Leadership in education: Effective U.K. college principals

College leaders face increasing challenges to manage complex responsibilities. They must possess a wide variety of managerial and leadership skills to be successful in academic environments, which are beginning to resemble more traditional organizational frameworks. The study examined in this article explored the relationships among managerial style, organizational climate, and several measures of college‐student performance with a sample of British further education college principals (similar to U.S. community college presidents). While considering the influence of various background factors, such as the size of the college, student funding, and years of experience, several significant relationships emerged demonstrating a significant association between principals' managerial behaviors and measures of college and student performance.     

U.K. statistics on immigration: development and limitations

This article discusses the data on international migration to the UK, their limitations, and their origins. No 1 source gives a demographically satisfactory account of net migration, and different sources of data are not compatible with each other. Their present form can only be understood in the context of a reluctant acceptance, in the face of domestic political pressure, of the need to impose the same controls on the entry of Commonwealth citizens from 1962-1971 as had been imposed on the entry of aliens since 1920. Coleman asserts that UK migration statistics suffer 1 major omission and several systematic deficiencies. The omission is the absence of any information, either from the International Passenger Survey (IPS) or from the Home Office, on gross or net migration flows to the UK from the Republic of Ireland. Neither the IPS nor the Home Office data provide a very satisfactory form of measurement of other migration streams. Neither has much time depth, the former not existing before 1963, the latter being affected by changes in rules and procedures. As a voluntary sample with only relatively few interviews per year on intended migrants, the IPS can only provide a crude overall estimate of the general demographic import of migration flows, incapable for statistical reasons of any refined sub-division or analysis, and prove both to error and bias. The Home Office statistics do not treat immigration in a demographically useful way. They measure flows only in 1 direction, provide no demographic or socioeconomic characteristics on those accepted for settlement, and are not compatible with the IPS in most ways. For political reasons, no action to resolve the Irish anomaly is likely, especially when the trend is for less, not more, control and counting on the entry of European Community citizens.     

Regulating without controlling: Children's food and self-management in the U.S. middle class

This ethnography examines how adults in an Atlanta community approached the challenges involved in children's food socialisation and emotional socialisation at large. In both realms, self-management was the ultimate goal. For parents, striking a balance between conscientious attentiveness and offensively controlling behaviours was key. Ultimately, the realm of children's food revealed emotional tensions inherent in middle-class models of selfhood, where both children and adults come under scrutiny for their comportment and tastes, and where careful regulation is deemed both necessary and problematic in ways that work to deflect attention from the compensatory labour of parents in a neoliberal economy.     

Patterns in Household Giving: Evidence From U.K. Data

The Family Expenditure Survey provides a long time series of household-level data on U.K. charitable giving, which previously has not been exploited. Data analyzed for the period 1978–93 reveal a long-term decline in the proportion of households giving to charity, which persists once we control for changes in other characteristics that affect giving, such as income and wealth. The biggest declines in the number of givers are among younger and poorer households. We also draw out generation-specific trends in a way that is crucial to thinking about future trends in funding for the voluntary sector.     

Advanced Networked Technologies in the U.K. Voluntary Sector

Advanced networked technologies have the potential to support deep strategic and operational transformation within voluntary organizations as they seek to respond to shifts in the social, economic, and political spheres in which they operate. Evidence form our study of U.K. voluntary organizations demonstrates relatively low uptake of the core networking technologies and applications essential to support such transformation. Friends of the Earth and The Samaritans are exceptions to this trend. Case studies of these organizations demonstrate that they are using advanced networked technologies to reconfigure key information flows and relationships, in support of enhanced campaigning and more effective user services. The extent to which these organizations are able to exploit the transformational potential that the technologies present is tempered by historically institutionalized relationships and values by which they are characterized.     

Decision making in child welfare: A critical review of the literature

The decision to intervene with families has enormous implications for a democratic society. Child protective services must both protect children and families. Practice theory, social policies, and agency procedures have not provided a consensus on the criteria to guide decision making in child welfare. This paper reviews the empirical studies in the decision making literature for the purposes of: identifying variables workers are using to guide their decisions; identifying major professional concerns and issues with this literature; and suggest questions for further research.     

Recruiting the new conservationists: Farmers' adoption of agri-environmental schemes in the U.K.

Financial incentives available to farmers under the Government's relaunched agri-environmental policy (AEP) promise to recruit more farmers into conservation schemes than ever before. The success of these voluntary schemes, which offer payments in return for farmers agreeing to desist from certain damaging operations or carry out environmentally sensitive ones, is widely proclaimed, chiefly with reference to the promising levels of enrolment that have already been achieved under the Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA) programme. Increasingly, however, attention is focusing on the environmental benefits that are being achieved on the ground and their longer-term durability. This paper reports on a survey of 101 farmers in South East England conducted with a view to investigating the level of engagement of those currently enrolled in such schemes. Focusing on the motivational aspects, it points to wide variations in the level of commitment and sympathy with the wider objectives of AEP schemes and places farmers on a participation spectrum ranging from the most resistant non-adopters at one end to the most active adopters at the other. The policy implications of this categorisation are explored and recommendations made for pushing more farmers towards the active end of the spectrum.     

Nature protection,ecologists and the farming context: A U.K. historical context

The paper explores the spirit and purpose of nature conservation as it has developed, first as a wholly voluntary movement and then with direct Government support. A major stimulus has been the increasing input of ecologists, first in campaigning for a series of National Nature Reserves and an Ecological Research Council, and then in undertaking the survey and research required for underpinning and executing conservation management. Contrary to expectations, advances in agriculture became a major obstacle to the preservation, let alone enhancement, of wildlife, particularly in the wider countryside. A more supportive context for nature conservation has only begun to emerge in the late 1980s.     

