Managing ambiguity: merger activity in the nonprofit housing sector

Merger behaviour in the nonprofit sector has been relatively neglected, yet has considerable marketing implications. This paper draws on a range of sources to explore the nature of merger activity in the nonprofit housing industry. It locates mergers within debates about inter-organisational strategies, and explores the context, extent, motivations for and regulation of mergers in the housing industry. While there are many similarities in environmental stimuli to and processes of negotiating mergers between the profit-distributing and nonprofit sectors, there are some distinctive features. This research explores the ambiguous nature of the merger activity among housing organisations. This ambiguity infects the terminology and record-keeping systems and helps to explain a significant gap between rhetoric and activity. Such ambiguity may be more than a negotiating strategy. It may represent the attempt to manage conflicting pressures to market nonprofit organisations as ‘sensitively serving the needs of society’ by on the one hand being competitive and efficient while on the other remaining value based and locally accountable. Copyright © 1999 Henry Stewart Publications     

China's One‐Child Policy: Some Unintended Consequences

This paper gives a brief overview of China's family planning policy which, although recently relaxed, still controls a large swath of the population. Unofficially known as the ‘one‐child policy’, it resulted from the social strife of the 1970s coupled with a Malthusian pessimism concerning the capability of the still largely closed and isolated Chinese economy to care for itself. We discuss the motivations for the policy, the unfortunate demographic future that it will create, and some policy reforms that can be undertaken today.     

A review of job embeddedness: Conceptual,measurement issues,and directions for future research

Job embeddedness (JE) theory is a relatively new perspective in turnover research. Although theoretical and empirical implications are encouraging, the construct of JE is still under development. In this paper, we identify five conceptualization and measurement issues warranting additional discussion and research. These are: (1) the composite measure vs. the global measure, (2) conceptual and measurement problems of community embeddedness, (3) conceptual and measurement problems associated with links, (4) discriminant validity issues and (5) the cultural boundaries of JE. For each issue, we discuss our concerns and suggest future research directions.