Multiple business ownership in the farm sector: assessing the enterprise and employment contributions of farmers in Cambridgeshire

Multiple business ownership has become an important theme within the small firms research literature. While early studies emphasised its role in reducing business risk, more recently portfolio entrepreneurship has been recognised as an important growth strategy, particularly in sectors where economies of scale can be achieved at a relatively low level. Research studies specifically examining multiple business ownership are still scarce, but the parallels between portfolio entrepreneurship in non-farm sectors and farm pluriactivity have been noted. Although pluriactivity has been subject to extensive investigation in recent years, analysis has generally focused on farm-centred diversification, rather than the wider entrepreneurial activities of the farmer. Using a survey of nearly 300 farm owners in Cambridgeshire, this exploratory study analyses the incidence of portfolio entrepreneurship in the farm sector and assesses its contribution to enterprise and employment creation. The results demonstrate that a core of farmers have multiple business interests and that these additional business activities make a substantial contribution to both numbers of enterprises and employment creation. While previous studies of pluriactivity have generally used the farm business as the main unit of analysis, it is argued that including the wider business activities of the farm owner enables a more precise estimation of the total contribution of farmers to rural economic development.     

Nursing Home Ownership Trends and Their Impacts on Quality of Care: A Study Using Detailed Ownership Data From Texas

The role of ownership in the provision of nursing home care has long been a challenging issue for policy makers and researchers. Although much of the focus historically has been on differences between for-profit and not-for-profit facilities, this simple distinction has become less useful in recent years as companies have employed more complicated ownership and management structures. Using detailed ownership data from the state of Texas, we describe the evolution of nursing home corporate structures from 2000 to 2007, analyze the effect of these structures on quality of care and staffing in nursing homes, and discuss the policy implications of these changes.     

Trust,Social Capital,and the Coordination of Relationships Between the Members of Cooperatives: A Comparison Between Member-Focused Cooperatives and Third-Party-Focused Cooperatives

In recent years, nonprofit scholars have increasingly studied the phenomenon of social enterprises which has become a generic term describing a wider reorientation among third sector organizations. The emergence of social enterprises has also led to a dynamic of hybridization and broadening in the cooperative sector, similar to an earlier dynamic of “economization”, but this time on the other end of the organizational spectrum. This paper aims at developing a fine-grained conceptual understanding of how this organizational dynamic is shaped in terms of member coordination, thus contributing to a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of different organizational forms of cooperatives. Specifically, to highlight the difference to traditional member-focused cooperatives, the paper introduces the term third-party-focused cooperatives for those social enterprises which emphasize economic goals as well as control and ownership by a particular community (typically place-based). The key result of the paper is that with the shift from member- to community-focus in cooperatives, the main coordination mechanism becomes one of norm-based trust on the basis of generalized reciprocity. In contrast to traditional maxim-based trust member coordination on the basis of relation-specific reciprocity, this enables third-party-focused cooperatives to mobilize bridging and linking social capital, facilitating collective action aimed towards the community interest. The findings suggest that this identity shift requires a mutual re-positioning between the cooperative and the nonprofit sector, in terms of umbrellas as well as regulatory and legislative bodies.     

Taking Your Eyes Off the Objective: The Relationship Between Income Sources and Satisfaction with Achieving Objectives in the UK Third Sector

As a major funder of the Third Sector, recent cuts in UK Government spending may require Third Sector Organisations (TSOs) to turn to other sources of funding, such as trading activities and public sector contracts. It has been argued that such changes can lead to economic objectives overwhelming social ones. This study utilises data from the 2008 National Survey of Third Sector Organisations to examine the relationship between the use of these alternative funding sources and organisations’ perceived success in achieving their primary objectives. As predicted by theory, a negative relationship between income from trading activities and achievement of objectives is found. Interestingly public sector contracts do not show a significant link with achievement of objectives. Social enterprise should therefore not be seen as an unqualified panacea for difficulties in social welfare provision in the UK, but public sector contracts need not necessarily lead to a loss of those elements that make the Third Sector provision attractive.     

