High School Seniors’ College Plans: Gendered Variations in the Effects of AcademicAgency, Cultural and Social Capital

This research focused on gendered variations in the effects of academic agency, social and cultural capital on high school seniors’ college plans. Monitoring the Future (2012) data from a sample of 12,000 seniors, supplemented with interviews with education professionals found theoretically meaningful gender differences. College plans of males and females were directly influenced by their academic agency. Their parents were an additional direct positive influence, even if only for males. But, parental cultural capital and abstaining from controlled substances increased likelihood of pursuing college through increased academic agency for both males and females. These findings contributed to the literature on gendered higher education pathways and supported theories of social and cultural capital development

The Effect of Employee Involvment on Firm Performance: Evidence from an Econometric Case Study

We provide some of the most reliable evidence to date on the direct impact of employee involvement through participatory arrangements such as teams on business performance. The data we use are extraordinary --daily data for rejection, production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period, almost 53,000 observations. Our key findings are that: (i) membership in offline teams initially enhances individual productivity by about 3% and reduces rejection rates by more than 25%; (ii) these improvements are dissipated, typically at a rate of 10 to 16% per 100 working days; (iii) the introduction of teams is initially accompanied by increased rates of downtime and these costs diminish over time. In addition: (iv) the performance-enhancing effects of team membership are greater and more long-lasting for team members who are solicited by management to join teams; similar relationships exist for more educated team members. These findings, which are best interpreted as lower bound estimates of the effects of teams, are consistent with the diverse hypotheses including propositions that: (i) employee involvement will produce improved enterprise performance through diverse channels including enhanced discretionary effort by employees; (ii) various kinds of complementarities accompany many changes in organizational design (such as between teams and formal education); (iii) the introduction of high performance workplace practices are best viewed as investments, though there are significant learning effects; (iv) differences in performance for team members solicited by mangers compared to those who volunteer are consistent with various hypotheses including management signaling and opportunistic behavior by employees, but inconsistent with hypotheses based on Hawthorne effectshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39998/2/wp612.pd

Overcoming Resistance to Diversity in the Executive Suite: Grease, Grit, and the Corporate Tournament

Once we open the corporate governance/human resources nexus to deeper inquiry, mutual scholarly interest in diversity and discrimination follows naturally. Firms have complex motives to take nondiscrimination and the promotion of diversity seriously. First, at least certain forms of discrimination are both unlawful and socially illegitimate and hence present threats of potential liability and injury to reputation. Second, human resources demands are such that attracting and motivating a diverse workforce is a competitive imperative. At the same time, however, offsetting economic forces may exist that favor subtle forms of discrimination and hostility to diversity, even if intentional and overt racial or gender-based bias is mostly outdated. In sum, the process of promoting diversity and ending discrimination, whether to avoid liability or simply to remain competitive, is a difficult challenge faced by many firms. It demands a close look at the efficacy of the internal decisionmaking and authority structures of the firm

Understanding, measuring and utilizing social capital: clarifying concepts and presenting a field application from India

Social capital is a resource, a propensity for mutually beneficial collective action that communities possess to different extents. Communities with high levels of social capital are able to act together collectively for achieving diverse common objectives. While the concept of social capital is valid universally, the measure of social capital will vary by context. It must be related in each case to aspects of social relations that assist mutually beneficial collective action within that particular cultural context. A locally relevant scale of social capital was developed to assess whether and how social capital mattered for development performance in 69 north Indian villages. Variables corresponding to other bodies of explanation, including extent of commercialization, relative stratification, and relative need were also examined, but a combination of high social capital and capable agency was found to associate most closely with high development performance. Agency is important particularly in situations where institutions are not available that enable citizens to connect with the state and with markets. The productivity of social capital is considerably reduced on account of this institutional gap in the middle. Development performance can be improved in these situations by adding to the stock of social capital and also through enhancing agency capacity.Social capital, Collective action, Social networks., Development, Capacity,

Are there effects of mother's post-16 education on the next generation? Effects on children's development and mothers' parenting [Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report No. 19]

