Governance Challenges for Not-For-Profit Organisations: Empirical Evidence in Support of a Contingency Approach

This article presents empirical evidence of the governance challenges faced by Australian not-for-profit (NFP) organisations. There is a dearth of academic research in the not-for-profit sector on issues of governance. Using survey and interview data, we explore what NFP leaders believe are key governance challenges, and what this means for theory and practice of NFP governance. We demonstrate that the effectiveness of governance systems is influenced by internal and external contingencies that NFP organisations face, such as variations in board roles, stakeholder and membership demands, funding arrangements, board member recruitment processes, skills of board members, and resources for training and development. We argue for a shift of focus away from prescriptive and normative NFP governance models, and contend that generic best practice governance standards for NFPs ought not to be further pursued, and that a contingency approach is more promising

The Governance of Corporate Sustainability: Empirical Insights into the Development, Leadership and Implementation of Responsible Business Strategy

This article explores how corporate governance processes and structures are being used in large Australian companies to develop, lead and implement corporate responsibility strategies. It presents an empirical analysis of the governance of sustainability in fifty large listed companies based on each company's disclosures in annual and sustainability reports. We find that significant progress is being made by large listed Australian companies towards integrating sustainability into core business operations. There is evidence of leadership structures being put in place to ensure that board and senior management are involved in sustainability strategy development and are then incentivised to monitor and ensure implementation of that strategy through financial rewards. There is evidence of a willingness to engage and communicate clearly the results of these strategies to interested stakeholders. Overall, there appears to be a developing acceptance amongst large corporations that efforts towards improved corporate sustainability are not only expected but are of value to the business. We suggest that this is evidence of a managerial shift away from an orthodox shareholder primacy understanding of the corporation towards a more enlightened shareholder value approach, often encompassing a stakeholder-orientated view of business strategy. However, strong underlying tensions remain due to the insistent market emphasis on shareholder value. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Herschel PACS and SPIRE spectroscopy of the Photodissociation Regions associated with S 106 and IRAS 23133+6050

Photodissociation regions (PDRs) contain a large fraction of all of the interstellar matter in galaxies. Classical examples include the boundaries between ionized regions and molecular clouds in regions of massive star formation, marking the point where all of the photons energetic enough to ionize hydrogen have been absorbed. In this paper we determine the physical properties of the PDRs associated with the star forming regions IRAS 23133+6050 and S 106 and present them in the context of other Galactic PDRs associated with massive star forming regions. We employ Herschel PACS and SPIRE spectroscopic observations to construct a full 55-650 {\mu}m spectrum of each object from which we measure the PDR cooling lines, other fine- structure lines, CO lines and the total far-infrared flux. These measurements are then compared to standard PDR models. Subsequently detailed numerical PDR models are compared to these predictions, yielding additional insights into the dominant thermal processes in the PDRs and their structures. We find that the PDRs of each object are very similar, and can be characterized by a two-phase PDR model with a very dense, highly UV irradiated phase (n $\sim$ 10^6 cm^(-3), G$_0$ $\sim$ 10^5) interspersed within a lower density, weaker radiation field phase (n $\sim$ 10^4 cm^(-3), G$_0$ $\sim$ 10^4). We employed two different numerical models to investigate the data, firstly we used RADEX models to fit the peak of the $^{12}$CO ladder, which in conjunction with the properties derived yielded a temperature of around 300 K. Subsequent numerical modeling with a full PDR model revealed that the dense phase has a filling factor of around 0.6 in both objects. The shape of the $^{12}$CO ladder was consistent with these components with heating dominated by grain photoelectric heating. An extra excitation component for the highest J lines (J > 20) is required for S 106.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, A&A Accepte

Governance Challenges for Not-for-Profit Organisations: Empirical Evidence in Support of A Contingency Approach

ABSTRACT: This article presents evidence of the governance challenges faced by Australian not-for-profit (NFP) organisations. We find a key challenge for NFPs is recruiting individuals with appropriate skills, as directors are volunteers often elected by the membership and frequently lack relevant experience. Another issue is balancing the needs of a diverse constituency with competing demands. We find that the often proposed solution to this challenge – stakeholder representation on boards – can further hinder the recruitment of suitable directors and create tensions detrimental to board effectiveness. We argue to shift focus away from normative governance models towards a contingency approach and posit a role for a national NFP sector regulator in assisting to develop appropriate governance systems according to contextual factors

