The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between governance characteristics of a sample of 200 UK non-profit organisations (NPOs) and their performance, considered as their ability to collect financial resources. Using a regression analysis, we verify strong positive relationships between the NPOs’ financial performance and CEO duality and board size. Further analyses show that if the charities increase their level of accountability through the use of additional voluntary disclosure mechanisms and tools such as the use of social networks, these relationships are confirmed. The results of our research have implications for policy makers that seek to strengthen governance of NPOs, and for boards and managers of NPOs who wish to develop their organisations’ performance.

This qualitative study explores how contemporary US managers and non-managerial employees in the metropolitan region of Atlanta, Georgia behaviorally differentiate effective managers from ineffective ones. We collected from 81 research participants 381 critical incidents (CIs) of observed effective and ineffective managerial behavior. These CIs were subjected to open, axial and selective coding which resulted in the emergence of 10 effective and 13 ineffective behavioral indicators of perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness. The findings could be valuable to managers seeking to make better decisions about how best to behaviorally manage and lead US employees in the 21st century.

There is little academic research in relation to mentoring, learning and women, particularly in the male dominated organisational context of the UK Police. Currently, there is a Home Office drive to address inequality with the UK Police with a number of initiatives proposed including mentoring interventions, flexible working arrangements and positive action recruitment initiatives. The purpose of this study is to investigate what policewomen mentees and mentors perceive they are learning through formal mentoring over time and how this makes a difference for them in the workplace. This will provide insights into whether Government investment in formal mentoring is the right intervention to help create a more gender reflective, more equal workforce, in the Police. This study takes a critical realist position and an interpretivist theoretical perspective investigating a single case study organisation. Key themes, spread across the four phases of the mentoring lifecycle were explored through 68 semi-structured interviews and four focus groups. Key findings have been uncovered in relation to learning outcomes for these police women, both as mentees and mentors. It was found that mentoring added value across all four learning domains (cognitive, skills, affective-related and social networks) and that the largest number of responses over time, were in relation to the affective-related domain, particularly building self-confidence. These findings are significant as they demonstrate that formal mentoring programmes can support and empower women within the specific workplace of the UK Police. In conclusion, if women are being precluded from breaking the ‘glass labyrinth’ due to lack of knowledge, opportunity and networks to progress within this context, then mentoring could be part of this solution. If the masculine organisational culture is also creating prejudice and obstacles for women in the workplace (the ‘concrete floor’), then mentoring might be one way towards breaking down these barriers. Also, if all (or some) of these factors are contributing to women’s lower self-confidence levels and the ‘sticky floor’ syndrome, then again the findings suggest that mentoring may be part of the solution towards empowering women beyond their current role. It is hoped that these insights will impact the emphasis put on the various Home Office recommendations and the initiatives offered by different Police forces. It is also hoped that these insights will have implications for other organisations who are considering investing in mentoring interventions, for similar groups or beyond.

Purpose: This study proposes a solution to the challenges of Professional Service Firms (PSF), which are referred to as cat herding, opaque quality and lack of process standardization. These result from misalignment in the mental pictures that managers, employees and customers have of the service. The study demonstrates how the process of articulating a shared service concept reduces these challenges. Methodology: A narrative methodology is used to analyze the perspectives of old management, new management and employees during organizational change in a PSF–a website design company growing to offer full-service branding. Group narratives are constructed using longitudinal data gathered through interviews and fieldwork, in order to compare the misaligned mental pictures and show the benefits of articulating the service concept. Findings: Professional employees view growth and change as threats to their culture and practice, particularly when new management seeks to standardize processes. These threats are revealed to stem from misinterpretations caused by miscommunication of intentions and lack of participation in decision making. Articulating a shared service concept helps to align understanding and return the firm to equilibrium. Research Limitations: The narrative methodology helps unpack conflicting perspectives, but is open to claims of subjectivity and misrepresentation. To ensure fairness and trustworthiness, informants were invited to review and approve the narratives. Originality: The study contributes propositions related to the value of articulating a shared service.

