When care is left to roam: Carers' experiences of grassroots nonprofit services in Ireland

Increasingly countries are turning to nonprofit organisations to provide health and social care, particularly for people with disabilities. Alongside this change, debates continue about how states should manage the relationship with such organisations. Should features of the old-style "welfare" model be retained? Should aspects of the "new public management" model be chosen to measure the impact of the work? Yet others argue that grassroots organisations should form the basis of a service provision system. In the context of these debates, Ireland serves as an interesting case study of the system of care that can emerge when the state operates a "relaxed control" approach. This paper takes the perspectives of users themselves: family carers who are accessing services for a disabled adult child, to examine the effects of this approach on the ground. We show how geography played a central role in shaping these experiences, and discuss how we can learn from the Irish context. Rather than arguing for narrowly defined contractual measures, we conclude by proposing a renewed focus on relationship building with the aim of effective system operation, in the future of care services. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.

The two-way relationship between the Balanced Scorecard and Management Control Systems in organizations:Lessons from a Case Study

This paper reports a case study conducted in Quinta da Aveleda, one of
the three largest Portuguese wine companies. Our aim was to explore the
relationship established between a newly implemented Balanced Scorecard
(BSC) and the elements of the Management Control System (MCS) in the
organization. Thus, two specific objectives were pursued. Firstly, to identify
the influences (barriers, opportunities) of the existing MCS on the implementation
of the BSC. Secondly, to identify the impacts the BSC implementation
was able to exert on the configuration of the organization’s MCS.
We found that the budgeting process, the planning system, the information
infrastructure, and the organizational structure and culture were the elements
of the previous MCS that influenced the BSC implementation process.
Eventually, the BSC implementation led to important changes in the budgeting,
planning, reporting systems and processes. In order to explain these
findings, we briefly explored the main issues and factors accounting for the
scope and nature of the BSC’s impacts on Quinta da Aveleda. These issues
and factors were the mobilized organizational resources, the implementation
approach, the communication, and the organizational support.

Power and the Construction of Independence in ICTD Organizations

How do powerful vested interests continue to influence ICT for development (ICTD) projects? In this paper, instead of adopting a macro-level analysis, I take an in-depth, ethnographic approach to focus on work practices at one NGO involved in producing information and communication technologies for use in developing countries. Staff decisions at this NGO were influenced by particular powerful organizations, and I draw on theoretical insights from organization studies in order to understand this. The approach yields surprising results. Staff members appeared able to "stand back" from the pressures coming from donors and other influential parties, and to critically reflect upon these. Paradoxically, rather than fueling resistance, this sense of independence appeared to reinforce dependency on these powerful organizations. Moreover, the fact that this NGO was engaged in ICTD work further heightened these effects. This study extends existing understandings of how power operates within ICTD organizations, by highlighting the ways in which a sense of independence can paradoxically exacerbate donor influence over work activities.

Consensus in organizations:Hunting for the social choice conundrum in APA elections

According to the axiomatic literature on consensus methods, the best collective choice by one method of preference aggregation can easily be the worst by another. Are award committees, electorates, managers, online retailers, and web-based recommender systems stuck with an impossibility of rational preference aggregation? We investigate this social choice conundrum for seven social choice methods: Condorcet, Borda, Plurality, Antiplurality, the Single Transferable Vote, Coombs, and Plurality Runoff. We rely on Monte Carlo simulations for theoretical results and on twelve ballot datasets from American Psychological Association (APA) presidential elections for empirical results. Each of these elections provides partial rankings of five candidates from about 13,000 to about 20,000 voters. APA preferences are neither domain-restricted nor generated by an Impartial Culture. We find virtually no trace of a Condorcet paradox. In direct contrast with the classical social choice conundrum, competing consensus methods agree remarkably well, especially on the overall best and worst options. The agreement is also robust under perturbations of the preference prole via resampling, even in relatively small pseudosamples. We also explore prescriptive implications of our findings.

The British are not coming! UK higher education and the nonprofit sector

The rationale for the growth of nonprofit management education in the United States has recently been charted by O'Neill (2005). Ten years previously, the United States and the United Kingdom were at similar levels of development. By 2006 the parallel lines had been broken. Why has nonprofit management education expanded in the United States while provision of graduate education for the voluntary sector in the United Kingdom has stood still? This article explores the factors that have prevented parallel growth in education provision. It argues that the university as an institution, both in terms of its nature and its power structures, is one of those factors. It presents the story of the closing of the world's first voluntary sector course at the London School of Economics and concludes with reflection on the likely future of voluntary sector management education provision in the United Kingdom.

