Balancing strategy and accountability: A model for the governance of professional associations

An erratum has been published for this article in Nonprofit Management and Leadership 15(4) 2005, 487 [ ]. Professional associations are operating in a context of uncertainty and change, with which their traditional governance structures struggle to manage. After describing this context and presenting a brief overview of relevant governance literature, a project aimed at supporting the redesign of governance structures and procedures among five professional associations in the United Kingdom is outlined. Three specific governance issues are examined: size of councils (council is the term used for a governing body of a U.K. professional association), their composition in relation to electoral processes, and the development of inner councils, or executive boards, within councils. Finally, we present a normative model, the cupped hands model, that has arisen from the research. This model offers a possible means of balancing the representation required by their status as membership associations with the requirement that professional associations become more strategic and proactive.     

Achievable Hierarchies In Voting Games

Previous work by Diffo Lambo and Moulen [Theory and Decision 53, 313–325 (2002)] and Felsenthal and Machover [The Measurement of Voting Power, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited (1998)], shows that all swap preserving measures of voting power are ordinally equivalent on any swap robust simple voting game. Swap preserving measures include the Banzhaf, the Shapley–Shubik and other commonly used measures of a priori voting power. In this paper, we completely characterize the achievable hierarchies for any such measure on a swap robust simple voting game. Each possible hierarchy can be induced by a weighted voting game and we provide a constructive proof of this result. In particular, the strict hierarchy is always achievable as long as there are at least five players.     

Overcoming Barriers to Homeless Delivery Services: A Community Response

Homelessness is one of the most pressing social problems today. The Institute of Medicine defines the problem as a failure in the support systems created to prevent the problem and a tighter housing market. The assumption is that the support system should help to prevent the occurrence of homelessness. The Eastern Fairfield County area performed a study to look at the relationship between those services serving people who are homeless and near homeless to determine the availability, accessibility, and adequacy of services for homeless people. The study identified several barriers in the service delivery system. A strategy was then developed to address these barriers. This paper shows how a research process can facilitate a community response to a social problem. The paper presents the steps that were taken so other communities may replicate the process.     

The Interhuman and What is Common to All: Martin Buber and Sociology

Martin Buber was close to sociology and sociologists from his university years on and in 1938 was head of the new Department of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although influenced by Ferdinand Toennies, and George Simmel, he went beyond them in his philosophy of the "interhuman" from which standpoint he also criticized Max Scheler. Focal social concepts of Buber's are "the interhuman"_the dialogical relationship between persons that entails "inclusion," or "imagining the real," making present, and confirmation (compared here with the social psychology of George Herbert Mead); the "essential We" or common cosmos that each helps to build by speech-with-meaning from his or her unique stance; the distinction between the "political principle" of government and the "social principle" of fellowship and social spontaneity; and the philosophy of community that led Buber to a federalistic socialism and the vision of restructuring society into a "community of communities".     

Siblings of People with Disabilities’ Explicit and Implicit Disability Attitude Divergence

Siblings of people with disabilities have more exposure to people with disabilities than most nondisabled people, uniquely positioning them toward disability, yet less is known about how this might impact their attitudes. This study examined siblings’ disability attitudes by determining siblings’ explicit and implicit disability bias, mapping their 2-dimensional prejudice, and examining theoretical variables that might be relevant to their attitudes. To do so, the Disability Attitudes Implicit Association Test, the Symbolic Ableism Scale, and survey questions were administered to 48 siblings. Findings revealed the majority of the siblings implicitly preferred nondisabled people, despite reporting low levels of explicit attitudes.     

The role of federal regulations in assuring research integrity

The federal government has a proper interest in research integrity. Regulations have had effects on scientists and institutions; some appear to have been beneficial, such as recent educational efforts; others have augmented bureaucracy and sowed divisiveness. The federal oversight bureaucracy should be subject to the sunset provision.

Participation by the community is essential to the development of effective regulations, but ethical issues should be dealt with by professional standards, not laws. It is argued that the scientific community had begun to respond to public concerns when change was accelerated by regulation, and that change from within is most effective.     

Organizational access to research settings: Entering secondary schools

Fieldworkers have long acknowledged the problems of gaining access to research settings but often failed to analyze them systematically. In this article we provide preliminary evidence that, when seeking to enter formal bureaucracies, access problems can be better understood and more easily resolved by referring to the organizational logic of the setting. Adopting an organizational perspective to analyze access issues, we compare public schools and private religious schools and show how access problems and the strategies to overcome them vary according to the variation in the schools’ organizational features. We develop our argument in four steps. First, we examine the organizational literature on formal institutionalized organizations to highlight the structural problems of gaining entry to public schools for research purposes. Second, we adopt an organizational perspective to identify strategies for overcoming problems of access to public schools. Third, we compare the access to private religious schools and to public schools to demonstrate that problems and solution strategies vary according to the schools’ variation in organizational features. Fourth, we demonstrate the usefulness of organizational access by showing that researchers’ ability to gain entry is enhanced by a preliminary understanding of the organizational characteristics of a formal research setting. Throughout our discussion, we provide illustrative examples from the senior author’s research in public schools and private religious schools in a large Midwestern city.