Determinants of executive compensation in small business development centers

We develop and test a model of nonprofit executive compensation based on theories of organizational science, economics, and agency theory. Our sample consisted of 114 directors of small business development centers in the United States. Consistent with our model, we find significant effects for human capital, organizational size, and organizational affiliation. We find tentative support for a significant pay‐for‐performance relationship. We find that when education, tenure, size, performance, and affiliation are held constant, female executives are compensated significantly less than male executives.     

St. Wolfgang College's Health

St. Wolfgang College recently decided to change its health care plan. The administration took this action after just minimum consultation with the faculty. Consequently, the faculty is disheartened, seeing the action as a reflection of the college's top down decision making process and command culture. Faculty are in a quadary as to what they can do. Further, the administration of the college has largely rebuffed the faculty's efforts to increase its involvement in governance, rejecting a faculty reform effort. The college's president has a background primarily in administration at the secondary school level. Since assuming leadership he has focused on improving physical plant. He avows a mission of enhancing the college's academic reputation and has taken actions that he and the administration believe will achieve this goal, such as dismantling two year degree programs that primarily serve disadvantaged and minority students and providing extra funding to flagship programs.     

Beacon Art Center and Institute

The Beacon Art Center and Institute, located in an area of Florida experiencing rapid population growth, has enjoyed increases in membership,revenue and services. The Board of the Corporation and the Director must develop a long range strategic plan for the future of the organization. Ability to function is currently restricted by limited space, limited size of staff, and limited endowment. The center also faces potentially troublesome governance issues. The long run future of the art center must be addressed by the Board and the Director of the organization. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

„Was Du noch wissen solltest …“ Der Generationswechsel in Familienunternehmen und das Ringen um eine tragfähige Wirklichkeit

Family-businesses draw both their strengths and weaknesses from the combination of two systems with different rules. This fact is revealed drastically, when family-businesses are passed over to the next generation. This transition marks one of the biggest milestones in the life-cycle of a family-business and therefore often fails. What exactly is the task, the following generation is facing? The main idea of this text according to the ideas of constructivism is that the following generation has to discover its own and the construction of all participants of the transition regarding reality. This is necessary to enable the company to create a (new) stable construction of itself.     

Detecting seasonal unit roots in a structural time series model

In this paper, we propose to detect seasonal unit roots within the context of a structural time series model. Such a model is often found to be useful in practice. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that our method works well. We illustrate our approach for several quarterly macroeconomic time series variables.     

The Poverty of Deductivism: A Constructive Realist Model of Sociological Explanation

Despite the lip service which many sociologists pay to Popper's hypothetico‐deductive model (HDM) of theory testing, few if any major social theories have been definitively falsified. The reason is that sociological explanations do not fit the deductivist model of explanation: They do not contain universal or statistical "covering laws" from which falsifiable hypotheses could be deduced. Sociological explanations are better conceived in realist terms as causal models of the social processes that produce certain outcomes. While few models are completely false, some are nonetheless more empirically adequate than others. This essay argues that (1) the CLM is inadequate to sociology and that (2) attempts to reformulate the HDM are therefore destined to fail. It then outlines (3) a constructive realist model (CRM) of sociological explanation and uses it to develop (4) explanatory realist (ER) criteria for evaluating explanations. Deductivist and realist approaches to methodology are then compared through an examination of Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions .