Selection of individuals to serve on major gift fundraising teams: a study of membership choice criteria

Major gift fundraising (MGF) is a crucial activity for large UK charities and is one that is normally undertaken by teams. This paper examines the criteria that the managements of large charities apply when selecting individuals to serve on MGF teams. It also explores possible connections between team composition and MGF success. A questionnaire exploring this matter was distributed to a sampling frame comprising 500 of the UK's largest fundraising charities, resulting in 151 replies. It emerged that MGF teams which contained people who had been chosen on the basis of their commitment to the MGF function, their communication and relationship nurturing abilities, and their wide‐ranging connections throughout an organisation were reported to perform better than teams that were not deliberately assembled in this way. The more background research was completed into an MGF prospect's circumstances and preferences and the more diverse an MGF team's composition, the higher the probability of success. However, team size did not exert significant effects on performance nor did (i) the personal status of any of a team's members or (contrary to expectations) (ii) the inclusion of individuals who knew a prospect personally. Teams with members who possessed extensive experience of MGF did not perform substantially better than others. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The information revolution,innovation diffusion and economic growth: an examination of causal links in European countries

Quality & Quantity - Over the last 5 decades, the economic landscape in Europe has been transformed rapidly due to innovation, digitisation of the economy, and emergence of new sources of...     

Monetary Policy in a Very Open Economy: Some Major Analytical Issues

This paper develops three considerations relevant to the possibility of modification of the Hong Kong currency board system for conducting monetary/exchange‐rate policy. The first concerns the system employed by Singapore, an economy similar in several ways to Hong Kong's, whereby the exchange rate is adjusted periodically in activist response to inflation and output developments. The second concerns a generalization, one that calls for adjustments of a weighted average of exchange rate and interest rate instruments, so designed to be effective whether the economy is, or is not, in a liquidity‐trap situation. Finally, the third topic concerns political‐economy aspects of policy, which tend to incline against the use of the activist systems.     

The role of trust and contract in the supply of business advice

The use of legal contract and personal trust are compared inthis paper for the relationships between clients and their differentadvisers who supply business advice. Personal trust betweenclient and adviser is found to operate as an exclusive meansto manage relational exchange only for social and family relationships.Using a sample survey of small and medium sized enterprises,results demonstrate that trust and legal contract are most commonlyoverlapping categories. Comparing different types of adviser,the level of trust, extent of legal contract, service intensity,service costs and client impact and satisfaction are each foundto interact. There are major differences between suppliers,but except in the case of social and family relationships toadvisers, higher reliance on trust alone is generally associatedwith lower levels of client impact and satisfaction received.The combination of trust with contract tends to be the routewhich is most associated with higher levels of client impactand satisfaction.     

Is the doctor in? A relational approach to job design and the coordination of work

When designing jobs, the degree of specialization is a key consideration. Though functional specialization allows workers to develop deep areas of expertise, it also increases the challenge of coordinating their work. In this article, we propose the concepts of stage‐ and site‐based specialization and posit that together they can counteract the divisive effects of functional specialization. Taking advantage of a natural experiment in physician job design at a Massachusetts hospital, we explore the impact of stage‐ and site‐based specialization on coordination and performance outcomes. Building on recent interest in relational approaches to job design, this study is the first to link relational job design to relational outcomes such as coordination. Our findings have practical implications for job design in professional service settings such as education, consulting, and health care. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Ethnocentric tendencies amongst arts audiences

• According to empirical research, the most regular consumers of art are well-to-do, well-educated members of the social elite who, as a socio-demographic group, would not be expected to exhibit ethnocentric tendencies. Yet, curators of arts institutions and art critics have long been concerned that ethnocentrism does exist amongst visitors to museums and art galleries. This paper reports the findings of a study that investigated the ethnocentric tendencies of arts audiences in Hungary (where, allegedly, individuals are more inclined to exhibit ethnocentric bias) and England (where the opposite is said to be true). The research examined whether ethnocentrism significantly impacted upon perceptions of artworks from (i) a visitor's own country, (ii) a culturally similar and (iii) a culturally dissimilar country. Intentions to attend art exhibitions featuring artists from these countries were then explored. The empirical analysis confirmed that individuals who exhibited ethnocentric tendencies did in fact overvalue the quality of artworks from their home country. Moreover, ethnocentrism within the Hungarian (but not the English) sample had a significant impact on intentions to visit particular types of exhibition.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Workplace mediation and the empowerment of disputants: rhetoric or reality?

There has been a growing interest in the field of employee relations in the use of mediation in seeking to resolve disputes in the workplace. Mediation is a model of dispute resolution, it is argued, that lends itself particularly well to situations where the parties have become entrenched in their positions. The study's timeliness is evident in the Government's recent strategic focus on workplace conflict, specifically its current initiative to pilot mediation networks within the small and medium enterprises sector. The research was carried out over a nine‐month period ending in March 2012. It is based on the views and experiences of 60 respondents from over 40 cross‐sectoral organisations in the North of England. Findings revealed that the main reasons for the disputes referred for mediation were relationship problems, poor communication and poorly perceived management style and practice. Significantly, differences in sector or occupation could also impact on whether cases went to mediation.     

Government advice networks for SMEs: an assessment of the influence of local context on Business Link use,impact and satisfaction

Business Link in Britain is one of the main recent government initiatives to support SMEs in the EU. The paper uses a 1997 survey of SMEs to determine how Business Link use, impact and satisfaction are influenced by firm characteristics, local partnership characteristics, local geographical context, service intensity and other explanatory variables. The paper presents econometric estimates based on logit and ordered logit models. A key finding of the paper is to demonstrate that local context is not very significant to service use, impact or satisfaction, but local Business Link management and adviser performance are important influences on the impact and satisfaction. Major differences in the way SMEs use government-backed services are also found. There are high volumes of use of ‘gateway’ information services producing only low impact, and low volumes but high impacts and satisfaction with intensive advice services governed by contracts between the clients and the adviser. Implications for the Small Business Service, launched in April 2000, are drawn.     

Multilateral Bargaining Problems

In many situations in economics and political science there are gains from forming coalitions but conflict over which coalition to form and how to distribute the gains. This paper presents an approach to suchmultilateral bargaining problems. Asolutionto a multilateral bargaining problem specifies an agreement for each coalition that is consistent with the bargaining process in every coalition. We establish the existence of such solutions, show that they are determined by reservation prices, and characterize these reservation prices as the payoffs ofsubgame perfect equilibrium outcomesof a non-cooperative bargaining model.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C71, C72, C78.