Separate and Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235 Program

In recent years scholars have identified racial disparities in wealth and home ownership as crucial factors underlying patterns of racial inequality and residential segregation in American metropolitan housing markets. While numerous federal housing policies have been identified as responsible for reinforcing residential segregation and racial inequalities in home ownership, little research has focused on the segregative effects of the Section 235 program. As one component of the 1968 Housing Act, Section 235 was designed to shift the focus of federal housing policy away from dispensing aid to local housing authorities for building public housing to providing direct supply-side subsidies to the private sector to stimulate home ownership for nonwhites and the poor. Archival and census data, government reports and housing analyses, and oral histories and interviews are used to examine the segregative effects of the Section 235 program in Kansas City, Missouri from 1969 through the early 1970s. Findings indicate that while the housing subsidy program allowed a vast majority of participating white families to purchase new housing in suburban areas, most participating African American families purchased existing homes located in racially transitional neighborhoods in the inner city. These findings corroborate recent research showing how the market-centered focus of federal housing policy has impaired the ability of African Americans to accumulate wealth through home ownership and reinforced racially segregative housing patterns.     

Media,Politics and Climate Change: Towards a New Research Agenda

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the media have been demonstrated to play a key role in shaping public perceptions and policy agendas. Journalists are faced with multiple challenges in covering this complex field. This article provides an overview of existing research on the media framing of climate change, highlighting major research themes and assessing future potential research developments. It argues that analysis of the reporting of climate science must be placed in the wider context of the growing concentration and globalization of news media ownership, and an increasingly ‘promotional culture’, highlighted by the rapid rise of the public relations industry in recent years and claims‐makers who employ increasingly sophisticated media strategies. Future research will need to examine in‐depth the targeting of media by a range of actors, as well as unravel complex information flows across countries as media increasingly converge.     

The strategic challenges of cooperation and competition in British Voluntary Organizations: Toward the next century

The interrelationships between public, private, and voluntary sectors in Britain have witnessed increasing levels of change in recent years. This article argues that there have recently been identifiable trends within the voluntary sector, namely, increased levels of competition between sectors, increased competition between voluntary organizations, and increased pressures toward professionalization in voluntary sector management and organization. Predominantly competitive strategies and modes of professionalization have often been borrowed uncritically from commercial “best practice” by voluntary organizations. Thompson's (1967) typology of strategies is used as a basis for proposing cooperation as an alternative to competition in the British voluntary sector.     

Constituting the Third Sector: Processes of Decontestation and Contention Under the UK Labour Governments in England

Discussion about, and analysis of, the question of definition and the third sector and civil society more generally has developed to a significant degree in recent years. This paper can be located in a new phase of recent research, which seeks to attend to the historical, cultural and politically contingent nature of this domain’s boundaries. The process of constituting the sector is discussed as the product of new discourses of decontestation and contention within third sector policy and practice. It takes England as a case study, drawing on evidence and argument assembled by the authors in recent and ongoing research efforts, variously conducted with the support of the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) and the European Commission. The paper proceeds by discussing relevant literature; describing recent patterns of policy institutionalisation; and then tries to draw out more analytically how this process of constitution has been associated not so much with a stable and consistent set of definitions and constructs, but rather with unstable and changing formulations, which reflect the playing out of a dual process of decontestation and contention.     

Private Property Wrongs: Uncovering the Contradictory Articulations of an Hegemonic Ideology*

One of the most effective sources of legitimation for privileged access to the environment and its natural resources comes in the form of hegemonic ideologies, such as private property rights. The concentratiosn of ownership and control over land and natural resources is rarely contested, because to question the rights of an industrial actor's property rights would be to question the ideological premise that private property ownership promotes societal well-being and progress. The staying power of this and other hegemonic ideologies, however, derives from the ability to keep certain internal contradictions associated with those ideologies concealed. Using recent conceptual work on ideology, this article focuses on recent events in forest politics in northern California, to illustrate the means by which environmental catastrophe has served as a source of vulnerability to the present hegemony of the ideology of private property rights. As with other instances of environmental justice mobilization, this case illustrates how the ability to elucidate contradictions in hegemonic ideologies may provide a more potent avenue for social transformation than attempts to introduce alternative ideologies.     

