Towards a Performance Measurement Framework for Community Development Finance Institutions in the UK

Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) are publicly funded organisations that provide small loans to people in financially underserved areas of the UK. Policy makers have repeatedly sought to understand and measure the performance of CDFIs to ensure the efficient use of public funds, but have struggled to identify an appropriate way of doing so. In this article, we empirically derive a framework which measures the performance of CDFIs through an analysis of their stakeholder relationships. Based on qualitative data from 20 English CDFIs, we develop a typology of CDFIs according to three dimensions: organisational structure, type of lending, and type of market served. Following on from this, we derive several propositions that consider how these dimensions relate to the financial and social performance of CDFIs, and provide the basis for a performance measurement framework.Community Development Finance, Performance Measurement, Stakeholder Theory

Drivers of Choice: Parents, Transportation, and School Choice

Based on surveys of two districts, explores the extent to which distance, transportation time, and mode prevent low- and moderate-income families from choosing private, charter, or non-neighborhood schools. Calls for decentralized transportation policies

Popoia te reo kia penapena: Nurture the language

Research to develop a Māori language screening tool (Specialist Education Services, 2001), identified that students entering Māori Medium at five, could be classified into one of four Māori language competency, groups. Concurrently, teachers raised their need to identify the Māori language proficiency of five year olds entering Māori Medium so that more appropriate teaching strategies could be incorporated in preparation for literacy. Accordingly, three Māori oral-language assessment tools, to help identify the Māori language competency of students entering Māori Medium settings at five years of age and provide formative information, were developed in response to this need. This paper details the development and trial of these tools

Engineers and management in manufacturing and construction.

There is a widespread view in the relevant academic literature that the UK's economic performance would be better if the situations of its engineers, engineering and manufacturing were more favourable. In particular the apparent dominance of accountants and financial expertise and the relative lack of influence of engineers and technical and productive expertise in manufacturing companies have been much discussed. As a presumed consequence of this, and despite a shortage of empirical evidence, engineers are apparently marginalised in managerial hierarchies, particularly in the most senior positions, and there is a subordination of technical to financial and other commercial priorities and objectives. The role of engineers in construction, however, has been virtually ignored despite the sector's economic importance and the relatively large numbers of engineers employed in it. The author and his supervisor conducted 25 interviews with representatives of the engineering and other main organizational professions, management institutes, employers' associations and a small number of academic and policy researchers. Their aim was to help identify the main issues which were relevant to UK engineers. From these interviews, and from reviewing the literature about engineers and management, the author decided upon the aims of the research. These were: to examine how engineers in manufacturing and construction feel about their influence and career prospects vis-ä-vis the members of the other professional groups with whom they work; to explore the perceptions of management-level people in industry about the managerial abilities of engineers and their colleagues; to investigate how engineers feel about the trade unions and professional associations which represent many of them; to examine the views of engineers about issues surrounding it engineering education and the importance which employers place on formal engineering qualifications; and to determine how engineers feel about the social place of their profession and about their levels of remuneration. Eighty-two interviews were conducted with engineers and their colleagues in three industrial sectors: mechanical and electrical engineering, chemicals, and construction. In manufacturing the main functional groups seemed to enjoy more constructive relationships than was apparently the case during the 1970s and 1980s. Although they appeared to form an influential group, the author found little evidence to support the notion that accountants dominate manufacturing companies, and they were generally considered both by themselves and by engineers and other colleagues to be performing a support function. Engineers appeared to enjoy the widest range of career opportunities of all the main management level groups, with the possible exception of chemists in chemicals. These opportunities included promotion to the boardroom. However some respondents felt that engineers needed to become rather less involved in the technical aspects of their work to advance their careers. In construction it was found that the main professional groups appeared to operate in varying degrees of mutual opposition. Their roles and influence depended to a large extent on the nature of the product and on the method of contracting chosen by clients. Architects in building and design engineers in civil engineering appeared to have lost their dominant positions in the management of projects. In both cases the main beneficiaries were contracting companies, which are staffed at management level mainly by engineers, and to a smaller extent quantity surveyors. 111 The author found no evidence to support the view that engineers are superior or inferior to other professional groups in terms of their `management' abilities, although the latter are clearly very difficult to measure. Only three of sixty-one engineer respondents were trade union members and most engineers appeared to believe that trade union membership was incompatible with their professional and/or managerial identities. About half of the engineers in the sample were members of professional engineering associations but this varied between sectors, as did the importance attached by respondents and their employers to chartered status. The engineer respondents tended to believe that their profession was poorly organised and ineffectual. Although employers appeared to rely heavily on formal qualifications to distinguish between different grades of technical staff, most respondents felt that engineering degrees needed to more practically oriented. The social standing of engineers and engineering was generally considered to be low. Many engineers believed that the general public neither understood nor appreciated fully what they did. However, engineers in the manufacturing companies in the study were generally satisfied with their levels of remuneration, although most respondents in construction felt that they were underpaid. The thesis concludes by arguing that when taken together with other evidence, particularly the many useful developments in education for management, the results suggest that the prospects for the UK economy might be considered to be improving, and certainly better than they were during the 1970s and 1980s

