Mutual benefit as outcome indicator: Factors influencing perceptions of benefit in organization–public relationships

The notion of mutual benefit has been a foundational assumption for scholars who use the relationship management perspective. Although many studies have inferred that mutual benefit links to organizational outcomes, no study to date has linked quantitatively key public member perception of benefit to positive organizational results. The current investigation sought to quantify the link between respondent perception of benefit and traditional organizational outcomes such as satisfaction and behavioral intent.     

Tax–benefit revealed social preferences

This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that would make the observed marginal tax rate schedule optimal. In this framework, the issue of the optimality of an existing tax–benefit system is transformed into the issue of the shape of the social welfare function associated with that system and whether it satisfies elementary properties. This method is applied to the French redistribution system with the interesting implication that the French redistribution authority may appear, under some plausible scenario concerning the size of the labor supply behavioral reactions, non Paretian (e.g. giving negative marginal social weights to the richest class of tax payers).     

Working together for whose benefit?

SUMMARY. Lack of multi-disciplinary cooperation was seen by the Cleveland Inquiry as one of the major causes of what went wrong. The need for the many different professionals to work together in child abuse has been stressed many times before, but in sexual abuse matters the task, seems particularly daunting. This article reviews the traditional barriers to cooperation, applies them to sex abuse and suggesfs ways of beginning to overcome them     

MAP adds peer recovery as insurance benefit

MAP Health Management is getting health care plans to cover peer recovery as a health care benefit, but it hasn't been easy. “You're talking to a guy who's been thrown out of more health insurance plan offices than anyone you've ever met,” said Jacob Levenson, founder and chief executive officer of MAP, in an interview with ADAW last month. The early response from insurance companies was “You want us to pay addicts to talk to addicts?” recalled Levenson.     

Questions and answers on employee benefit issues

This Issue Brief addresses 19 topics in the areas of pensions, health insurance, and other benefits. In addition to the topics listed below, the report includes data on the prevalence of benefits, tax incentives associated with benefits, lump-sum distributions, number of private pension plans, pension coverage rates, 401(k) plans, employer spending on group health insurance, self-insured health plans, employer initiatives to reduce health care costs, and employers' response to the retiree health benefits accounting rule, and flexible benefits plans. In 1992, U.S. employers (public and private) spent $629 billion for noncash benefits, representing nearly 18 percent of total compensation, excluding paid time off. In 1992, 71 percent of the 50.1 million individuals aged 55 and over received retirement benefits, including distributions from private and public pensions, annuities, individual retirement accounts, Keoghs, 401(k)s, and Social Security. Among the 76 percent of all private pension plan participants who participated in a single plan, 30 percent named a defined benefit plan as their pension plan type, 58 percent named a defined contribution plan as their pension plan type, and 12 percent did not know their plan type. Private and public pension funds held more than $4.6 trillion in assets at the end of 1993. The 1993 year-end assets are more than triple the asset level of 1983 (nominal terms). According to the Congressional Budget Office, U.S. expenditures on health care were expected to have reached $898 billion in 1993, up from $751.8 billion in 1991, an increase of 19.4 percent in nominal terms.     

Would rethinking learning disabilities benefit Kuwait?

Learning disabilities education in Kuwait grew from Kuwaiti’s wholesale importation of the Western, medical model of disability – a model basically incompatible with Kuwaiti culture. Conflicting factors include its problematic normal/abnormal binary, its assumption that the ‘deficit’ is located in the student and the segregation of students by label. As proponents of disability studies we investigate whether, and if so how, Arab educators at Kuwait’s only learning disabilities school talk about this incompatibility. Through focus group and individual, in‐depth conversational interviews we found that they acknowledged this tension, but that they dealt with it in more complex ways than we had anticipated: by compartmentalizing, accepting the imported model as the only alternative to overcrowded public education and subjugating their experiential awareness to that of the Western scientific model.     

Predicting welfare benefit claiming using expectancy theory

Explanations for why over 600,000 UK pensioners do not claim their entitlement to Supplementary Pensions (a means-tested benefit) can be attributed to three types of attitudinal factors: (1) their perceptions of their situations; (2) their beliefs that applying leads to certain outcomes and has certain implications; and (3) their feelings about these outcomes. Although beliefs and feelings about the outcomes of applying are central insofar as many of them represent responses to factors which government can hope to influence, it is clear that these beliefs and feelings are not important to all pensioners. Thus in order to identify and to determine the importance of key beliefs and feelings, a method must be devised to locate those non-claimants for whom such expectations are strongly related to their behaviour. This small study of Scottish pensioners tests the effectiveness of a conceptual model which employs pensioners' perceptions of need, of the utility of the benefit, and of the stability of their situations both as predictors of non-claiming and as moderators of the relationship between their beliefs and feelings about the outcomes of applying and their actual claiming behaviour.     

