Bank Loan Officers' Perceptions of Business Owners: The Role of Gender

There is a widely held belief that banks may be discriminating against female business owners. This study was designed to explore the perceptions held by bank loan officers of male and female business owners, using Bourdieu's theory of practice and Kelly's personal construct methodology. The research literature might lead to an expectation that the characteristics of the business owners would be relatively homogenous but that men and women business owners would be construed differently (for example women might be seen to lack drive). However, the results demonstrate heterogeneity in the constructs held by bank loan officers, and a particular concern with the character of the business owner. Significant gender differences were observed in only 20 of the 325 constructs elicited from 35 bank loan officers. Female bank loan officers were as likely as male bank loan officers to draw gender distinctions between business owners. Detailed multivariate analyses confirmed no evidence of systematic gender differences in the constructs held by bank loan officers of business owners.     

The trouble with foster care: the impact of stressful 'events' on foster carers

Summary The article draws on the first stages of a large-scale longitudinalstudy into foster care with 'looked after' children. It usesdata supplied by 950 foster carers in response to a postal questionnairedesigned to document the proportions who had experienced oneor more of six potentially stressful 'events': breakdowns ordisruptions, allegations, relationship with birth parents, familytensions, 'tug of love' cases, and other disagreements withsocial services. The article uses carers' comments to describetheir reaction to the 'events'. It then examines the relationshipbetween the 'events' and measures of carer stress, satisfactionwith fostering, and intentions to continue fostering. Overall,two-thirds of the sample had experienced one or more of these'events' and these were associated with a measure of mentalill-health and with attitudes towards continuing fostering.     

Futures forecasting for strategic planning at general electric

Without in any way denying that there are forces for stability, I want to state, as strongly as I can, my conviction that change is now more rapid, more complex and more pervasive than ever before in human history. There are forces loose in the world, particularly in the ‘post-industrial society’ of the United States, that go far beyond the youth movement in creating change. As a result, it is utterly unrealistic to pretend that business can continue to plan its strategies in the traditional mode.     

A Strange Kind of Science: Making Sense of the Millennium Villages Project

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are often critiqued as a strategy of social engineering. This analysis would seem to be supported by the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), the world's leading programme for the achievement of the MDGs. At the level of its discursive articulation, the MVP appears as a scientific ‘proof of concept’ for the comprehensive engineering of neoliberal social orders. But its evaluation methodology has been widely criticised for a lack of scientific rigour, and field research that I conducted in the Ruhiira Millennium Village in Uganda in 2013 revealed serious problems of implementation. I argue that the MVP is better understood not as a strategy of social engineering but as the staging of a social fantasy in which the constitutive antagonisms of capitalist development are concealed. In this fantasy space, the MDGs function to fill the gap between the promise of development and the impossibility of capitalism without poverty.     

Verbal and Nonverbal Dynamics of Privacy, Secrecy, and Deceit

We discuss the ways in which deception can be used to protect privacy, as well as the ways in which claims to privacy can provide the latitude to lie. In their attempts to maintain their own privacy and their secrets, people can be assisted by others who overlook their lies. Habits of honoring other people's verbal and nonverbal claims about themselves, even when they are not totally convincing, and expectations of similar indulgences from others can keep interactions from getting derailed by small interpersonal bumps. But they also enable exploitation in the form of frauds and scams .     

Human Service organizations: an Australian perspective

Theoretical models or frameworks of change in human service organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, must adapt to the changing circumstances faced by such organizations in the later 1980s and 1990s. Too often change no longer means innovation initiated from within a service organization in order to improve service to its clients, but rather change engendered or enforced from outside the organization which may have uncertain or adverse implications for clients, target groups, or staff. Major changes may have to be implemented within tight time limits and in situations of high intra- and inter-organizational conflict. In such situations, sequential models of organizational change based upon a rational problem solving process, developed during the more favourable era of the 1970s, may be of limited use. A complementary framework for analysis and action planning can be built upon four dimensions of change identified here as rational-empirical, social-systems, power-politics and values-vision. These dimensions offer a comprehensive framework for understanding and intervening in various aspects of the change process, such as assessing the forces for and against change, preparing an organization for change, building up a change system, selecting change strategies, and evaluating a change process. Such a framework can be useful to those seeking to influence change in various alternative directions.