Management consultancy’s role in delivering lasting [triple bottom line] benefits

Abstract

Management consultants have become ubiquitous in helping improve organizational performance. This paper presents an investigation of the impact of their interventions on organizational sustainability and growth through the performance improvement work carried out for and with their clients. The paper presents the findings of a questionnaire survey of 440 respondents from 206 countries; 197 of respondents were Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and 243 from large organizations. There is a particular focus on knowledge transfer in terms of urgency and impact of the work with regard to the extent to which consulting interventions in SMEs, as well as large multinational corporations, embed long-term sustainability practices.     

THE "ALIENATED" PARTNER: RESPONSES TO TRADITIONAL THERAPIES FOR ADULT SEX ABUSE SURVIVORS

Childhood sexual abuse affects both survivors and partners; however, the common therapy modalities for survivors (individual and individual group therapy exclude their partners. In-depth interviews with the husbands of survivors were used to examine partner issues around the survivor's therapy. Several thems, both positive and negative, emerged from the qualitative analysis of the in-depth interviews. The authors suggest that therapists should consider integration conjoint couple therapy as an adjunct to, not a replacement for the traditional modalities of individual and individual group therapy for adult survivors.     

Union militancy among public employees: A public choice hypothesis

Public employee union membership has grown from under 6 percent to over 20 percent of all union members since 1963. This growth has been ascribed to lagging wages, inelastic demands for public products, political clout, changed laws, and reduced professionalism and public spiritedness. These explanations agree that public employees now confront their employers in a newly militant and adversarial mode. We disagree. We model this growth in membership as a continuation of old public employment relations and forecast the soon diminution of militancy.     

Dissemination to research subjects: operationalizing investigator accountability

Recent articles have argued from principles of bioethics for the right of research subjects to receive the results of the studies in which they have participated. We argue that accountability is a powerful tool of meso-level analysis appropriate to reasoning about answerability in research ethics, and that it captures the responsibility of researchers to disseminate study results to research subjects. We offer the following features of the research situation as relevant to the manner of dissemination to study subject, in addition to factors already proposed in the literature (risk and impact on health outcome): (a) features of the research subject in relation to identity, personal investment, disease, and community; (b) characteristics of the research study and field of inquiry in relation to certainty and significance; and (c) relationships among the research subjects and the healthcare workers involved in their care and in the research.     

Under One Roof: A Review of Research on Intergenerational Coresidence and Multigenerational Households in the United States

What motivates adult children, parents, and even grandchildren to live together? To answer this question, we review the sociological and social gerontological research on multigenerational households and families. We first provide a snapshot of multigenerational coresidence in the US and then discuss the primary theoretical perspectives used to explain these patterns: exchange theory, altruism, and norms and obligations. Structural conditions including economic crises tend to facilitate adult children moving in with parents (often with dependent children in tow), while spousal loss and declining health act as catalysts for parents moving in with adult children. Furthermore, economic struggles often facilitate the formation of grandparent-headed families where the middle generation parents may or may not be present. We suggest that the current economic recession and housing crises will have profound effects on multigenerational households and may also encourage more coresidence. Changes in social welfare policies, increases in coresident grandparenting, and changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the US also have implications for multigenerational households’ economic and social security.     

Longitudinal Trends of Religious Groups in Deregulated Taiwan: 1990 to 2009

Religious economies theory predicts that in a deregulated religious market, well‐organized religions will thrive, and loosely organized religions will struggle and decline in membership. This research (1) tests this hypothesis with representative sample data from Taiwan between 1990 and 2009; (2) contrary to religious economies theory, finds significant growth of folk religion in Taiwan; and (3) highlights the growth of religious commitment among Taiwanese Buddhism—evidenced by a decrease in the overall number of Buddhist adherents and an increase in the proportion of Buddhists who are formal converts. Additionally, neither significant growth in congregational religion nor organized, sectarian folk religion is detected in the analysis.     

Would rethinking learning disabilities benefit Kuwait?

Learning disabilities education in Kuwait grew from Kuwaiti’s wholesale importation of the Western, medical model of disability – a model basically incompatible with Kuwaiti culture. Conflicting factors include its problematic normal/abnormal binary, its assumption that the ‘deficit’ is located in the student and the segregation of students by label. As proponents of disability studies we investigate whether, and if so how, Arab educators at Kuwait’s only learning disabilities school talk about this incompatibility. Through focus group and individual, in‐depth conversational interviews we found that they acknowledged this tension, but that they dealt with it in more complex ways than we had anticipated: by compartmentalizing, accepting the imported model as the only alternative to overcrowded public education and subjugating their experiential awareness to that of the Western scientific model.