Corporate Volunteering: Benefits and Challenges for Nonprofits

In the frame of corporate social responsibility, corporate volunteering is almost exclusively studied from the point of view of companies, while the perspectives of nonprofit organizations are neglected. Hence, this article focuses on the perspective of managers of nonprofit organizations on volunteer partnership projects with for‐profit companies. In the center of this article lie nonprofit managers' strategy and motivation for participating in corporate volunteering, conception of corporate volunteer activities, and the often‐cited win‐win‐win aspect. Key findings suggest that a majority of the questioned nonprofits lack strategic behavior and management tools for undertaking volunteer partnership projects with companies. Nevertheless, corporate volunteering is widely perceived as an opportunity and a promising method of raising donations for nonprofit organizations. This article suggests that the key to successful future cooperation between nonprofits and profit‐oriented organizations lies in the processes of internal evaluation and subsequent strategy development.     

The Militarization of Opulence

This article investigates the processes through which a site, thought to encapsulate the history of the Cyprus conflict, has been militarized in multiple ways. Defined as a site of negotiation since its opening, Ledra Palace Hotel has instead been a place where conflict has diachronically persisted. The masculinization and militarization of this environment is addressed within a gender-focused analysis that emphasizes the normalization of violence. This approach reveals the political potential of acknowledging conflict dynamics hitherto obfuscated by hegemonic conceptualizations of ‘the conflict’.     

Implementation of Active User Principle: Learning from the Czech Social Services Reform

ABSTRACT

The active user principle introduced in Czech social services by the new Act on Social Services (2007) was expected to induce change of the prevalent paternalistic nature of social service provision. This study examines the relationship between clients and social service workers in social service facilities designed for people without shelter. From 2001 to 2008, instrumental case studies were examined from three different shelter facilities using qualitative interviews (with 17 members of staff) and document analysis. The findings indicated that neither the frontline workers nor the managers could always understand how to implement this principle. Response patterns and the effect it had on recipients are examined. These findings imply that such a profound change needs to be supported with proper explanation, professional training, and practical application skills. Directions for further application and future research are suggested.     

Longitudinal Test of a Multiple Domain Model of Adolescent Condom Use

A comprehensive multiple domain model (MDM) to understand condom use in adolescents was proposed and tested using structural equation modeling of data at three time points. The proposed model integrates social psychological theory, demographic and personality factors, social environment, and situational/contextual variables. Adolescents who were sexually active at time 2 (6 months after baseline) and time 3 (1 year after time 2) and completed surveys at all three time points were included in the analyses (N = 511). An iterative process of model testing resulted in a structural equation model that provided a good fit to the data (CFI = .92, RMSEA = .04). Models comparing gender and race as moderators also were calculated and supported the generalizability of the model. Results provide support for an MDM that goes beyond traditional social psychological models for a broader understanding of condom use in adolescents. Implications for further theory testing and safer sexual interventions are discussed.     

Policy experiment in Russia: cash-for-babies and fertility change

Population decline in modern day Russia is alarmingly steep: Russia loses approximately 750 thousand people each year. To combat population decline, the Russian government instituted aggressive pro-natalist policies. The paper evaluates the capacity of new policies to change women's reproductive behavior using a socio-institutionalist theoretical framework, which analyzes the gendered interaction between the states, the labor market, and family. The paper arrives to a disappointing conclusion that while efforts to improve fertility are quite aggressive, new policies do not challenge gendered hierarchies neither in public nor in private spheres, which will further depress fertility rates of Russian women.     

On Measuring Segregation in a Multigroup Context: Standardized Versus Unstandardized Indices

Social Indicators Research - There has been little discussion about the consequences of using standardized, rather than unstandardized, segregation measures when comparing societies with different...     

Stability of a characterization by the identical distribution of linear forms

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have during the last decade become a widely spread tool for modelling sequences of dependent random variables. Inference for HMMs has been considered by several authors, but so far no work has been done on estimating their order. In this paper we propose a penalized likelihood estimator for this purpose. This estimator is based on the m-dimensional distribution of HMM, and it is shown that in the limit it does not underestimate the order.     

The roles of prior catchability assumptions and sample features on bayes estimates of the number of classes in a population

The object of this paper is to explain the role played by the catchability and sampling in the Bayesian estimation of k, the unknown number of classes in a multinomial population. It is shown that the posterior distribution of k increases as the capture probabilities of the classes become more unequal, and that the posterior distribution of k increases with the number of classes observed in the sample and decreases with the sample size. Moreover, it is shown that the posterior mean of k is consistent.