PROFILING: A STRATEGY FOR SUCCESSFUL VOLUNTEER RECRUITMENT IN CREDIT UNIONS

Credit unions are non‐profit financial organisations that provide financial services to their members. They are located in 97 countries across the world. All credit unions are governed by a volunteer board and many are reliant on volunteers for all their labour requirements. However, recruiting volunteers is a problem. The literature on recruitment issues in volunteering in general, suggests that the not‐for‐profit sector looks to the private sector for guidance on recruitment policies and approaches. One such approach which is considered in this paper is ‘market segmentation’ wherein the potential volunteer body is profiled to determine if an individual is likely to volunteer and if they are, to identify the type of role they are most likely to be attracted to. Prior literature on volunteering in non‐profit organisations suggests that certain types of individual (dominant individuals) are more likely to volunteer. This paper investigates whether this dominant status profile is evident amongst volunteers in credit unions in Northern Ireland (NI). The study finds that people with dominant characteristics are more likely to be attracted to volunteering to the board of directors and individuals who have less dominant traits overall should be offered more social/participative type roles. This information can be used by credit union governing boards for volunteer recruitment, retention and management purposes.     

The impact of large-scale employee share ownership plans on labour productivity: the case of Eircom

Large-scale employee share ownership plans (ESOPs) have been a distinctive characteristic of Irish public enterprise reform, with shareholdings of 14.9% being allocated to employees as part of firm restructuring and privatisation programmes. This paper presents a case study analysis of a large-scale ESOP in Eircom, Ireland's former national telecommunications operator. We identify changes in labour productivity (LP) during 8 years before and after the establishment of the company's ESOP and use a framework based on Pierce, Rubenfeld and Morgan (1991, The Academy of Management Review, 16, 121–144) and Pierce, Kostova and Dirks (2001, Academy of Management Review, 26, 298–310) to explore the role played by the ESOP. The ESOP was found to play a key role in enabling firm-level reform through concession bargaining and changes in employee relations, and thereby indirectly affecting LP. However, despite the substantial shareholding and influence of the ESOP, we find that it has failed to create a sense of psychological ownership among employees, and thereby further impact on productivity.     

Investigating productivity change and hospital size: a nonparametric frontier approach

The study obtains measures of the productive efficiency of ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ Northern Ireland hospitals during the 1986–92 pre-Trust period. The measures provide insights into how these hospitals were responding to the pressures for increased efficiency prior to Trust status. They also constitute a useful benchmark for evaluating productivity change under the post-1992 Trust status environment. A nonparametric frontier approach is used to measure productivity change and to decompose this into technical change (or shifts in the best practice frontier) and efficiency change (or change in how far a hospital is from the frontier). The latter change in efficiency is also decomposed into changes in scale efficiency, pure technical efficiency and input congestion. The findings indicate that smaller hospitals, starting from a less efficient base, achieved greater productivity gains than larger hospitals over 1986–92. For smaller hospitals, this was due to progressive shifts in the best practice frontier outweighing a substantial decline in efficiency. This decline was found to be due to a deterioration in scale efficiency over the period. The results overall support the current policy view that larger hospitals are more efficient than smaller hospitals in providing health care services.     

Extrapolation of causal effects – hopes,assumptions, and the extrapolator’s circle

ABSTRACT

I consider recent strategies proposed by econometricians for extrapolating causal effects from experimental to target populations. I argue that these strategies fall prey to the extrapolator’s circle: they require so much knowledge about the target population that the causal effects to be extrapolated can be identified from information about the target alone. I then consider comparative process tracing (CPT) as a potential remedy. Although specifically designed to evade the extrapolator’s circle, I argue that CPT is unlikely to facilitate extrapolation in typical econometrics and evidence-based policy applications. To argue this, I offer a distinction between two kinds of extrapolation, attributive and predictive, the latter being prevalent in econometrics and evidence-based policy. I argue that CPT is not helpful for predictive extrapolation when using the kinds of evidence that econometricians and evidence-based policy researchers prefer. I suggest that econometricians may need to consider qualitative evidence to overcome this problem.     

>Conversion Ratios in Charities in England and Wales: An Investigation of Economies of Scale

This study examines ways in which the scale economies of charities can be measured and investigates the use of conversion ratios as indicators of scale efficiency. Problems and difficulties inherent in the use of these ratios are detailed. The analysis then employs nonparametric tests (Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests), based on the identified conversion ratios, to examine for the existence of scale economies in the operation of the 500 largest fundraising charities in England and Wales. The statistical analysis provides evidence of scale economies and suggests that scale efficiency gains have not as yet been exhausted. The charity sector therefore appears to be characterised by increasing returns to scale with further growth necessary before optimal size, as indicated by constant returns to scale, is achieved.     

Rationalizing Northern Ireland Hospital Services Towards Larger Providers: Best-Practice Efficiency Studies and Current Policy

This article explores the relative efficiency of Northern Ireland hospitals, and in particular the efficiency of small hospitals relative to their large counterparts, employing a technique called data envelopment analysis. The empirical analysis revealed that larger hospitals displayed higher cost efficiency, higher allocative efficiency and higher technical efficiency than their smaller counterparts. These results support Northern Ireland's recent strategy of concentrating hospital services in six large hospitals, supported by medium sized hospitals, and closing or restructuring smaller hospitals.     

Enterprise logic: explaining corporate attention to stakeholders from the ‘inside‐out’

Why are some firms more effective than others at addressing stakeholder concerns? Conventional stakeholder theories focus on variables in the external environment and cannot adequately explain variance across firms operating in the same context. Our matched‐pair study of eight global corporations goes inside the firm and investigates the role of managerial cognition on corporate attention to stakeholders. We find that top management's conceptualization of the firm's relationship with society—which we name enterprise logic—prompts distinct foci of attention and potentially constrains how well a single firm can simultaneously attend to multiple stakeholders. These findings highlight the value of an ‘inside‐out’ perspective, centered on managerial cognition, in explaining why some firms address stakeholder concerns more effectively than their peers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The diversification and financial performance of US credit unions

For US credit unions, revenue from non-interest sources has increased significantly in recent years. We investigate the impact of revenue diversification on financial performance for the period 1993–2004. The impact of a change in strategy that alters the share of non-interest income is decomposed into a direct exposure effect, reflecting the difference between interest and non-interest bearing activities, and an indirect exposure effect which reflects the effect of the institution’s own degree of diversification. On both risk-adjusted and unadjusted returns measures, a positive direct exposure effect is outweighed by a negative indirect exposure effect for all but the largest credit unions. This may imply that similar diversification strategies are not appropriate for large and small credit unions. Small credit unions should eschew diversification and continue to operate as simple savings and loan institutions, while large credit unions should be encouraged to exploit new product opportunities around their core expertise.