Measuring pathological gambling in children: The case of fruit machines in the U.K.

The alleged incidence of addiction to fruit machine gambling among children in the U.K. has highlighted the need for a measure to define and count pathological gambling in children. The DSM-IV criteria, which are being refined to diagnose pathological gambling in adults, was adapted for use with pre-adult gamblers. The resulting DSM-IV-J criteria were tested using a questionnaire survey on a sample of 467 schoolchildren aged between 11 and 16 years. Those children who were defined as probable pathological gamblers by the DSM-IV-J index were significantly more likely to be involved in behaviours hitherto associated with dependency, than were the control group. DSM-IV-J appears to be a major advance in the discrimination of pathological gambling in children.The author would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this work through a Research Studentship Grant. The author would also like to thank Henry Lesieur Ph.D. and Mark Dickerson Ph.D. for their helpful comments in the design stage of this research.     

Organizational Structure and Innovation in U.K. Voluntary Social Welfare Organizations: Applying the Aston Measures

This paper discusses the methodological issues involved in assessing the impact of organizational structure upon the innovative capacity of voluntary organizations. It reports the use of a specific methodological tool—the Aston measures—as an approach to these issues. In addition to the empirical findings reported, this paper argues for these measures as a useful addition to the methodological tool kit of voluntary sector researchers.     

Discourse, interaction, and testimony: The making of selves in the U.S. Protestant dispute over homosexuality

Ethnography helps to elaborate Foucault's conception of power at work to produce subjects through micro-level interactions. I examine interactions among Protestants as they discuss homosexuality in two sites, an ex-gay movement seminar and a pro-gay liberal congregation. In two opposed groups, the genre of testimony produced an authentic-seeming truth, working performatively to produce group boundaries, to legitimate authority and hierarchies in the group, and to tacitly define certain categories as abject, unlivable. That groups can produce this effect in spite of their intentions illustrates how certain forms of social power inhere in language and work through everyday talk.     

Intermittent labour forms in U.K. agriculture: Some implications for rural areas

Intermittent labour forms — generally conceived as ‘seasonal or casual workers’, but also including labour supplied by agricultural contractors or, under cooperative arrangements, by neighbours or family members — are an established and increasingly important part of the U.K. agricultural labour market. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about either the precise level or the detailed character of such labour. Although the MAFF June Census does collect data on ‘seasonal or casual’ workers it is limited in both its scale and depth of coverage. In this paper, the results of a survey of intermittent labour forms on farms in part of north Wales and the north and south west Midlands are discussed. In general, it is shown that the true extent of intermittent employment is almost certainly much greater — perhaps by a factor of five or more — than the MAFF Census figures would imply. From the survey data it is demonstrated that farms across the range of product and size structures make extensive use of both directly-recruited and indirectly-recruited (contract) labour. More specifically, a restructuring process and the substitution of such labour forms for regular labour is evident.Having considered the level and character of intermittent employment in modern agriculture the paper goes on to consider some of the implications for rural economies. In general it is argued that the use of intermittent labour has almost certainly precipitated some radical changes in the organisation of the farm labour force and in the ability of farmers or growers to service their own needs from within. Moreover, the restructuring process has served to erode the viability of the rural economic and social structure by replacing stable job opportunities with alternatives that offer only a marginal form of job experience and limited income and which cannot in isolation support rural communities.     

Global Centrality and Income Inequality in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: A Test of Two Hypotheses

This article provides a quantitative assessment of two global city hypotheses: Sassen’s polarization and Hamnett’s professionalization claims. We conduct our analysis by using a continuous measure of global city status developed by researchers at the Global and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) and examining its correlation with the Gini index of household income inequality with relevant controls across a large sample of U.S. metropolitan areas in 2008. We examine industrial employment distribution as a causal pathway by which global city formation may influence urban income structures, as per Sassen and Hamnett’s original hypotheses. Results show that global city status is consistently associated with higher levels of inequality, but neither theorist’s claims about causal mechanisms are supported. This begs the question: What explains the correlation? We suggest an alternative hypothesis relating global city status to the distribution of educational credentialing.     

Communications officers and the C-suite: A study of Financial Times Global 500 companies

A content analysis of the websites or annual reports of the 2012 Financial Times Global 500 companies was performed to examine the position of communications officers (COs) on their executive boards. Almost one quarter of the companies examined had a CO on the executive board. Their distribution differed by region, with North America leading, followed by Europe. No significant differences were found between business to business (BtB) and business to consumer (BtC) companies or between sectors with more or less regulated communication. Economic indicators did not predict whether a company would have a CO on the executive board.     

Women of the corporation: A sociolinguistic perspective of senior women's leadership language in the U.K.

This paper reconceptualises a classic theory (Kanter 1993[1977]) on gender and leadership in order to provide fresh insights for both sociolinguistic and management thinking. Kanter claimed that there are four approved ‘role traps’ for women leaders in male‐dominated organisations: Mother, Pet, Seductress and Iron Maiden, based on familiar historical archetypes of women in power. This paper reinterprets Kanter's construct of role traps in sociolinguistic terms as gendered, discursive resources that senior women utilise proactively to interact with their predominantly male colleagues. Based on a Research Council funded ¹ study of 14 senior leaders (seven female and seven male) each conducting at least one senior management meeting in the U.K., the paper finds that individual speakers can transform stereotyped subject positions into powerful discursive resources to accomplish the goals of leadership, albeit marked by gender.