This paper seeks to focus on legal issues concerning direct payments for social care for adults. Its aim is to consider whether the aspirations for choice, control and innovation…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to focus on legal issues concerning direct payments for social care for adults. Its aim is to consider whether the aspirations for choice, control and innovation, central to successive governments' purpose in introducing direct payments and which have caused it to gain public support, risk being undermined by budget cuts within social service departments and whether the legal framework provides sufficient guarantees to those in need.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper summarises the legal basis for direct payments; considers issues of brokerage, choice, resource allocation and commissioning; and looks at relevant legal challenges made up to May 2011.
Findings
The paper finds that severe budgetary restraint is likely to undermine the original vision for personalisation and direct payments; and that the legal framework of social service delivery creates risks for councils and service users.
Practical implications
In order to achieve their legal entitlement, users of self‐directed support should always seek top‐up discretionary funds in addition to their initial resource allocation schemes budgetary indication, unless satisfied that the initial indication meets their needs. User groups should be careful to ensure that in funding care services, councils conduct a proper balancing exercise and do not over focus on their own budgetary agenda which may be unlawful.
Originality/value
The paper should provide a useful reference point for users of self‐directed support and their advisers.
Details
Keywords
Chaudhry Ghafran and Sofia Yasmin
Developing economies often lack sufficient state regulation to encourage corporations to engage with environmental sustainability challenges. Environmental NGOs fill this vacuum…
Abstract
Purpose
Developing economies often lack sufficient state regulation to encourage corporations to engage with environmental sustainability challenges. Environmental NGOs fill this vacuum but this relationship is fraught with challenges, linked to each party’s competing interests. This paper examines how an environmental NGO operating in a developing country manages such challenges.
Design/methodology/approach
A longitudinal case study, from 2017–2022, based on semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, with the main periods of field work in 2017 and 2020.
Findings
We unravel nuanced dynamics of accountability within an NGOs collaborative ecosystem. Our findings reveal a web of interlinked obligations and expectations, strategically adopted to reconcile environmental and CSR logics fostering trustworthy partnerships with firms. Despite aiming for transformative change, the NGO made gradual initiatives, to meet the challenges of fostering systemic change in developing nations. Institutional logics of professionalism and development allowed NGO members avoid mission drift and realign upward accountability relations into lateral ones.
Originality/value
The study provides insight into successful NGO-corporate partnerships and illustrates how accountability is negotiated, upheld, and reconceptualized in such collaborations.
Details
Keywords
We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are…
Abstract
We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are prescribed competing demands due to academic logic and the logic of managerialism. We interpret six individual experiences of institutional plurality and illuminate how social position, disposition, emotions, and apprehension regarding plurality affect their response to shifting emphases in the logics of the university. In addition, we show that although there may appear to be harmony in the organizational-level response to institutional plurality, turmoil may be affecting the organization’s members, highlighting the importance of looking at how people experience institutional logic multiplicity.
Details
Keywords
H. Karpate, H. Wheat, J. Jirsa, D. Fowler and D. Whitney
Reinforced concrete structures have been wrapped to provide strength and confinement in the presence of seismic loads. The wrapping of structures as a means of mitigating…
Abstract
Reinforced concrete structures have been wrapped to provide strength and confinement in the presence of seismic loads. The wrapping of structures as a means of mitigating corrosion is relatively recent. The objective of the work to be described is to investigate the long-term effectiveness of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite wraps in mitigating corrosion in reinforced concrete elements in severe environments.
Details
Keywords
Christopher W. J. Steele and Timothy R. Hannigan
Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of…
Abstract
Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).
Details
Keywords
Raghu Garud and Thinley Tharchen
Institutional arrangements, while constituting subject positions, also relegate others to inhabit unlivable abject positions. Such a perspective on identity begs the question on…
Abstract
Institutional arrangements, while constituting subject positions, also relegate others to inhabit unlivable abject positions. Such a perspective on identity begs the question on the possibilities of institutional reform given that abjects must seek recourse, if any, from the very institutions that marginalized them. One source for reform can be found in the functioning of institutional forums vested with performative powers, such as the Supreme Court. But how do these institutional forums legitimately bring about social transformation given that precedents bind them? To address this puzzle, we analyzed two Supreme Court rulings that showcase the performativity of institutions in materializing subject/abject positions, and the reforms that are possible. One is the 2015 US Supreme Court ruling providing marriage rights to same-sex couples. The other is the 2014 Indian Supreme Court ruling that legalized a third gender. An analysis of these two rulings and a comparison across them highlights the historical yet contingent nature of identity. The analysis also highlights “citational grafting” as a key mechanism underlying institutional reform, i.e., citations to earlier instances of social transformation serving as precedents for bringing about additional changes given new circumstances.
Details
Keywords
Charles D.T. Macaulay and Sarah Woulfin
The purpose of this study is to explore the plurality of logics composing an organizational field and how that plurality affects a sport governing body's (SGB) sense of self. The…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore the plurality of logics composing an organizational field and how that plurality affects a sport governing body's (SGB) sense of self. The authors sought to determine what logics exist in a specific field and how they interact according to Kraatz and Block's (2017) types of organizational responses. Finally, the authors explore how an organization's responses affect organizational outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors analyzed 476 unique organizational web pages and documents and 293 news media articles from four news outlets. The authors conduct a content analysis informed by Gioia et al.’s (2013) method to explore the website data to understand the logics of the field. The authors analyze the media articles for media accounts of events and determine how logics inform an SGB's actions (Cocchairella and Edwards, 2020).
Findings
The authors find institutional plurality leads to a fractured organizational sense of self, resulting in poor outcomes. The authors' findings suggest Kraatz and Block's (2017) as well as other previously theorized strategies do not lead to an organization reconciling competing logics. Rather, the strategies employed led to outcomes harming the organization's legitimacy and financial well-being.
Originality/value
There are several calls within the broader management field and the sport management field to address institutional plurality (Kraatz and Block, 2017; Robertson et al., 2022). Unlike previous research studies, this study finds detrimental effects of plurality on an organization. The authors discuss the strength of the strategies employed and why the strategies failed.
Details
Keywords
Civil wrongdoings with consequent financial and other loss or damage to employers, employees and third parties may result in the course of various trade union activities. These…
Abstract
Civil wrongdoings with consequent financial and other loss or damage to employers, employees and third parties may result in the course of various trade union activities. These day to day trade union activities take a variety of forms. The most common ones are inducement of breach of contract, conspiracy, trespass, nuisance, and intimidation. Each of these activities constitutes a tort which, unless the statutory immunities apply, would normally give rise at common law to an action for damages or, as is more frequent, enable the aggrieved party to obtain an injunction.
Simple Test for Millscale. A quick method of checking the complete removal of millscale from steel plate has been developed by Shell Research Ltd. at Thornton, Cheshire. Companies…
Abstract
Simple Test for Millscale. A quick method of checking the complete removal of millscale from steel plate has been developed by Shell Research Ltd. at Thornton, Cheshire. Companies of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group are large users of steel plate in refineries and tankers. It was in connection with the protection of tankers that this test for the detection of residual millscale on shot‐blasted metal surfaces was developed.
In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of…
Abstract
In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.
Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).