Crowding-out in savings decisions,portfolio default adoption and home ownership: evidence from the Chilean retirement system

This paper studies crowd-out effects across choices regarding different sources of investment and savings in the Chilean pension system (e.g., voluntary savings within and outside the retirement system, housing status, and default portfolio adoption). Because preferences over choice sets are unobserved and it is expected that individual unobserved characteristics may be correlated across decisions, I jointly estimate a dynamic reduced-form life cycle model of wealth accumulation. Simulation results indicate no short- or long-run crowd-out effects across voluntary savings accounts within and outside the retirement system. There is evidence that in the short run, there is crowding-out between mandatory savings and other forms of investments, such as home ownership or savings in the financial-banking sector. Results also show that in the long run, individuals treat home ownership and participation in voluntary retirement programs as substitute goods. Finally, the long-run effects of participating in voluntary savings programs are important in increasing active participation in portfolio decisions.

     

The Value Relevance of Fair Value

This paper investigates the value relevance of revalued tangible assets and its variation depending on industry, size of the firm and age of revalued amounts. It examines the reaction of investors on the Romanian market, a developing market, in the period of economic growth between 2003 and 2007, before Romania’s adherence to the European Union. Also, it suggests a model which allows for the comparative analysis of the influence over share price attributed to two equity growth sources: revaluation reserves and operational profit. The findings confirm the central hypothesis of the study—revaluated amounts of tangible assets are value relevant—and verify the predictive and feedback value, timeliness, reliability, and the possibilities for fair value implementation, characteristics which have been selected for testing. However, the results are less consistent than the outcome of the variable which reflects the equity growth due to profit, which leads to a moderate value relevance of fair value in the case of revaluated tangible assets. The value relevance analysis on clusters verifies the established hypotheses regarding the superiority of value relevance for the manufacturing sector as opposed to the service sector and of revaluations older than 2 years compared to more recent revaluations. The hypothesis regarding higher value relevance of revaluated amounts disclosed by large firms compared to SMEs is not confirmed, as only the latter presented significant statistical values.     

Patterns of household immigration into South Texas

This article examines Mexican migration into South Texas in recent decades and focuses on changes in the characteristics of the migrants' households. An ethnographic approach is used in examining 56 permanent, immigrant households. "This article introduces a hypothesis for explaining the increase and permanency of household immigration." It is found that "immigration often leads to downward social mobility with respect to legal status of household members, type of employment, and property ownership. Of particular note is the transformation of the household from a single to a multiple worker unit, in response to agricultural labor demands and growing employment opportunities in the non-agricultural sector."     

Politics and performance: the implications of emerging governance arrangements for urban management approaches and information systems

Challenges to traditional public sector approaches to urban government have had an impact on various aspects of governance and management, including political arrangements, decision making processes, ways of ensuring accountability, the allocation of roles and responsibilities between public sector agencies and other potential service providers and between different levels of government, and the mobilisation and allocation of financial resources for urban development. These are discussed, drawing in particular on recent research on urban poverty and governance in ten cities in the South. The changing approaches to urban government and management have been accompanied by attempts to define criteria by which urban governance arrangements and performance can be assessed, which are summarised and critically evaluated. Finally, the potential value of a particular set of tools (GIS) for emerging approaches to urban governance is assessed. Their potential for improving the information available to all governance actors is recognised. However, because of their cost and technological and managerial demands, as well as the limited effectiveness of spatial planning and inequalities in access to information, plans for their use must be financially, institutionally and politically realistic.     

On penguins on icebergs: The rural white paper and the assumptions of rural policy

The recent Rural White Paper represents an extensive statement on government analysis of rural issues and its approach towards rural policy in England. It is an important document in demonstrating the extent to which the accepted premises have shifted over the past fifteen years. It shows in considerable detail many local initiatives that have been taken, especially within the private sector, and the role of government in stimulating and disseminating information on good practice. However, it fails to analyze fully the major forces underlying change, generally originating beyond rural areas and commonly from outside of the U.K., which will have major significance in determining the prospects for those living in rural areas and for the quality of the rural environment.     

