An Observational Analysis of the Impact of Board Dynamics and Directors' Participation on Perceived Board Effectiveness

This study addresses calls for closer examination of board dynamics by offering an inside view of director interactions. Video observations of three board meetings at each of two Australian corporations matched with director interviews and secondary data reveal distinct patterns of director interactions, their sources of variation and their impact on perceived board effectiveness. The data reveal that director interactions are multidimensional and dynamic: while group interactions across agenda items are similar, with a few directors leading the discussion, the contributing directors change across items. Moreover, directors' inclusiveness and evenness of participation are associated with higher perceptions of board effectiveness. Lastly, the study found that director interactions change with the nature of the items, board climate and board meeting arrangements. The study contributes to the literature by moving beyond the individual‐level analysis of directors' skills or independence, and offering a detailed view of how the joint group and individual dimensions of board dynamics affect board functioning.     

Policy options when population growth slows: The case of Thailand

Thailand reached replacement-level fertility almost a decade ago, although there has been a lag in measuring and recognising the implications of this benchmark event. Fertility could well sink still lower. The momentum of population growth will ensure substantial further increase before the population levels off, but this is not true in all regions. For example, earlier and faster fertility decline in the North, and net outmigration, have led to a situation where some geographical and age segments of the North's population are decreasing. Population policy in Thailand since 1970 has had two major planks: to reduce fertility through an active family planning program, and to distribute population away from the large primate city of Bangkok. The paper discusses whether these policies may need to be modified as a result of the major demographic and socio economic changes that have been taking place. It also discusses the limits to population policy in terms of the likely efficacy of various measures that could be adopted, based on both an assessment of the Thailand situation and the experience of other low-fertility countries.     

Expansion of Secondary AND Tertiary Education in South East Asia: Some Implications for Australia

The number of secondary and tertiary graduates in South East Asia is growing very rapidly. Many interrelated issues arise. One is the need to improve equity of access to these levels of education. Another is the need to broaden the employment base for the better-educated beyond the professional and clerical jobs (largely in the public service) which have hitherto been available to most secondary and tertiary graduates. Yet another relates to the appropriate content of education at these levels, the appropriate rate of expansion and the ultimate target for the proportion of young people receiving tertiary education. There are many parallel issues for Australia, particularly as Australian educational policy, increasingly favouring the supply of places in Australian educational institutions on a full-fee basis, requires a greater “meshing” of educational systems with those in the region. Australia should also be aware that rapidly rising numbers of educated youth in an uncertain job market could lead to increased political instability in some South East Asian countries and an increase in applications for migration to Australia. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Australian Population Association Conference, Brisbane, 31 August-2 September 1988. The author would like to thank participants in that Conference, as well as Anthony Reid and Jamie Mackie, for valuable comments, though they are in no way responsible for remaining shortcomings in the paper.     

Is demographic uniformity inevitable?

Globalizing processes of industrialization and Westernization are creating a retreat from diversity in human experience. The paper discusses whether population trends are reinforcing this process and draws on findings about growth rates, the family and urbanization in Western countries. East and Southeast Asia and Latin America. The extent to which counterbalancing forces, including cultural resilience, are curbing homogenization is also examined.     

A demographic perspective on the Muslim world

A demographic perspective is relevant to understanding the position of Muslims in today’s world. This paper examines the size and growth of Muslim populations, and whether most Muslims live in overwhelmingly Muslim countries. It also examines indices of poverty and human development for Muslimmajority countries, and the growth of the youth population; finally, it examines the key components of population growth: mortality and fertility. Mortality has declined sharply over the past 15 years in many Muslim countries, though not in all, and Muslim countries are no longer prominent among the ‘outliers’ with higher mortality than expected on the basis of their income levels. Fertility rates are also declining sharply in a number of major Muslim-majority countries, raising interesting issues about attitudes of different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, village-level religious leaders and ordinary Muslims towards contraception and abortion, as well as the role of socio-economic development and family planning programs in fertility declines. Despite these declines, past high fertility in many Muslim-majority countries leaves as a legacy a rapidly growing adolescent population and a burgeoning, inadequately educated labour force.     

The relation of psychological,social, and economic variables to fertility-related decisions

To test a recent model of social behavior, a questionnaire was designed and administered to 270 married women in a midwestern city. A stratified random sample was obtained, comprising a 2 × 3 factorial design (Catholic vs. Protestant and high vs. middle vs. low socioeconomic status). It was hypothesized that an individual’s intention to engage in a fertility-related behavior would be highly correlated with (a) her beliefs about the consequences of performing that behavior weighted by the value of those consequences, and/or (b) her beliefs about what relevant others think she should do and her motivation to comply with those others. The data strongly supported this hypothesis for each of three different behaviors. Analysis of variance revealed a significant religious differential for intentions to have a two-child family (Catholics were less likely to intend to have a two-child family than Protestants). This differential was further examined in terms of the proposed model of behavior.     

CEO successor compensation: outside versus inside successions

We propose that outside CEO candidates will have greater bargaining power than insiders. As a result, outside CEO successors will likely receive greater total compensation than inside CEO successors. Outside successors, meantime, pose more risk to the hiring firm than inside successors due to higher information asymmetry. As a result, outside successor compensation packages are tilted towards more performance-related pay-at-risk, while inside successor packages have a higher percentage in salary. In addition, outside successors may want to utilize the structure of their compensation at their previous firm in their new contracts. Using a sample of 99 firms with outside successors who were not CEO in their prior firms, matched by industry and size to firms that hired inside candidates, we find evidence supporting these hypotheses.     

Zelda Foster and her contributions to social work in end-of-life care

This article is both a memoir of one social worker's professional collaboration with Zelda Foster and a tribute to Zelda's legacy in the form of an educational resource on end-of-life care. It reviews achievements of Zelda Foster in social work practice and teaching related to death and dying. Resources presented in this article were supported by the Soros Foundation's Project on Death in America, a funded grant project to which Zelda contributed. The end-of-life care education, training and informational tools discussed in this article are examples of ongoing efforts in the social work profession to improve the lives of the dying and bereaved.     

Players and arenas: strategic interactionism in social movements studies

This ‘Authors Meet Critics’ symposium focuses on two books edited by Jan Willem Duyvendak and James M. Jasper, Players and Arenas: The Interactive Dynamics of Protest and Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged. Both books make bold attempts to develop and apply a strategic interactionist perspective in social movement studies by focusing on the interplay of micro and macro processes and decision-making in a range of protest movements. Critical interventions from Aidan McGarry, Robert J. Davidson and Guya Accornero raise a number of questions relating to the core arguments of the books, the key findings and the conceptual advances. Duyvendak and Jasper then address these challenges by drawing attention more acutely to the role of agency in social movements and highlighting significant critiques of the current state of the art in social movement scholarship.