Decision-making processes in community transport organisations: a comparative case study of service providers

Transport services provided by voluntary organisations have grown dramatically in recent years. However, little systematic research has been undertaken on the functioning of these organisations. The aim of the research on which this paper is based was to rectify the lack of information on how decisions relating to service provision are made by such organisations — often called community transport (CT) operators. Three organisations were selected for a comparative case study approach. The results show that the leadership approach of their key staff was of particular significance. Each organisation is moving in the direction of greater professionalism and away from its community roots. This cultural change can be attributed to responses to external forces, especially those affecting resources. Evidence suggests they are being forced towards adopting practices of the private sector, but that this need not be the case. Community transport provision is in a period of transition, the outcome of which may radically alter both its structure and its survival capacities.The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The authors would also like to place on record their thanks to the three organisations who participated in this study.     

Friendly foes under friendly fire: a risk-based approach to benefit society failures in West Kent, 1860–1885

ABSTRACT

Much of the extensive historiography of nineteenth-century English friendly societies has focused on their capacity to create social capital and their predisposition towards insolvency, although more recently historians have argued that the ability of affiliated orders to raise levies made them financially stronger than previously supposed. However, given that societies still failed regularly, in what circumstances was it impossible to mount such rescues, and why? This article answers this question through a case study of three small ‘local’ societies in West Kent. Using the perspective of risk and risk transfer, it suggests they all suffered from a serious combination of membership and competitor risk which, when mishandled, also caused significant reputational damage to both societies and their managers. A further major tension was that many local opinion formers were starting to demand higher standards of accountability, including from friendly society trustees. The article also looks at the survival strategies of individual managers and members, arguing that – during financial crises – self-interest exerted powerful forces on those societies. In each case, the evidence reveals that often longstanding local relationships, based on mutual trust and shared values, were fractured so completely that raising levies or other bailouts to keep them afloat proved impossible.     

Industry culture and strategic response: the case of the british bus industry

This article is concerned to demonstrate the utility of the notion of culture at the industry level. A multiple-case study of nine British bus companies highlights the way in which entrenched views and practices which were common among the nine companies restricted the range of strategic thinking among them. Many of these views and practices are emblematic of traditional bus company perspectives and are common throughout the industry. The reasons for the “hold” that the industry culture has on managers are examined. These include such factors as the impact of leadership and the inheritance of pre-deregulation features.     

Thinking with suffering

Abstract

This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses on the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action.     

Using the ‘risk factor paradigm’ in prevention: lessons from the evaluation of Communities that Care

This paper discusses results from an evaluation of the UK-based Communities that Care programme. This ‘risk and protective’ programme was set up in 1997 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with a central aim of exploring if such an approach could be successful in the UK context. Communities that Care puts into operation the ‘risk factor paradigm’ by providing evidence of risk and protection for local communities that help them target resources for the reduction of future social problems. Results show that such a model looks ‘promising’ although though there are substantial implementation issues that need to be addressed if it is to be successful over a longer time frame.     

Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund

Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as made up of socio‐technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This article reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.     

AVERAGE PREDICTIVE COMPARISONS FOR MODELS WITH NONLINEARITY, INTERACTIONS, AND VARIANCE COMPONENTS

In a predictive model, what is the expected difference in the outcome associated with a unit difference in one of the inputs? In a linear regression model without interactions, this average predictive comparison is simply a regression coefficient (with associated uncertainty). In a model with nonlinearity or interactions, however, the average predictive comparison in general depends on the values of the predictors. We consider various definitions based on averages over a population distribution of the predictors, and we compute standard errors based on uncertainty in model parameters. We illustrate with a study of criminal justice data for urban counties in the United States. The outcome of interest measures whether a convicted felon received a prison sentence rather than a jail or non-custodial sentence, with predictors available at both individual and county levels. We fit three models: (1) a hierarchical logistic regression with varying coefficients for the within-county intercepts as well as for each individual predictor; (2) a hierarchical model with varying intercepts only; and (3) a nonhierarchical model that ignores the multilevel nature of the data. The regression coefficients have different interpretations for the different models; in contrast, the models can be compared directly using predictive comparisons. Furthermore, predictive comparisons clarify the interplay between the individual and county predictors for the hierarchical models and also illustrate the relative size of varying county effects.     

Increasing User Choice or Privatizing Risk? The Antinomies of Personalization

Within a very short space of time, the concept of personalizationhas come to occupy a central place within dominant social workand adult care discourses within the UK. Through an analysisof one influential model of personalization, this paper willexplore the factors behind the concept’s current popularity.I shall argue that this popularity is due primarily to its congruencewith key themes of New Labour thought, including individualization,responsibilization and the transfer of risk from the state tothe individual. I shall conclude that, given its acceptanceof the marketization of social work and social care, its neglectof issues of poverty and inequality, its flawed conception ofthe people who use social work services, its potentially stigmatizingview of welfare dependency and its potential for promoting,rather than challenging, the deprofessionalization of socialwork, the philosophy of personalization is not one that socialworkers should accept uncritically.