What Happens When Nonprofits Use Quality Models for Self‐Assessment?

Two tools to assist organizational self‐assessment have recently become popular in the U.K. nonprofit sector, providing the opportunity for a comparative study of how such tools are used in practice. Because both spring from the quality movement in management, the study also provided a chance to observe how quality ideas evolve as they are applied in nonprofit contexts. The study found that self‐assessment can indeed enable constructive review processes in a wide range of contexts. However, when the models “work” it is in rather different ways than is suggested by the terms in which they are promoted.     

A Critical Response to the Keys Young Report: Ending Domestic Violence? Programs for Perpetrators

This paper questions some of the continuing effects of the dominant theoretical construction of domestic violence in the light of the recent Keys Young report to National Crime Prevention. A re‐examination is made of patriarchy as the dominant theoretical underpinning and some of the consequences for service delivery and policy development are explored. Is it necessarily the case that we have now got our understanding and subsequent intervention strategies right and that all that is needed is a consolidation of the ideas and the tightening of funding arrangements?     

The Formation of Top Managers: a Discourse Analysis of Five Managerial Autobiographies

What do top managers see as the root of their success? This paper reports on a discourse analysis of five autobiographies from major industrial figures. Those chosen all had some disruption (war, being a refugee, or immigrant status) between the culture of their childhood and the culture in which they undertook their careers. This makes them more aware than most of their upbringing. Their accounts of their first 20 years are examined, and themes are drawn out for each of them. These themes are tabulated and some of the differences between them are discussed. Common themes are conspicuous by their absence. The paper discusses why this should not surprise us; top management is not one activity in one culture, and an upbringing that might have led one of these managers to success might have been disadvantageous to another. The paper concludes that the common factor between the accounts of the managers is that they all regard their upbringing as having fitted them particularly well for the company, industry and culture in which they were eventually successful.     

Trust in leadership: A multi-level review and integration

Leaders have been argued to play a key role in determining organizational effectiveness across all levels (e.g., individual, team, unit) that exist within organizations. A key component in a leader's ability to be effective within such environments is the degree to which subordinates and co-workers trust him/her. Therefore, it is not surprising that researchers and practitioners alike are interested in identifying the mechanisms through which trust in leadership can be developed as well as those factors which moderate this relationship [e.g., Gillespie, N. A., Mann, L. (2004). Transformational leadership and shared values: The building blocks of trust. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 19, 588–607; Kouzes and Posner, 1995; Roberts, K. H., O'Reilly, C. A. (1974). Failures in upward communication in organizations: Three possible culprits. Academy of Management Journal, 17, 205–215; Whitener, E. M. (1997). The impact of human resource activities on employee trust. Human Resource Management Review, 7, 389–404]. Despite this, research that has addressed the factors that foster trust in leaders and the outcomes of this trust has been disjointed and, as yet, no comprehensive model has been presented to systematically examine these factors. Therefore, the purpose of this article will be to present an integrative model of trust in leadership.     

Futures research—Working with management teams

This paper discusses ways of looking at the future, with particular emphasis on the future as a ‘conscious dream’, and discusses an approach by which conscious dreams can be represented as explicit models. A case study is given of the use of this method with three housing managers who were enabled by it to articulate their own images of the future and understand each others' images. The benefits to be gained from such a procedure are discussed.