Stream Director: Paul Grout
Funder: ESRC
Staff: Dave Cowan, Tony Prosser, Morag McDermont
This research relates to housing associations, which have traditionally been bound together by notions of housing need, not-for-profit, tenant participation, and voluntarism of boards of management. Since the mid-1980s, these understandings have been altered and there have consequently been a variety of shifts in cultures (e.g., professionalised management boards; complex group structures have been developed by housing associations; a developing private sector ethos; and methods of tenant selection have begun to prioritise choice over need
Funder: ESRC
Staff: Paul Grout, Sylvia Sonderegger, Sebastien Mitraille
This research aims to develop a theoretical understanding of the role of culture within organizations and communities. A central idea is to model the consequences of differences in interaction between members of communities or, for example, employees within organizations. Currently there are two strands to this research.
One is addressing how the ‘distance’ between actions, approaches and beliefs affects welfare and ‘production’. This theoretical research is well underway and indicates that diversity of types is beneficial within organisations since, somewhat surprisingly, they help to internalise externalities caused by individuals disregard for the impact that their personal choices have on the costs that others face when trying to integrate within the organisation or community. We have now concluded all the analysis of the formal model.
A second strand, concerns legal services. Legal services suffer from a potential conflict between the desire to protect an ‘ethical’ culture, what we might call professional mores, alongside promotion of competition, innovation and the public interest. These problems are not unique to legal services and exist in differing degrees in other professional services. Thus it is of interest to understand how relations and reputations in these markets affect the way that regulation can help provision of legal services and justice while promoting competition. We explore how the manner in which parties interact in legal services markets influences what can be achieved by changes in regulation. We have shown, for example, how regulatory changes that improve accountability and transparency can benefit those parts of the market where users rely on reputation but harm those parts of the market that operate through close relational contracts.
Funder: Leverhulme
Staff: Paul Grout, Wendelin Schnedler, Michelle Yong
There is a large academic literature arguing that not-for-profit delivery mechanisms are particularly useful for the delivery of public services because employees may have public service motivation. The research shows that donated labour (i.e., giving extra effort and commitment to the organisation because of public sector motivation) is fragile and small changes in the use of the power of the public sector can bring dramatic declines in the scale of donated labour. A basic model is now concluded. It has been presented at several international conferences and at the American Economic Association meetings in Chicago (January 2007).
Funder: Leverhulme
Staff: Paul Grout, In-Uck Park, Sylvia Sonderegger, Sebastien Mitraille
This research is concerned with the way that organisations may operate what is observationally equivalent to a glass ceiling in the presence of imperfect information in the labour market. The research suggests that outcomes where women have to work harder to achieve the same position as men may be ‘natural’ outcomes of competition in some markets. The analysis shows that the market-place may naturally separate into ‘female-friendly’ and ‘female-unfriendly’ firms, with the former employing more women on comparatively favourable contracts relative to the female-unfriendly firms. The first stage of this research is now complete.
The willingness of employees to donate labour in caring professions has been analysed theoretically (see above) but there have been no statistical empirical studies that attempt to measure this affect and test whether donated labour depends on the type of organization (e.g., for–profit, not-for-profit or public sector. This project is conducting such an investigation on the British Household Panel Survey. The first stage of the research is now finished and a research paper is close to completion. We measure donated labour by the amount of unpaid overtime that employees do. We first consider whether the amount of unpaid overtime is higher for caring professions in not-for-profit and public sector organisations compared to private sector organisations and find that it is. We introduce fixed effects to discriminate between the models and find that mission based matching models appear a better description of the data than organisational models.
One strand of this research has concerned legal services. These services suffer from a potential conflict between the desire to protect an ‘ethical’ culture, what we might call professional mores, alongside promotion of competition, innovation and the public interest. Thus it is of interest to understand how relations and reputations in these markets affects the way that regulation can help provision of legal services and justice while promoting competition. Our research explores how the manner in which parties interact in legal services markets influences what can be achieved by changes in regulation. Our main result is that regulatory changes will have complex and different effects in different markets. In particular, regulatory changes that aid infrequent clients may have opposite effects in markets that work through relational contracts. Moreover, allowing the different sub-markets to interact may introduce additional elements of tension between protecting the interests of different types of user of legal services.
This research addresses how the ‘distance’ between actions, approaches and beliefs affects welfare and ‘production’. This theoretical research is well underway and indicates that diversity of types is beneficial within organisations since, somewhat surprisingly, they help to internalise externalities caused by individuals disregard for the impact that their personal choices have on the costs that others face when trying to integrate within the organisation or community. This suggests there exists a rigorous micro-founded argument for diverse communities as opposed to a preference for ‘discrimination’ (often postulated in research of this type).
