Child center closures: Does nonprofit status provide a comparative advantage?

Reliable access to dependable, high quality childcare services is a vital concern for large numbers of American families. The childcare industry consists of private nonprofit, private for-profit, and governmental providers that differ along many dimensions, including quality, clientele served, and organizational stability. Nonprofit providers are theorized to provide higher quality services given comparative tax advantages, higher levels of consumer trust, and management by mission driven entrepreneurs. This study examines the influence of ownership structure, defined as nonprofit, for-profit sole proprietors, for-profit companies, and governmental centers, on organizational instability, defined as childcare center closures. Using a cross sectional data set of 15724 childcare licenses in California for 2007, we model the predicted closures of childcare centers as a function of ownership structure as well as center age and capacity. Findings indicate that for small centers (capacity of 30 or less) nonprofits are more likely to close, but for larger centers (capacity 30 +) nonprofits are less likely to close. This suggests that the comparative advantages available for nonprofit organizations may be better utilized by larger centers than by small centers. We consider the implications of our findings for parents, practitioners, and social policy.     

Social Capital or Social Cohesion: What Matters For Subjective Well-Being?

The theoretical analysis of the concepts of social capital and of social cohesion shows that social capital should be considered as a micro concept whereas social cohesion, being a broader concept than social capital, is a more appropriate concept for macro analysis. Therefore, we suggest that data on the individual level should only be used to analyze the relationship between social capital, social cohesion indicators and subjective well-being and that they do not allow commenting on the level of social cohesion in a society. For this last type of analyses aggregated indicators of social cohesion have to be computed which is not the issue of this paper. Our empirical analysis is based on individual data for Luxembourg in 2008. In general, our results suggest that investments in social capital generate monetary returns (increased income) and psychic returns (increased subjective well-being) even in a highly developed and multicultural country like Luxembourg. When we are adding on the micro level variables representing the economic domain of social cohesion following Bernard (1999), then we observe that this domain also has an effect on income and on subjective well-being. Therefore, we recommend including the economic domain in any future analysis using the concept of social cohesion.     

The governance of strategic networks: how do different configurations influence the performance of member firms?

Journal of Management and Governance - The purpose of this paper is to analyze how different configurations of network governance influence the performance of member firms. To achieve this...     

Modified S-charts for controlling process variability

To help in the detection of variance increases and decreases, three modified versions of traditional Shewhart S-charts are evaluated in terms of their average run length values. One scheme uses control limits based on equal tail chi-square distribution probabilities. The second uses control limits based on unequal tail probabilities. The third uses warning limits based on equal tail probabilities, but requires two successive points beyond the warning limit to give an out-of-control signal. They all result in better average run length values than the traditional S-chart. Also, if the only concern is the detection of variance increases, then both S-charts and warning limit charts without lower control limits are shown to have better average run length values than those of the traditional charts.     

The Eternal Triangle: Sixty Years of the Centre–Periphery Relationship in the National Health Service

The history of the National Health Service in England is marked by a paradox. Even while successive governments used the rhetoric of power to the periphery, the exhort‐and‐hope system of 1948 was transformed into a command‐and‐control system over the next 60 years. The contrast between rhetorical aspirations and policy trajectory can be traced back, this article argues, to a debate in the 1945 Cabinet about the design of the NHS: a debate which set out the tension between three policy goals – equity, efficiency and democracy. The pursuit of equity and efficiency (variously defined) has provided the rationale for centralization, at the expense of democracy seen as control by elected local bodies. The major change over time has been less in central government's policy ambitions than in its administrative capacity. New organizational structures and managerial techniques made it possible to exploit opportunities created by information technology.     

The resentful undergrowth of nostalgia: Ontological insecurity,relative deprivation and powerlessness

This article untangles competing conceptualisations of nostalgia and identifies a specific form of collective-restorative nostalgia as politically significant. We argue that the link between resentment and this type of nostalgia emerges from their joint critique of the socio-political realities of the present. Nostalgia provides spatial and temporal orientations for a group's experiences of resentment through highly selective recollections of the heartland and an idealised golden age. We hypothesize that nostalgia leverages the heartland and the golden age to formulate claims for recognition and restored status on behalf of those who feel left behind by late modernity. Next, the article uses structural equation modelling and the 2019 Belgian National Election Study to reveal how resentment (consisting of ontological insecurity, group relative deprivation, and powerlessness) mediates between structural characteristics and nostalgia. Our findings suggest that each component of resentment individually contributes to explaining the nostalgia of less educated and economically deprived individuals.     

A Model for the Transportation of Hazardous Waste*

Many decision problems, such as the transportation of hazardous waste, can be modeled by networks. However, due to the imprecise nature of much of the information decision makers have available, it is sometimes difficult to determine a best approach to the problem. To alleviate this problem, a network model that combines both precise and imprecise information is presented for the transportation of hazardous waste. The properties of the network model are investigated and solution procedures are presented.