Development of theory-based health messages: three-phase programme of formative research

Online health behaviour interventions have great potential but their effectiveness may be hindered by a lack of formative and theoretical work. This paper describes the process of formative research to develop theoretically and empirically based health messages that are culturally relevant and can be used in an online intervention to promote healthy lifestyle behaviours among new university students. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, a three-phase programme of formative research was conducted with prospective and current undergraduate students to identify (i) modal salient beliefs (the most commonly held beliefs) about fruit and vegetable intake, physical activity, binge drinking and smoking, (ii) which beliefs predicted intentions/behaviour and (iii) reasons underlying each of the beliefs that could be targeted in health messages. Phase 1, conducted with 96 pre-university college students, elicited 56 beliefs about the behaviours. Phase 2, conducted with 3026 incoming university students, identified 32 of these beliefs that predicted intentions/behaviour. Phase 3, conducted with 627 current university students, elicited 102 reasons underlying the 32 beliefs to be used to construct health messages to bolster or challenge these beliefs. The three-phase programme of formative research provides researchers with an example of how to develop health messages with a strong theoretical- and empirical base for use in health behaviour change interventions

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Early Childhood Intervention: Evidence from an Experimental Evaluation of the Incredible Years Parenting Program.

A number of researchers and policy makers have recently argued that the most effective way of dealing with long-run disadvantage and the intergenerational transmission of poverty is through early childhood intervention and in particular policies aimed at supporting the family. This study was part of a randomised evaluation of the Incredible Years Program, which is aimed at improving the skills and parenting strategies of parents who have children with conduct problems. The results show that the treatment significantly reduced behavioural problems in young children. Furthermore our detailed cost analysis, when combined with a consideration of the potential long-run benefits associated with the programme, suggest that the long-run rate of return to society from this program is likely to be relatively high.

The Value of Values in Small Business: Compliance and Ethics Programs for the Rest of Us

Essay from the Project for Law and Business Ethics Symposium: “Unearthing Corporate Wrongdoing: Detecting and Dealing with Ethical Breaches in the Business World

Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means a scholar did not co-author with Erdős but did collaborate with someone who did (i.e., an Erdős 1). In this study, we examine collaboration networks in law, searching for the Legal Erdős. We crown Sunstein as the Legal Erdős and name a complete (as possible) list of Sunstein 1s and 2s

Sunstein1s and 2s

In Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship, we began the study of the legal academy\u27s collaboration network. When mathematicians discuss the nature of collaboration in their field they focus on the most influential collaborator in the discipline-- Paul Erdos, the peripatetic Hungarian mathematician who authored over 1500 papers with over 450 different collaborators before his death in 1996. They introduced the concept of the Erdos Number, which is the number of degrees of separation between a mathematician and Erdos