scholarly journals From NGOs’ accountability to social trust. The evidence from CEE countries

2020 ◽  
Vol 109 (165) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Halina Waniak-Michalak ◽  
Ivana Perica ◽  
Sviesa Leitoniene

Purpose: The paper aims to find a link between the level of NGO accountability and the social trust for non-governmental organisations (NGOs). We will investigate if the accounting regulations and transpa-rency rules for NGOs in particular countries influence the social trust for NGOs. We will follow the process of the creation of accounting law for NGOs in three CEE countries: Lithuania – one of the Baltic states, which is in last place in the World Giving Index ranking, and Poland, and Croatia – the two best post-communist countries in the World Giving Index ranking. We will analyse the change in social trust in these countries in line with the development of legal and accounting rules and norms for NGOs. Methodology/approach: The design and methodology approach includes a literature review and compa-rative analysis. We supported our findings with panel regression analysis. Research limitations include the selection of only a few countries for the analysis and only nine years of observation per country. Findings: The results of our research indicate that accounting regulations are of marginal importance for social trust. We conclude that accountability alone does not solve the social trust problems faced by non- -profit organisations. Other factors affect social trust, such as lack of institutional mechanisms, lack of anempathic society, and negative media coverage. Originality/value: The originality and value of this paperlie in the fact that we explain how NGOs’ accountability and revenues influence social trust in NGOs.Furthermore, we refer to CEE countries where – due to their historical heritage – both social trust andtransparency were deeply affected.

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Halina Waniak-Michalak ◽  
Ivana Perica ◽  
Sviesa Leitoniene ◽  
Ewa Chojnacka

The purpose of the paper is to describe the process of creating institutional settings in three post-communist countries and analyze the change of the social trust in these countries in line with the development of legal and accounting rules and norms for NGOs. The design and methodology include a literature analysis and the inductive method to analyze historical data for each country. The countries that were selected for the research are Lithuania – one of the Baltic states, which is in the last place in the World Giving Index (WGI) ranking, Poland with the average result in WGI ranking, and Croatia – the best post-communist country in the WGI ranking. Research limitations include the use of the descriptive method and the small number of countries included in the analysis. The originality and value of this paper lie in the fact that the problem of low social trust in NGOs in post-communist countries is analyzed by linking it with the development of NGO accountability and civil control over them.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1476718X2110627
Author(s):  
Caroline Cohrssen ◽  
Nirmala Rao ◽  
Puja Kapai ◽  
Priya Goel La Londe

Hong Kong experienced a period of significant social unrest, marked by protests, from June 2019 to February 2020. Media coverage was pervasive. In July 2020, children aged from 5 to 6 years attending kindergartens in areas both directly and less directly impacted by the protests were asked to draw and talk about what had taken place during the social unrest. Thematic analysis of children’s drawings demonstrates the extent of their awareness and understanding and suggests that children perceived both protestors and police as angry and demonstrating aggression. Many children were critical of police conduct and saw protestors as needing protection from the police. Children around the world have been exposed to protest movements in recent times. The implications for parents, teachers and schools are discussed.


2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Beyeler ◽  
Hanspeter Kriesi

This article explores the impact of protests against economic globalization in the public sphere. The focus is on two periodical events targeted by transnational protests: the ministerial conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Based on a selection of seven quality newspapers published in different parts of the world, we trace media attention, support of the activists, as well as the broader public debate on economic globalization. We find that starting with Seattle, protest events received extensive media coverage. Media support of the street activists, especially in the case of the anti-WEF protests, is however rather low. Nevertheless, despite the low levels of support that street protesters received, many of their issues obtain wide public support.


Author(s):  
Ann T. Jordan

Business anthropology is a fast-evolving field. Social sciences such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology each have a unique set of constructs and theories for studying human behavior and each brings special insights to understanding business. Anthropologists are skilled in observing and learning from the rich interaction of social beings in their environment. With methods based in techniques for first-hand observation and interviewing of participants, and with theoretical knowledge gleaned from studying human societies across the world, anthropologists are the social scientists uniquely situated by training to analyze the social milieu and group-patterned interaction in any human setting. Simply, business anthropology is the use of anthropological constructs, theory, and methods to study its three subfields: organizations, marketing and consumer behavior, and design. Organizational anthropology is the study of complex organizations from an anthropological perspective to solve organizational problems or better understand the nature and functioning of the organizational form within and across organizations. In marketing and consumer behavior anthropology’s methods allow one to get close to consumers and understand their needs, while anthropology’s theoretical perspectives allow one to understand how human consumption plays out on the world stage. In the design field anthropologists use their methods to observe and learn from the detailed interaction of social beings in the designed environments in which we all live. They use their theoretical perspectives to develop a holistic analysis of the rich data to develop new products and evaluate and improve existing ones whether they be refrigerators or office buildings. The field of business anthropology is difficult to define because the moniker “business anthropology” is a misnomer. This field, as most anthropologists practice it, is not limited to work in for-profit businesses. Business anthropologists work with for-profit organizations, but also non-profit ones, government organizations and with supranational regulatory bodies. In addition to working for a business, an organizational anthropologist might be working in a non-profit hospital to improve patient safety, a design anthropologist might be working for an NGO to develop a less fuel-intensive cooking system for refugee camps and an anthropologist in marketing might be working in a government agency to develop ways to advertise new vaccines.


