: Human Rights Violations and the Elites’ Victim-Blaming Attitudes

Chapter 8 Contemporary Black Migrants in American Society

References

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Needy and the Neglected in our Hostile Society

M any individuals, intellectuals, and groups contributed a lot to the success of this book. It will be impossible to acknowledge all of them by name.

Our gratitude goes first to the subject of the book, the units of analysis, who are the needy and neglected. We acknowledge them because their observation fired our motivation to analyze their plight and try to see the failure of perspectives that our discipline, sociology, has been following to explain their harrowed experience in this society. Their patience, endurance, and reactions to the pseudoacademic character assassination of some of these analyses also needs commendation. Our attempt to understand what was responsible for their resilience in face of this abject poor condition was responsible for the ideas in this book.

We thank our Creator for giving g us good health and the ability to complete this book. Our thanks go to our students in such courses as Sociological Theories, Social Stratification, African American Experience, Sociology of Developing Societies, Rural Sociology, Social Problems, and Marriage and Family. The inquisitive nature of these students concerning global and United States social structure affected the production of the book. We, however, relied heavily on the neglected at the underdeveloped society based on the imitational approach sold to such countries from the West. We believe one can understand the plight of the needy and the neglected from the West if we can analyze the results of the exportation of the ideology of neglection to these nations from the West.

The book benefited a lot from works of experts on the needy and neglected from developing societies. We acknowledge president Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, chief Obafemi Awolowo and Namdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, and the like for their ideas shown in practice as politicians and leaders and in their writings as intellectuals. We owe a lot to some intellectuals who became the voice of the neglected. In this group are Walter Rodney, Akin Mabogunje, Patrick Wilmot, and Aaron Gana.

Our big thanks go to the affected, the depended variables of this book who are the poor, the homeless, the urban slum dwellers, those who are disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system, the aged and the sick, and the laborer working and earning below poverty line. This book is aptly dedicated to them.

Our thanks go to our colleagues in the department whose friendly relations created an environment friendly for academic development. We were particularly indebted to Dr. M. Hossain, Dr. Hogson, Dr. G. Ahmed, and S. Spencer for their support. We are thankful to Ms. Grisell Campbell for her administrative assistance.

Some of our students need to be specially mentioned for their inquisitive and thought-provoking questions, especially in the Social Stratification and Sociology of Developing Societies, Rural Sociology, and African American Experience courses: Marlene Brown, Woods, Anthony Jackson, Nike Okegbenro, Brenda White, Tomecca Perry, Asia Frazier, and Ebony Mitchel.

Our thanks go to the members of our families who supported us by coping with the shortage of quality family life during the production of this book.

We hope you will enjoy reading the book and also give us your constructive criticisms, which will advance the course of the development of knowledge in this field. Lastly, we accept the responsibility for all the shortcomings of this book.

Petersburg, Virginia

June 5, 2016

Zacchaeus Ogunnika

Joyce M. Edwards

CHAPTER ONE

The Problems of Coordination and Control in Women’s Community Development Programs

Introduction

I ncreased complexity of functions of an organization necessitates the activity commonly referred to as coordination.

Coordination is a key word that helps an organization to survive. This is true of Women in Development (WID) organizations in our societies today., An organization becomes complex if its activities manifest into several programs that require specific but different areas of expertise and expert ideas to actualize. These different programs are regarded as part of a common whole, and their purpose is to achieve the general goal. It will then be foolhardy for the management of an organization to allow the different programs to pursue their different goals without cooperating with one another. Such an action is referred to as irrational because it lacks coordination, and surely, the central goal will be difficult to attain.

In some organizations, the various subgoals necessitate the division of the whole organization into departments, all of them working toward the attainment of the central goal of the organization. This results in what is called a complex organization because of the differentiation into departments that had occurred within the department. In such a case, there is a great need for coordination in the organization. In sum, the central ingredient for any organization’s success is the effective coordination of the activities geared toward the central goal of the organization. The ability possessed by different managements of different organizations toward effective internal coordination marks the difference between the success and failure of organizations.

Coordination activities are particularly important in a women’s development organization because its programs are geared toward women’s enlightenment. One of the major aims is to make women become active participants in their own and their society’s affairs so that their contributions to economic development will be understood and acknowledged.

This goal is central and unique, but the activities required to achieve the goal are numerous. First of all, the WID program needs to exist, and existence means that there must be adequate resources and investments to back it up. To achieve this goal, the WID program should generate funds. The program therefore needs to engage in fund-raising activities. Fund-raising activities also need coordination because there are different types of fund-raising exercises that can be achieved with different methods. The overall activities need to be coordinated effectively in order to produce results.

Apart from fund raising, WID goals include the emancipation of women from the shackles of ignorance and poverty. This means that women need to be educated and made aware of their problems through awareness campaigns and women’s education programs. Women need to be trained to have skills to ensure their independence. Women need to develop leadership skills through training. It is through adaptation that energy is obtained from the environment for the upkeep of the organization. An organization usually lines up activities to aid it in its adaptation process, but these activities alone cannot keep organizations going. They need to be coordinated with other activities in the organization for the realization of the total goal of the organization. For WID programs, adaptation requires that fund raising has to be harmonized with other activities

The second problem a successful organization should confront is goal attainment. Parsons explains that adaptation is important, but it will only end up in the planning stage if there are no activities geared toward the achievement of the goal of the organization. In most organizations, this function is seen as political. It is political in the sense that it relates to the ability of the organization to effectively utilize power to get what it wants from the environment. In case of WID programs, the goal-attainment function relates to how the activities of the various women’s institutional and noninstitutional organizations are coordinated in order to acquire the needed resources—how the various women’s development organizations (such as Family Support, Women in Nigeria [WIN], and other organizations) coordinate and relate to the source of power to get what they want. Without a proper goal-attainment activity, the WID program will be adversely affected. But as the theme of this chapter says, no function can, by itself alone, achieve the goal of the WID without coordination with other functions.

The third function is integration, which is a system of rewards and punishments for the organization members. This function is based on the premise that all cannot always be smooth within activities and people in an organization. Some individuals are more zealous than others, while some are criminally minded, while some are really doing their work. There must then be a system of rewards and punishments to integrate the different elements. If there is no integration system in an organization, then there will be anarchy, and everybody will be