The Oxford Handbook of Conflict Management in Organizations

New ways of managing conflict are increasingly important features of work and employment in organizations. In the book the world's leading scholars in the field examine a range of innovative alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices, drawing on international research and scholarship and covering both case studies of major exemplars and developments in countries in different parts of the global economy. Developments in the management of individual and collective conflict at work are addressed, as are innovations in both unionized and non-union organizations and in the private and public sectors.

New practices for managing conflict in organizations are set in the context of trends in workplace conflict and perspectives on how conflict should be understood and addressed. Part 1 examines the changing context of conflict management by addressing the main frameworks for understanding conflict management, the trend in conflict at work, developments in employment rights, and the influence of HRM on conflict management. Part 2 covers the main approaches to conflict management in organizations, addressing both conventional and alternative approaches to conflict resolution. Conventional grievance handling and third-party processes in conflict resolution are examined as well as the main ADR practices, including conflict management in non-union firms, the role of the organizational ombudsman, mediation, interest-based bargaining, line and supervisory management, and the concept of conflict management systems. Part 3 presents case studies of exemplars and innovators in the field, covering mediation in the US postal service, interest-based bargaining at Kaiser-Permanente, 'med-arb' in the New Zealand Police, and judicial mediation in UK employment tribunals. Part 4 covers international developments in conflict management in Germany, Japan, The United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and China.

This Handbook gives a comprehensive overview of this growing field, which has seen an huge increase in programmes of study in university business and law schools and in executive education programmes.

From gendered organizations to compassionate borderspaces: Reading corporeal ethics with Bracha Ettinger

In this article, we propose a new way of approaching the topic of ethics for management and organization theory. We build on recent developments within critical organization studies that focus on the question of what kind of ethics is possible in organizational contexts that are inevitably beset by difference. Addressing this ‘ethics of difference’, we propose a turn to feminist theory, in which the topic has long been debated but which has been underutilized in organization theory until very recently. Specifically, we draw on the work of Bracha Ettinger to re-think and extend existing understandings. Inspired by gender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy and art, Ettinger’s work has been celebrated for its revolutionary re-theorization of subjectivity. Drawing on a feminist ethics of the body inspired by psychoanalysis, she presents a concept of ‘trans-subjectivity’. In this, subjectivity is defined by connectedness, co-existence and compassion towards the other, and is grounded in what Ettinger terms the ‘matrixial borderspace’. An ethics of organization derived from the concept of the matrixial suggests that a different kind of ethical relation with the Other is possible. In this article, we demonstrate this through examining the issue of gender in the workplace. We conclude by outlining the implications of this perspective for rethinking ethics, embodiment and gender, and in particular for the development of a corporeal ethics for organization studies.

Faith-based Non-Governmental Organizations in the Public Square

This chapter has both a methodological and a substantive aim. First, I suggest, using the role and function of NGOs in religiously related legal disputes as a paradigm example, the distinction between institutional, doctrinal, and theoretical approaches to the study of the relationship between religion and law is sometimes unhelpful, creating a barrier preventing us from understanding the phenomenon that we are examining. Instead, I suggest, a more integrated understanding, drawing on each of these approaches and seeing how they relate to each other, may well be more illuminating. The second aim of this chapter is to suggest, in a preliminary way, that the phenomenon of faith-based organizations should be more integrated than in the past into doctrinal and theoretical debates in the area of law and religion, in particular the problem of how liberal society is to engage with organized religion where there is a fundamental dispute as to who represents that religion, or as to what the basic tenets of that religion are.

Empowering Human Services Organizations to Embrace Evidence-informed Practice: International Best Practices

Human service organizations are increasingly using knowledge as a mechanism for implementing change. Knowledge emerging from many sources that may include academic publications, grey literature, and service user and practitioner wisdom contributes toward informing best practice. The question is: how do we harness this knowledge to make practice more effective? This paper synthesizes the lessons learned from eight international organizations that have made a commitment to knowledge mobilization as an important priority in their mission and operation. The paper provides a conceptual model, tools and resources to help human services organizations create strategies for building, enhancing or sustaining their knowledge mobilization efforts. The paper describes a flexible blueprint for human service organizations to leverage knowledge mobilization efforts at all levels of service delivery.

Latent and Explicit Authority in Hierarchical Organizations

We consider the problem of the exercise of authority within social production organizations, embedding the decision makers into a structure of formal authority relationships. We distinguish two types of behavior. First, we introduce an equilibrium notion implementing latent authority under which subordinates submit themselves to authority even though such authority is not en- forced explicitly. Second, we compare this with a non-cooperative equilibrium concept describing explicit exercise of authority. We show that for low enough enforcement costs both forms of authority will be exercised in equilibrium, but for higher enforcement costs latent authority will be exercised while explicit authority will not.