There is an extensive body of research which shows that the children of parents with longer participation in education do better in standard tests of school attainment than those whose parents have had less education. One of the mechanisms put forward for explaining the intergenerational transmission of educational success is parenting. This report adds to a growing body of research from the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning on the inter-generational transmission of educational success and issues of parenting skills, behaviours and attitudes. The report seeks to establish whether the strong correlation between mothers' participation in education and both her child's development and her parenting results from a primarily causal relationship, or from selection effects. Using longitudinal data spanning three generations, we find that while mothers' participation in post-compulsory education has some small positive causal effects, much of the apparent relationship between a mother's post-16 educational participation and measures of her children's cognitive ability and her parenting skills is driven by the selection bias – it is largely other factors, such as her aspirations, motivation and prior achievement, which determine her child's attainment and affect her decision to stay on in education. Much of the developmental literature tends towards a causal interpretation of the relationship between parents' education and the development and ability of their children. However, the results of this report suggest that such assumptions should be made with considerable caution. Our findings suggest that simply extending the length of time that women spend in education may do little to directly affect the educational attainment of their children. Rather, it is the ability and aspirations of women which inform their participation in post-16 education, their parenting ability and the attainment of their children. It may be through inter-generational continuities in factors such as these that inequalities in educational success are transmitted through the generations. This suggests that supporting children in learning through early and continued investment in quality education and developmental opportunities is more important in addressing social immobility than simply extending the average length of participation, important though that may be

The Effect of Employee Involvment on Firm Performance: Evidence from an Econometric Case Study

We provide some of the most reliable evidence to date on the direct impact of employee involvement through participatory arrangements such as teams on business performance. The data we use are extraordinary --daily data for rejection, production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period, almost 53,000 observations. Our key findings are that: (i) membership in offline teams initially enhances individual productivity by about 3% and reduces rejection rates by more than 25%; (ii) these improvements are dissipated, typically at a rate of 10 to 16% per 100 working days; (iii) the introduction of teams is initially accompanied by increased rates of downtime and these costs diminish over time. In addition: (iv) the performance-enhancing effects of team membership are greater and more long-lasting for team members who are solicited by management to join teams; similar relationships exist for more educated team members. These findings, which are best interpreted as lower bound estimates of the effects of teams, are consistent with the diverse hypotheses including propositions that: (i) employee involvement will produce improved enterprise performance through diverse channels including enhanced discretionary effort by employees; (ii) various kinds of complementarities accompany many changes in organizational design (such as between teams and formal education); (iii) the introduction of high performance workplace practices are best viewed as investments, though there are significant learning effects; (iv) differences in performance for team members solicited by mangers compared to those who volunteer are consistent with various hypotheses including management signaling and opportunistic behavior by employees, but inconsistent with hypotheses based on Hawthorne effectsProductivity, High Performance Work Practices, Employee Participation, Human Resource Management Practices

The Emergent Logic of Health Law

The American health care system is on a glide path toward ruin. Health spending has become the fiscal equivalent of global warming, and the number of uninsured Americans is approaching fifty million. Can law help to divert our country from this path? There are reasons for deep skepticism. Law governs the provision and financing of medical care in fragmented and incoherent fashion. Commentators from diverse perspectives bemoan this chaos, casting it as an obstacle to change. I contend in this Article that pessimism about health law’s prospects is unjustified, but that a new understanding of health law’s disarray is urgently needed to guide reform. My core proposition is that the law of health care provision is best understood as an emergent system. Its contradictions and dysfunctions cannot be repaired by some master design. No one actor has a grand overview—or the power to impose a unifying vision. Countless market players, public planners, and legal and regulatory decisionmakers interact in oft-chaotic ways, clashing with, reinforcing, and adjusting to each other. Out of these interactions, a larger scheme emerges—one that incorporates the health sphere’s competing interests and values. Change in this system, for worse and for better, arises from the interplay between its myriad actors. By quitting the quest for a single, master design, we can better focus our efforts on possibilities for legal and policy change. We can and should continuously survey the landscape of stakeholders and expectations with an eye toward potential launching points for evolutionary processes—processes that leverage current institutions and incentives. What we cannot do is plan or predict these evolutionary pathways in precise detail; the complexity of interactions among market and government actors precludes fine-grained foresight of this sort. But we can determine the general direction of needed change, identify seemingly intractable obstacles, and envision ways to diminish or finesse them over time. Dysfunctional legal doctrines, interest group expectations, consumers’ anxieties, and embedded institutional and cultural barriers can all be dealt with in this way, in iterative fashion. This Article sets out a strategy for doing so. To illustrate this strategy, I suggest emergent approaches to the most urgent challenges in health care policy and law—the crises of access, value, and cost