The NFC buy-out—A new form of industrial enterprise

When the Conservative Government's plans for floating the National Freight Company, Britain's biggest road freight business, on the Stock Exchange were delayed by economic factors, senior management in the business put together a scheme to buy NFC. In what became Britain's largest employee buy-out, with over 10,000 employees and pensioners putting up £6·187m of the purchase price, a new form of industrial enterprise was created. In this article Sir Peter Thompson, leader of the buy-out team and now Chairman of the National Freight Consortium plc, describes the background to the buy-out, the complex financial, legal and communications activities involved, and the way in which employee-involvement has become an integral part of the operation of what has proved to be a commercially successful business providing exceptional returns on investment.     

The effect of unionization on labor productivity: Some time-series evidence

This paper presents evidence concerning the effect of unionization on the average productivity of labor using time-series data from the private, domestic sector of the U.S. economy over the 1948–73 period. Aggregate technology is specified by a constant-returns-to-scale, Cobb-Douglas production function which incorporates union and nonunion labor and proxies for both embodied and disembodied technical change. Maximum likelihood estimates of the model indicate that union membership significantly decreased average labor productivity, holding constant the quality and mix of capital and labor and controlling for cyclical effects. I thank John Addison, Maxim Engers, Barry Hirsch, William Johnson, Duane Leigh, Roger Sherman, and Jonathan Skinner for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Of course, responsibility for remaining errors is mine.     

Linking Community Context to Quality of Parenting: A Study of Rural Families1

Abstract Virtually all past studies of the effect of community context on families and children have focused on large metropolitan communities. Using a sample of divorced women living in small, Midwestern communities, the present study tests a model of the processes whereby community structure influences parenting practices. Results obtained through structural equation modeling supported the hypotheses. High concentrations of disadvantaged people within a community were indirectly related to parenting through community social disorganization. Community social disorganization had a direct effect on quality of parenting, as well as indirect effects through negative events, access to social support, and depressed mood. The various methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are considered.     

Accountability in organizational life: Problem or opportunity for nonprofits?

This article reviews the notion of accountability as an intrinsic experience in daily organizational life and contrasts it with the more traditional construct of accountability as an external control or monitoring device. The concept of “felt responsibility” can provide an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. Both research and the author's field experiences in nonprofit settings suggest how nonprofit leaders and managers can use felt responsibility to help individuals act with accountability to themselves and to others. The concept of “conversation for accountability” poses a pragmatic opportunity for nonprofits in particular to turn the current environment of finger pointing and aggressive monitoring into an enabling organizational practice that benefits both nonprofit members and their clients or constituencies.     

The effect of unionization on labor productivity: Some additional evidence

Following Brown and Medoff (1978), a number of studies have investigated the effect of unionization on labor productivity using a log-linear, Cobb-Douglas model of technology. To derive this model, a first-order Taylor-series approximation to the intrinsically nonlinear unionization variable is made; the resulting linear equation is estimated with generalized least-squares (GLS) techniques. We demonstrate that this approximation introduces a bias that necessarily results in an overstatement of the absolute value of the exact union productivity effect. We illustrate the magnitude of this bias by comparing GLS estimates of the linear Brown-Medoff model with GLS estimates of the exact, nonlinear relationship, using aggregate time-series data from the private domestic sector of the U.S. economy.     

Funding source,board involvement techniques,and financial vulnerability in nonprofit organizations: A test of resource dependence

The study examined here tested a resource dependence view of the organization on a sample of nonprofit social service agencies. Results indicated that CEOs of privately funded nonprofit agencies were more likely to use board involvement techniques than CEOs of government‐funded or commercially supported organizations. In addition, privately funded agencies were less vulnerable to economic shock than government or commercially funded agencies, and funding source explained incremental variance in board involvement and vulnerability beyond characteristics of the organization and board. These results provide support for assertions of resource dependence theory and suggest that a CEO's strategic engagement with an organization's board depends in part on the nature and concentration of the organization's resources.