10,440 research outputs found
Social innovation, co-operation and competition: inter-organizational relations for social enterprises in the delivery of public services
There is much rhetoric concerning the need for collaboration and partnership both from policy makers and those within the sector who see the social enterprise model as being more collaborative than the private sector. However, there is limited understanding of the processes by which trust is built up and maintained in these contexts. The chapter examines the relationships between commissioners and providers, users/beneficiaries/ customers (vertical relationships) and relationships between providers (horizontal relationships). The chapter will go beyond assumptions concerning how organisations are expected to behave, and will examine the economic and social institutional contexts in which their actions are embedded. In particular attention will be given to how organisations build relationships in ‘quasi markets’ and in an environment of emerging competition for the delivery of public services. These issues are explored by looking at the case of self employment support provision in the UK
Alternative approaches to capacity building: practices in the public and private sector.
This study aims to examine alternative practices in capacity building found in the public and private sector and to examine how these can be used to benefit third sector organisations.
This report is structured around three themes:
a) Reviewing the different interpretations of capacity building in the public, private and third sector.
b) Selection of eight case studies of public and private sector capacity building programmes that have raised the capacity of organisations supported.
c) Identifying a range of alternative practice from which implications for the third
sector can be drawn.
The study has examined a range of approaches to capacity building in the private and public sectors, drawing on existing literature, key informant interviews and eight case
studies. Key issues related to capacity building are drawn out and implications for the capacity building in the third sector are identified. Finally recommendations are made of
how lessons from the private and public sector can be adapted for the third sector context.
While capacity building is defined as the range of support activities that help organisations develop their skills and resources, this study examines the different types of approaches and makes a distinction between those approaches that can help organisations improve on what they are currently doing, the support that allows them to make more radical change or start new activities
Transdisciplinary environmental research: building trust across professional cultures
With the challenges of researching complex topics such as those related to environmental sustainability and land use, there is a growing interest in promoting collaboration between research and industry, between different disciplines in research, and between different types of research organisations. However there is a need to know more about how collaboration is operating and approaches to building trust in these relations. This paper uses the detailed analysis of 10 case studies of research collaborations related to sustainability and environmental land-use to examine the different professional cultures among research collaborators, the incentives they have to cooperate, and the processes of building trust. The paper shows that trust is vital when crossing professional cultural boundaries as people are opening themselves to vulnerability and risk. The results show how trust is built between university researchers, environmental NGOs, private businesses and commercial advisory companies. Trust is shown to be built by having information others, prior experience of working together, norms of cooperation, and sanctions exerted on those who might transgress norms of behaviour. Having incentives is a necessary but not adequate basis for having trust. These relationships are built up through existing relationships, building trust through progression of projects and the use of intermediaries or guarantors
Feasibility of using S-191 infrared spectra for geological studies from space
There are no author-identified significant results in this report
Social impact measurement as an entrepreneurial process.
Third sector organisations are growing in scale and scope, but little is known about how they measure their social value and report their achievements. This paper explores the process of social impact assessment in charities, voluntary organisations, and social enterprises.
It looks at why organisations embark on social impact measurement; what guides their decisions about how to measure this impact, and how they use the results. It argues that these decisions are shaped by the objectives of the leadership and power relationships within organisations and, more importantly, with stakeholders outside the organisation.
Impact measurement can be seen as a bureaucratic form of regulation or as a form of marketing for organisations with entrepreneurial skills. The lack of consistent approaches, and the range of assumptions that need to be made in any measurement process, provide organisations with ‘room to manoeuvre’ and a source of power to influence others.
In this way, the process of measuring impact can been seen as a socially entrepreneurial process – a way to create opportunities and win scarce resources needed to make a social impact
Social impact measurement and non-profit organisations: compliance, resistance, and promotion
Non-profit organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their social impact. This paper examines the experience and behaviour of non-profit organisations in the UK in relation to a demand for impact evaluations. It shows that organisations both accept and resist control, and use evaluations for promotional purposes. External resource providers request organisations to present evidence on how resources are used and what organisations have achieved. However, non-profit organisations can also proactively use social impact measurement as a way of exerting control over their environment through using their discretion in deciding what to measure, how to measure and what to report. The analysis uses a combination of the concepts acceptance, rejection, compliance and strategic decoupling to distinguish different organisational responses to external demands for impact evaluation
Groups as a means or an end? Social capital and the promotion of cooperation in Ghana
In the past two decades there has been a growing emphasis within the international development industry on promoting group activity. This paper charts how interpretation of the loose concept of social capital has shaped donor and NGO discourses on, and their preoccupation with, groups. Donors are using blueprints of group cooperation in an asocial and aspatial manner that ignores local specificities of place, space and cultural context. An empirical case is examined that demonstrates how donor discourse is reinterpreted, translated and even rejected by players at different spatial scales. The reasons for the continued donor preoccupation with groups in the face of local resistances are explored
Social capital as culture? Promoting cooperative action in Ghana
In this chapter we focus on culture and its complex interconnections with the concept of social capital. Our study is set in the context of recent preoccupations of the World Bank (followed by other donors) with the concept of social capital itself and the related construct that it can be built in order to promote economic growth and development. The adoption of the social capital concept is perhaps the closest that the World Bank has come in recent years in its recognition of the potential linkages between local cultures (notably cultures of enterprise), economic growth and development. That is not to say that we agree that culture is social capital – or vice versa. Far from it, indeed! Our thesis is rather that the World Bank has taken up social capital in a highly essentialized form - as group cooperation per se - in its development initiatives, whilst at the same time congratulating itself on its adoption of a more culturally (as opposed to economistically) oriented development paradigm. The Bank’s conflation of social capital construction with group activities, and its consequent efforts to promote development through supporting group-based initiatives, far from illustrating a cultural turn in its development thinking, arguably reflect a continuing lack of sensitivity to cultural diversity and the specific geographical contexts within which diverse cultural registers (elite, popular and youth cultures, among others) evolve and interact (see also Nederveen Pieterse, this volume).
Following a brief introduction to the links between concepts of social capital and culture, we review recent development problems and donor activities in Ghana. We then present two rural case studies of group-based development interventions in Ghana’s coastal savanna to illustrate our argument that while culture is complex, multi-faceted and inextricably linked with place and time dynamics, recent development interventions seemingly emanating out of donors’ desire to build social capital have been based on very poor conceptualizations of culture
‘We don’t deal with courts’: cooperation and alternative institutions shaping exporting relationships of small and medium-sized enterprises in Ghana
Through an investigation of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) exporting in contexts which lack a formalised institutional environment in a less developed country, this article shows how entrepreneurs cope with institutional deficiency. By drawing on an analysis of 12 SMEs exporting from Ghana to other West African countries, the findings reveal how entrepreneurs and their organisations avoid recourse to the courts and instead, use culturally specific relationships to settle disputes when exporting. Institutional forms operating in parallel to the formal legal system are examined. These are shown to be hybrid forms drawing on traditional cultural institutions such as chieftaincy and religion, combined with forms of corporations and cooperatives. Assumptions around the different roles of family and kinship also are explored. The study contributes to the ongoing development of a theoretical understanding on trust and relationship building in international entrepreneurship, and the importance of understanding cultural context
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