Rural development and the Fifth Malaysia Plan

The Fifth Malaysia Plan, 1986–1990, represents the fourth phase of Malaysia's Outline Perspective Plan, 1971–1990. Its strategies for the rural sector incorporate broadly technocratic policies outlined in the 1984 National Agricultural Policy (NAP). Maximization of farm incomes, and of the national income derived from agriculture, is to be based on ‘efficiency of production involving the judicious selection of economically remunerative crops and employing the most efficient technology’. The model for the efficient mode of agricultural production is the estate or plantation. The greatest challenge to this ‘modernization’ policy lies in the padi sector. Much of Malaysia's padi land remains low in productivity and many farms are too small to support a family. Although great advances have been made in padi production since 1950, poverty amongst padi households remains high and, since the mid-1970s, there has been an active withdrawal from the industry by substantial numbers of farmers. The problem facing Malaysian planners in the padi sector is that of reconciling the continuation of existing land ownership and inheritance patterns with the need for the creation of larger operating units to permit the use of modern technology and raise the incomes of those working them. In general the technical advances of the last 30 years have widened the income gap between larger and smaller farmers. Weaknesses of the plantation mode of production in the padi sector relate both to its methods per se and their inability to cope with inadequate production by very small farms or shares. With or without major land reforms, which are not on the Fifth Plan's agenda, there is an urgent need to reduce the number of households dependent on padi growing for their living.     

Critical Analysis of the Relationship between Local Ownership and Community Resiliency*

Abstract Collectively, current resource‐development literature has given little attention to organizational features of ownership as important variables in community resilience. By drawing from six local buyout cases in Canada's forest sector, we reveal the complexity and numerous constraints on local ownership and expose a more nuanced context than most sociologists tend to consider. Our findings suggest that the meaning of local ownership and community resilience varies depending upon the composition (e.g., private vs. public; mill vs. forest license vs. coupled mill & forest license), type (social, cooperative, trust and/or direct‐share ownership), extent of ownership (percentage of local versus extra‐local shares), and the level of control (e.g., proportion of locally held seats on the Board of Directors) associated with ownership. Future research on local ownership should more carefully differentiate between the nature of local ownership and its associated outcomes.     

Social and economic transition: a case study in Portugal's western Algarve

This study discusses change in the village of Figueira, 7 km north west of Portimao, in the Algarve. Original surveys in 1967,1981 and 1983 allow analysis of changes in land tenure, housing and occupation. The results are used to infer the extent to which change to a wage-labour economy has been associated with a concentration or dispersion in the ownership of agricultural land and housing. They generally suggest that ownership has become more dispersed, agriculture more fragmented, and share-cropping less common. The wages of the non-agricultural sector have been held in household control and have provided the bulk of the investment into agriculture and housing. Social and economic change has been stimulated by the expansion of capitalism but, in the case of agriculture and housing at least, this has not been associated with the concentration of economic control. These results are used to comment on the Marxist ‘peasant class’ thesis.     

Trust and functional foods. New products,old issues

Trust in the "agro-food" sector has been declining in recent years reflecting a general decline of trust in traditional decision making processes. The introduction of new technologies in the production of foods re-introduces the problem of trust and highlights the parameters affecting its structure and direction. This paper discusses the issue of trust in relation to the introduction of functional foods into the market. Trust is assessed as both a philosophical and a psychological construct with particular emphasis on its communication aspects. The paper ends with specific recommendations for action in the agro-food sector. This paper partly reflects work done with Professor Cees Midden, Technical University of Eindhoven, as part of an expert technology assessment project for the Europaeische Akademie Bad Neuenahr Ahrweiler GmbH.     

Determinants of Profitability of Banking Sector in India

India currently is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. One sector of Indian economy that has played a critical role in transforming the Indian economy has been its banking sector. But this sector of Indian economy has also gone through a major transition that is still in progress. Many events and policies have contributed in this transition. One pivotal variable has been the growing profitability of this sector in the recent years. But profitability in banking sector is affected by numerous factors. These factors can be internal or external. In this research we shall try to examine the most important factors that may stem from both internal and external factors, which affect profitability of Indian banking sector. For this study a balanced panel data set is used that is drawn from Indian banking industry. The data is compiled for the purpose of investigating the nature of the relationship between the profitability and the factors that determine profitability of banks in India. The results of the study clearly demonstrate a close correlation between both internal and external factors and the level of profitability of banks in India.