The Good, the Bad, and the Social: On Living as an Answerable Agent

This article describes answerability, a fundamental component of social reason and action. "Holding answerable" and "being answerable" are characterized in terms of their roles in the drama of human relations, and our general tendency to anticipate answerable, rather than ethical, behavior in situations that are ethically problematic is discussed.     

Youth Unemployed—Observations on the Community Youth Support Scheme

Tasmanian CYSS experience reveals the centres are predominantly attended by single young males with minimal educational and employment qualifications. This group also revealed evidence of childhood adversity and current domestic problems. The CYSS project was often considered of doubtful value in procuring a job but nevertheless the centres seem to provide valuable social contact and emotional support. There was less evidence of psychological malaise. Whilst CYSS projects are prohibited from searching for employment, counselling and the selling of goods produced by the centre, in fact, the centres often evade these prohibitions.     

Divorced Mothers and Higher Education in Utah

Drawing on human capital theory and role strain theory, we analyzed survey responses from 133 divorced mothers in Utah and in-depth interviews with a subsample of mothers to examine investment in higher education. In models predictive of postdivorce college degree attainment, having a college educated parent was the strongest predictor of receiving a college degree. Computer skills and student loans were also associated with completing college. In modeling the relationship between college degree (associate or bachelor) and employment income, only completion of a 4-year degree was predictive of increased future income. Drawing from both survey data and in-depth interviews, we found that increased income, personal improvement, and career advancement were the primary reasons given for pursuing higher education. In contrast, the role strain from fulfilling multiple roles as a single parent and the need for career counseling were the primary barriers to investing in higher education.     

Corporate eLearning: Human resource development implications for large and small organizations

Abstract

This paper compares and contrasts the current attitudes towards, awareness of and take-up of eLearning in large and small organizations and outlines the implications for human resource development (HRD) professionals. An in-depth study was conducted in Ireland with a number of large multinational organizations and a number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the engineering, electronics, aerospace, pharmaceutical and medical device sectors. The study focused on awareness, perceptions, technology support infrastructure, current and planned involvement, most frequent and most preferred methods of delivery, benefits, barriers, the motivational factors and overall attitudes to eLearning. The comparison describes a number of similarities and a number of differences both within the large organization sector and within the SME sector and between the two sectors. Finally, the implications for HRD professionals are discussed.     

Book Review: Zhao LiQing and Carolyn Iyoya Irving (eds.), The Non-Profit Sector and Development,Hong Kong Press for Social Sciences,Hong Kong, 2001, 368 pp.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Evaluating the products of alternative sampling methods

While theoretical work in survey sampling has offered the promise that selection procedures based on probabilities proportional to size would produce subgroups for surveys as efficiently as oversampling, there were fewer expectations that the two methods would produce comparable products. This research reports the results of an experiment conducted within the 1982 General Social Survey (GSS), which compares two subsamples of blacks (N=510). The multivariate normal distributions of the oversample and the black probability sample are demonstrated to be statistically similar. This similarity extends to subsets of demographic and substantive variables, and to most individual variables as well. For survey directors, these results imply that the choice between oversampling and pps methodologies used for locating population subgroups should depend more on the relative costs/efficiencies involved, than on concerns over product quality. More generally, these results mean that all of the blacks in the 1982 GSS may be combined and treated as a single, national probability sample of the American black population.     

Relationships among the academic business disciplines: a multi-method citation analysis

A great number of papers have been published that compare the quality or impact of academic journals. This article seeks to broaden the debate on journal evaluation by showing how top journals in various academic business disciplines, as defined by the Financial Times list of top research outlets, relate to one other. Using large-scale sociometric analyses on about 140,000 citations we found that the integration of the citation network has increased over time. Moreover, the information flow from Finance and Economics to Management has become stronger and, within Management, a polarization between information generators and users has taken place. We also found that most business academics published in distinct and mostly non-overlapping disciplines. The only exceptions were Finance and Economics as well as Strategic Management and OB/HR. Surprisingly, we also found that the general business journals, which could be assumed to be cited by most other journals across the management disciplines, are not central to the entire field. For instance, they are not complementary at all to Finance and Economics. Instead, Operations Research (OR) and Management Information Systems journals occupy the central space on the perceptual map. This indicates that these disciplines (and OR in particular) are complementary with Management and with Finance and Economics.