Is Stakeholder Corporate Governance Appropriate in Russia?

Journal of Management and Governance - Alternative forms of disciplining the actionsof senior enterprise managers can becharacterized as shareholder or stakeholdergovernance. This paper analyzes...     

Developing creative solutions to the problems of children and their families: communicative reason and the use of forum theatre

The paper represents a further development of work previously reported in this journal by Spratt & Houston (1999) and Spratt et al. (2000) . The authors have sought to develop ways of understanding current social work with children and families in line with the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas. This analysis has been complemented by an adoption of the methodology of the radical dramatist, Augusto Boal. In synthesizing Habermas's analysis of communicative discourses with the consciousness raising methodology of Boal, the authors have already demonstrated the effectiveness of this hybrid in problem‐solving exercises with social workers. The present paper reports on an application of this developing theory to practice, utilizing the centrepiece of Boal's method, forum theatre. A forum theatre project, concerned with the issue of bullying, is described and evaluated. It is argued that the project provides an exemplar of an innovative, democratizing and effective methodology that might profitably be utilized in social work with children and families. Finally, suggestions are made as to how these ideas could be developed in practice.     

Statistics in Management Education

Results of two surveys are presented and indicate the statistical knowledge of past students from Master of Business Administration programmes, their usage of statistics together with their opinions about the statistical content of Master of Business Administration degree courses. These views are contrasted with the results of a second survey of academic staff who teach statistics on such programmes. We find that past students recommend a greater statistical content than is currently taught but, paradoxically, most of the academic staff associated with teaching the subject believe that the statistical content of their programme will decrease in future years.     

Supplier involvement in product development in the electronics industry: A case study

The movement of activities earlier in the product development process requires a re-examination of the total supply network. The objective of this paper is to determine the degree of early supplier involvement (ESI) that exists between a multinational electronics company and its key suppliers, in terms of depth of integration, information exchange and buyer–supplier relationships. The paper provides insights into the strategic factors that affect the dynamics of the ESI process. The research indicates that there are considerable impediments for those participants responsible for establishing and managing the implementation of ESI. A number of strategic insights are identified that explain the existence of the impediments to the ESI process. Finally, based upon the findings a number of lessons are highlighted for organisations considering the adoption of the ESI process.     

Parents' Views on Social Work Interventions in Child Welfare Cases

Correspondence to Trevor Spratt, Lecturer in Social Work, School of Social Work, The Queen's University Belfast, 7 Lennoxvale, Belfast BT9 5BY, Northern Ireland. E-mail: T.Spratt{at}qub.ac.uk Summary This article reports findings from the third part of a three-partresearch project examining the potential for social workersto shift from a child protection to a child welfare orientationin their practice. Whilst social workers in the UK have beenencouraged to make such changes, they have been hampered byconcerns to manage risk. Findings reported from the earlierparts of the project, indicated that there was potential fora substantial proportion of child protection work to be redesignatedas child welfare work, but that where this was achieved in practice,there was evidence of the continued influence of child protectionprocesses as social workers sought to manage the risks inherentin child welfare cases. The study reported here sets out toascertain the views of parents who were subject to child welfareinterventions. The findings indicate that while parents feelapprehension with regard to contact with social workers, inthe majority of cases successful relationships are formed. Itis argued that social workers display considerable skill inmonitoring potential risks whilst engaging with families andthat the subtleties involved in such activity are not capturedby official measures of governance which concentrate on moreabstract indicators of performance.     

A model for collaboration networks giving rise to a power-law distribution with an exponential cutoff

Recently several authors have proposed stochastic evolutionary models for the growth of complex networks that give rise to power-law distributions. These models are based on the notion of preferential attachment leading to the “rich get richer” phenomenon. Despite the generality of the proposed stochastic models, there are still some unexplained phenomena, which may arise due to the limited size of networks such as protein, e-mail, actor and collaboration networks. Such networks may in fact exhibit an exponential cutoff in the power-law scaling, although this cutoff may only be observable in the tail of the distribution for extremely large networks. We propose a modification of the basic stochastic evolutionary model, so that after a node is chosen preferentially, say according to the number of its inlinks, there is a small probability that this node will become inactive. We show that as a result of this modification, by viewing the stochastic process in terms of an urn transfer model, we obtain a power-law distribution with an exponential cutoff. Unlike many other models, the current model can capture instances where the exponent of the distribution is less than or equal to two. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the consistency of our model empirically by analysing the Mathematical Research collaboration network, the distribution of which has been shown to be compatible with a power law with an exponential cutoff.