There were only three decades in British history when it was the norm for patients to pay the hospital; those between the end of the First World War and the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. At a time when payment is claiming a greater place than ever before within the NHS, this book uses a case study of the wealthy southern city of Bristol as the starting point for the first in-depth investigation of the workings, scale and meaning of payment in British hospitals before the NHS. Payment and philanthropy in British healthcare, 1918-48 questions what it meant to be asked to contribute financially to the hospital by the medical social worker, known then as the Lady Almoner, or to subscribe to a pseudo-insurance hospital contributory scheme. It challenges the false assumption that middle-class paying patients crowded out the sick poor. Hopes and fears, at the time and since, that this would have an empowering or democratising effect or that commercial medicine would bring about the end of medical charity, were all wide of the mark. In fact, payment and philanthropy found a surprisingly traditional accommodation, which ensured the rise of universal healthcare was mitigated and mediated by long-standing class distinctions while financial contribution became a new marker of good citizenship. Anyone interested in these changing notions of citizenship, charity and money, as well as the hospital as a social institution within the community in early twentieth-century Britain, will find this book a valuable companion.

This paper examines the relationship between internal flexibility, the employment of fixed-term contract workers and productivity in 27 European Union countries. Drawing on European Company Survey data, the paper assesses whether establishments that employ on a fixed-term basis experience higher productivity than their competitors and stronger labour productivity improvements over time. These issues are of importance, given the recent weakness of productivity growth in many EU member countries, the steps that governments have taken to relax rules relating to the employment of fixed-term workers, and the emphasis placed on contractual flexibility within the European Commission's flexicurity agenda. The paper finds that establishments that do not use fixed-term contracts enjoy productivity advantages over those that do. Establishments that employ on a fixed-term basis but retain workers once their fixed-term contract has expired perform better than those that do not retain workers. The findings also show that establishments that pursue internal flexibility report both higher productivity than competitors and productivity increases over time. In addition, they are more likely to retain workers who have reached the end of a fixed-term contract.

Works discussing the experience of combatants, based on their writings or on oral testimony, are a well-established genre of military history. However, it is rare to find authors explicitly analysing the various influences that shaped the soldier’s experience in any era. This article, which forms part of a wider study of British and Dominion soldiers in the two world wars, attempts to fill this gap by using the Gallipoli campaign as a vehicle to examine some of the factors that shaped the experience of British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers that served at the Dardanelles. Here, ‘experience’ is defined as ‘the process or an instance of undergoing and being affected by an event or a series of connected events’. Such an exploration helps to reveal the extent to which individuals in war have ‘agency’, the ability to determine their own fate, or are limited by external factors (in sociological terms, ‘structural constraints’). Such external factors could stem from apparently trivial things, which nevertheless determined a man’s fate. In September 1914 Philip Ibbetson and his mate Jack tried to join the Royal Australian Navy in Brisbane, but Jack was rejected because of hammer toes. Both men then enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), which was evidently less fussy about recruits’ feet. They eventually found themselves at Gallipoli, rather than experiencing a rather different war at sea. In their case, agency was noticeably absent.

On 14 April 1931, Constable E.R. Trask wrote a report which began: ‘I respectfully report that acting on instructions received, I attended a Communist Meeting, which was held in the Communist hall.’ 1 He carefully noted the names of all those who attended whom he believed to be communists. This typified police practice at that time. In other words, identification and surveillance of suspected or known communists in meetings, on demonstrations and in other settings, dominated political policing long before the Cold War. For the New Zealand Police Force, anti-communism was an organising worldview with communist influence their general explanation for any radical activity. This article examines how New Zealand police officers understood dissent among unemployed workers in the 1930s and during the 1951 waterfront dispute, and concludes that continuity in political policing prevailed, despite the momentous events of World War Two and the early Cold War years which intervened. It argues that policing methodology is a form of social knowledge, so that the words in the written police archives need to be seen in the broader perspective of surveillance as a knowledge system into which new constables were socialised. For example, each year detectives from other centres were sent to Christchurch during its Show Week in November to keep their ‘own city criminals under observation and to point them out’ to local police.2 This model of policing was already dated by the 1930s, even more so by the 1950s, but it continued to inform and structure political policing.

In this study, we approach the problem of distinguishing general profanity from hate speech in social media, something which has not been widely considered. Using a new dataset annotated specifically for this task, we employ supervised classification along with a set of features that includes -grams, skip-grams and clustering-based word representations. We apply approaches based on single classifiers as well as more advanced ensemble classifiers and stacked generalisation, achieving the best result of accuracy for this 3-class classification task. Analysis of the results reveals that discriminating hate speech and profanity is not a simple task, which may require features that capture a deeper understanding of the text not always possible with surface -grams. The variability of gold labels in the annotated data, due to differences in the subjective adjudications of the annotators, is also an issue. Other directions for future work are discussed.