Costing out a wage and benefit package

Labor costs represent the largest single cost of operation for most organizations. For the unionized employer, the compensation package is determined during contract negotiations. It is important for both union and management negotiators to be able to identify the cost of a proposed agreement. Both parties to a contract should know whether a proposed compensation package is consistent with an organization's ability to pay. In addition, when "trading" demands, both parties should be aware of the cost of the demands being traded. An approach to costing out a labor agreement has been presented in this article. While it can be described as the standard approach, it is subject to several criticisms. Typically, it is applied in a way that assumes that history will repeat itself. In addition, it focuses on the direct cost of a proposed compensation package. While this is certainly relevant, the impact of the compensation package on organization profits is more important. Finally, the time value of money is not taken into account. This would be important if a multi-year contract is being negotiated. While there are legitimate concerns about the approach presented here, our objective is to provide the reader with a basic approach to costing out a wage and benefit package. Anyone involved in contract negotiations or, in the nonunion firm, anyone responsible for administering a wage and benefit program, should be aware of the problems that we have described and seek out reference materials to provide guidance in addressing them.     

Questions and answers on health insurance benefit issues

This Issue Brief addresses eight topics in the areas of health insurance and health care costs. Using a question and answer format, the discussion draws largely on EBRI research and the EBRI Databook on Employee Benefits, third edition. In 1993, U.S. expenditures on health care were $884.2 billion, and they are projected to reach $2,173.7 billion by 2005, increasing at a projected average annual rate of 7.8 percent. Health care spending accounted for 13.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1993 and is projected to reach 17.9 percent of GDP by 2005. Among the factors contributing to the increase in health care costs are the growth in the number of individuals with traditional reimbursement health insurance coverage, the rapid expansion of technology and treatment options, and demographic factors such as the aging of the population. In 1993, employers, both public and private, spent $235.6 billion on group health insurance, accounting for 6.2 percent of total compensation. Group health insurance is the fastest growing component of total compensation, increasing at an average annual rate of 13.7 percent from 1960 to 1993. An increasing number of employees are required to make a cash contribution to their health insurance plan premium. In 1993, 61 percent of full-time employees in medium and large private establishments who participated in an employee only health insurance plan were required to make a contribution to the premium, up from 27 percent in 1979. In 1993, 185.3 million persons under age 65 had health insurance coverage, while 40.9 million people--or about 18.1 percent of the nonelderly population--received neither private health insurance nor publicly financed health coverage. Of those individuals who had health insurance coverage, 60.8 percent, or 137.4 million persons, received their health insurance through an employment-based plan. In 1993, 15.2 percent of the nonelderly population without health insurance coverage were noncitizens. In six states noncitizens represented a higher proportion of the total uninsured population than individuals in the nation as a whole. An increasing number of employers are self-funding their health insurance plans. In 1994, 74 percent of employers with 500 or more employees self-funded their health insurance plans, up from 63 percent in 1993. An estimated 22 million full-time employees in private industry and state and local governments participated in a self-funded employment-based health insurance plan.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Functional benefit of power training for older adults

Aging leads to significant losses in muscle mass, strength, and the ability to independently perform activities of daily living (ADL). Typically, standard resistance training (RT) has been used to reduce these losses in function by maintaining or even increasing muscle strength in older adults. Increasing strength does not necessarily, however, result in an increase in the ability to perform ADL. There is now research suggesting that muscle power is more closely associated with the performance of ADL than muscle strength is, so training for muscle power might lead to more beneficial results in functional performance. This review of studies investigating the effect of training on ADL performance in older adults indicated that standard RT is effective in increasing strength in older adults, but power training that contains high-velocity contractions might be a more optimal means of training older adults when the emphasis is on increasing the performance of ADL.     

General child benefit fund experiments in providing differentiated services

Populations not autonomous in their administrative relations has difficulties with access to social benefits of the Caisses d'Allocations Familiales (CAFs). These difficulties, whether rooted in cultural, educational, social, or other issues, disrupt the management of their documents of social benefits and thereby weigh on their economic situations. From 1998 to 2000, five CAFs tested suitable solutions to situations of beneficiaries for whom standardized procedures have shown their limits, in the areas of housing, compensatory allocations of revenues, and given territories. They have defined goals, methods, and indicators for complex situations and have regular assessments of the management of the project as the project is going on. These results concern a better understanding of the beneficiaries, understanding of the services to provide them with, and the benefits for the beneficiaries, for the agents, for the CAF, and for its relations with the partners associated with their missions.     

Qualitative cost–benefit evaluation of complex,emergent programs

This paper discusses a methodology used for a qualitative cost–benefit evaluation of a complex, emergent program. Complex, emergent programs, where implementation varies considerably over time and across sites to respond to local needs and opportunities, present challenges to conventional methods for cost–benefit evaluation. Such programs are characterized by: ill-defined boundaries of what constitutes the intervention, and hence the resources used; non-standardized procedures; differing short-term outcomes across projects, even within the same long-term goals; and outcomes that are the result of multiple factors and co-production, making counter-factual approaches to attribution inadequate and the use of standardized outcome measures problematic. The paper discusses the advantages and limitations of this method and its implications for cost–benefit evaluation of complex programs.     

How understanding multidimensional diversity can benefit global public relations education

This essay offers a novice way to look at diversity as a multidimensional concept. Such approach may help to enrich students’ understanding and appreciation of one another and can contribute to a more fruitful pursuit of global public relations education among undergraduate and graduate students. Specifically, the essay shows how a multidimensional diversity approach can help students to uncover the complexity of their own identities they may not have been articulating in the past. Addressing multidimensional diversity in the classroom can encourage discussions about the importance of diversity in public relations practice and in the globalized society.