Measuring childhood materialism: Refining and validating Schor's Consumer Involvement Scale

This paper examines the measurement of childhood materialism using Schor's ( 2004 ) Consumer Involvement Scale. Schor treated consumer involvement empirically as a unidimensional construct, though she suggested that conceptually it may be multidimensional. Using confirmatory factor analysis procedures on data collected from children in the U.S. and U.K., the psychometric superiority of a three‐factor structure is established, comprising dissatisfaction, consumer orientation, and brand awareness components. Additional analyses demonstrate distinct associations between each of these components and other constructs, including self‐esteem, outside school activities, and child–parent relations. The scale's generalizability across boys and girls is also confirmed. The results suggest that Schor's Consumer Involvement Scale will be useful for researchers interested in studying the important topic of materialism in children. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

MULTILEVEL FRAMING: AN ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF BUDGET CONTROL IN PUBLIC ENTERPRISES

This paper addresses the question as to why there tends to be recurring budget deviations in public sector service organizations. In the public sector, budgets and actuals are loosely coupled, and budgets may serve other institutional functions than control purposes. However, little research has addressed how the framing of budget information may explain the different functions of the budgets as control devices. The paper argues that the valence of budget deviations varies between organizations, and that organizations that have a positively oriented valence towards budget surpluses have a propensity to underspend the budgets. Consequently, organizations that have a positively oriented valence towards budget deficits tend to overspend the budgets. The empirical part analyses the budget situations in the Central Bank of Norway and in a large university hospital in Norway. In the case of the Bank, it was found that underspending of budgets was framed as performance measures indicating high organizational efficiency. The Hospital, on the other hand, showed a different picture as budget deficits were the situation during all years studied. One main finding was the key actors’ roles as translators of the society's expectations as to the fulfilling of the organizations’ missions. These translators function as mediators between the institutional context and pressures, the organizations’ goals and the internal budget processes. The conventional wisdom that the budget also acts as a means of communication and as symbols and ritual acts that reflect the institutional contingencies of the organizations, is further developed by describing how organizations’ goals valence the role of budgets.