1990 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandras Shtromas

Before the 1980s one hardly spoke of any significant social movements in the Baltic republics. Political apathy, bordering on hopelessness, as far as the masses were concerned, and an emphasized apoliticism of the intelligentsia, whose members never tired of stressing that their only concerns are professional, cultural, maybe aesthetic, but not at all political—that was the social situation in the Baltic states most of the time under Soviet rule.This overall image of apathy, complacency, and acquiescence was, however, not entirely correct. Underneath there were many things happening, as very few Balts indeed were total conformists and total loyalists of the Soviet regime. Most of them were, rather, “conservationists.” That is a special term I use for people outwardly loyal to the Soviet system, working within that system, trying to comply with the rules of the system, but at the same time using whatever position in the system they have to preserve their nation's economic, cultural, and historical heritage. They were trying especially hard to safeguard their nation's economic well-being, ecological situation and, of course, spiritual identity and heritage, by promoting art, literature and other activities, mainly under the slogan “national in form and socialist in content,” but more and more national in form and less and less socialist in content, as far as the circumstances allowed it. These people wore the disguise of Soviet loyalism for the benefit and the advantage of their own nation; that was the attitude I call conservationism in the Baltic states and that was the attitude that was prevalent among most native Balts.


Author(s):  
Hnai Al Badri ◽  
Hanan Al-Sheikh

There is no doubt that media plays a key role in modern societies, as it has become the main source for the formation of collective awareness among citizens around the world. In light of the real vile war the Arab world has been witnessing against terrorism, media has become a major player in the confrontation. Today, the Arab world is facing terrorist and fanatic attacks that take religion as a cover for its atrocities and hideous actions, disturbing the peace and amity in communities, and causing a lot of harm to innocent people, destruction of infrastructure, and devastating impact on economy and the social structure. Unfortunately, Jordan's media—as is the case with other Arab media—seems to have issues with their adopted strategies to deal with terrorism, its causes, and influencing factors. The chapter provides the details and findings of a study that attempts to characterize the approach adopted by Jordan's media coverage of terrorism and to investigate and appraise the strategic value of such approach, leading to the recommendation for a more effective strategy that is based on proper understanding of the political, social, and economic environment and other key factors.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-186
Author(s):  
Juan E Mezzich ◽  
James Appleyard

One of the fundamental features of our approach to person centered medicine is its world-wide matrix. This applies to the historical roots of person centered medicine, to its contemporary antecedents, to the scope of the multiple organizations that are collaborating to develop it, to the reasons behind the selection of Geneva as the site of its foundational conferences, to the nature of the non-profit organization that has been established to formalize it, to the aims of its official journal and the geographical sources of the articles it publishes, and to the horizons informing the planning of its congresses and evolving projects. These diverse and complementary international perspectives and domains, and the papers published in this particularly international issue of the Journal, will be highlighted next.


Gesture ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terra Edwards

Abstract This article examines the social and interactional foundations of sign-creation among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington. Linguists studying signed languages have proposed models of sign-creation that involve the selection of an iconic gestural representation of the referent which is subjected to grammatical constraints and is thereby incorporated into the linguistic system. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 190 hours of video recordings of interaction and language use, I argue that a key interactional mechanism driving processes of sign-creation among DeafBlind people in Seattle is deictic integration. Deictic integration restricts the range of contextual values that the grammar can retrieve by coordinating systems of reference with patterns in activity. This process brings language into alignment with the world as it is perceived by the users of that language, making a range of potentially iconic relations available for selection in the creation of new signs.


Social media represents emerging phenomena that proliferates through military, government, corporate, and non-profit organizations, as well as tens of millions of households around the world. Politicians, entertainers, revolutionaries, grandparents, and grandchildren alike are all participating in various aspects of the social media phenomena. Understanding how knowledge flows influence and are influenced by these phenomena is important for harnessing the power of dynamic knowledge principles for competitive advantage in our current, technology-driven, and socially connected world. As discussed in Chapter 11, these phenomena have both technical (esp. involving information technology) and non-technical (esp. involving people and organizations) aspects, which come together, through the process, for productive and goal-oriented action. Indeed, the process is where the socio and the technical parts come together: how people in organizations employ technologies to perform goal-oriented activities. Because the process provides an action-focused interface between fast-moving technologies and comparatively slow-moving people and organizations, it governs the proliferation and change of emerging phenomena. As such, technologically enabled, organizational, knowledge, and work processes in particular are key to leveraging emerging phenomena for competitive advantage. In this chapter, the authors employ familiar principles for understanding and analysis of social media as emerging knowledge phenomena.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-31
Author(s):  
Maksim Rudnev

Social status reflects the hierarchical position of social groups within society, their prestige as perceived by members of their society. The existing literature shows that age groups differ in their status considerably across countries, and that their status is linked to socio-economic modernization. This study investigates the determinants of elderly people’s status in post-communist countries in comparison to other countries. Using two large international datasets — from the World Values Survey (58 countries) and European Social Survey (29 countries) — as well as multilevel regressions, we found that elderly people in post-communist countries were at the bottom of the status hierarchy. Compared to other regions of the world, this low status was only in part explained by country modernization level, implying that some other factors may have had an effect. Moreover, only in postcommunist countries the perceived status of older people decreased with respondent’s age. We suggest that the low status of older people in post-communist countries was caused by the social and economic transformations that followed the fall of the communist regime — which led to the older generation losing human capital — and then exacerbated by the ageist legacy of the Soviet industrialist ideology. Finally, we insist that the very low status of older people is a problem of society as a whole rather than this particular age group.


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