The characteristics of the IR emission features in the spectra of Herbig Ae stars: Evidence for chemical evolution

Herbig Ae/Be stars are a class of young pre-main sequence stellar objects of intermediate mass and are known to have varying amounts of natal cloud material still present in their direct vicinity. We characterise the IR emission bands, due to fluorescence by PAH molecules, in the spectra of Herbig Ae/Be stars and link observed variations to spatial aspects of the mid-IR emission. We analysed two PAH dominated spectra from a sample of 15 Herbig Ae/Be stars observed with Spitzer and derive profiles of the major PAH bands. The shape and the measured band characteristics show pronounced variations between the two Spitzer spectra. Those variations parallel those found between three ISO spectra of other, well-studied, Herbig Ae/Be stars. The derived profiles are compared to those from a broad sample of sources. The Spitzer and ISO spectra exhibit characteristics commonly interpreted respectively as interstellar matter-like (ISM), non-ISM-like, or a combination of the two. We argue that the PAH emission detected from the sources exhibiting a combination of ISM-like and non-ISM-like characteristics indicates the presence of two dissimilar, spatially separated, PAH families. As the shape of the individual PAH band profiles reflects the composition of the PAH molecules involved, this demonstrates that PAHs in subsequent, evolutionary linked stages of star formation are different from those in the general ISM, implying active chemistry. None of the detected PAH emission can be associated with the (unresolved) disk and is thus associated with the circumstellar cloud. This implies that chemical changes may already occur in the natal cloud and not necessarily in the disk

Affective iconic words benefit from additional sound–meaning integration in the left amygdala

Recent studies have shown that a similarity between sound and meaning of a word (i.e., iconicity) can help more readily access the meaning of that word, but the neural mechanisms underlying this beneficial role of iconicity in semantic processing remain largely unknown. In an fMRI study, we focused on the affective domain and examined whether affective iconic words (e.g., high arousal in both sound and meaning) activate additional brain regions that integrate emotional information from different domains (i.e., sound and meaning). In line with our hypothesis, affective iconic words, compared to their non‐iconic counterparts, elicited additional BOLD responses in the left amygdala known for its role in multimodal representation of emotions. Functional connectivity analyses revealed that the observed amygdalar activity was modulated by an interaction of iconic condition and activations in two hubs representative for processing sound (left superior temporal gyrus) and meaning (left inferior frontal gyrus) of words. These results provide a neural explanation for the facilitative role of iconicity in language processing and indicate that language users are sensitive to the interaction between sound and meaning aspect of words, suggesting the existence of iconicity as a general property of human language

Second Low Temperature Phase Transition in Frustrated UNi_4B

Hexagonal UNi_4B is magnetically frustrated, yet it orders antiferromagnetically at T_N = 20 K. However, one third of the U-spins remain paramagnetic below this temperature. In order to track these spins to lower temperature, we measured the specific heat C of \unib between 100 mK and 2 K, and in applied fields up to 9 T. For zero field there is a sharp kink in C at $T^\ast\approx$ 330 mK, which we interpret as an indication of a second phase transition involving paramagnetic U. The rise in $\gamma = C/T$ between 7 K and 330 mK and the absence of a large entropy liberated at $T^\ast$ may be due to a combination of Kondo screening effects and frustration that strongly modifies the low T transition.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

The Dynamics of Sustained Reentry in a Loop Model with Discrete Gap Junction Resistance

Dynamics of reentry are studied in a one dimensional loop of model cardiac cells with discrete intercellular gap junction resistance ($R$). Each cell is represented by a continuous cable with ionic current given by a modified Beeler-Reuter formulation. For $R$ below a limiting value, propagation is found to change from period-1 to quasi-periodic ($QP$) at a critical loop length ($L_{crit}$) that decreases with $R$. Quasi-periodic reentry exists from $L_{crit}$ to a minimum length ($L_{min}$) that is also shortening with $R$. The decrease of $L_{crit}(R)$ is not a simple scaling, but the bifurcation can still be predicted from the slope of the restitution curve giving the duration of the action potential as a function of the diastolic interval. However, the shape of the restitution curve changes with $R$.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure