Social process in a voluntary organisation: a study of adult membership in the Scout Association of New Zealand

<p>This thesis examines social processes in a large, voluntary organisation. The investigation was concerned with the activities and retention of lower-level adult members in the Scout Association of New Zealand. The demographic, socio-economic and organisational background of members, their attitudes, and the organisational context within which activity occurs were examined with reference to the relationship of these variables with the satisfaction, commitment and participation of members. Particular attention was given to five organisational variables: size, communication, control, support and effectiveness. Attitudinal variables such as solidarity, ideology, prestige and orientation were also examined. It was found that the organisational variables were most clearly related to differences in satisfaction, commitment and participation. This was described firstly in terms of an association between larger size, better and more frequent communication, and higher levels of control, support, and effectiveness. The latter in turn was related to higher levels of satisfaction, commitment, and participation. Background variables, particularly age, also proved important. This suggested that the life cycle plays a part in voluntary association membership and activity. It was concluded that the main organisational variables are affected by the peripheral structural position of voluntary associations in New Zealand society. The sanctions available to senior officials are few and generally weak, and there is often little pressure to pursue some of the more intangible formal goals. Adherence to official procedures varies, with frequent blockages of control, communication and support. This results in considerable differences in the organisational environment within which members operate. The study was carried out over two years. Observation, semi-structured and unstructured interviews were used, as well as a lengthy questionnaire.</p>

Membership Fees in the History of the All-Union Society of Book Lovers: The Economy and Ideology of a Late Soviet Mass Organisation

This article considers the financial side and specifically the phenomenon of membership fees in the history of a mass voluntary organisation of the late Soviet period, i.e. the All-Union Society of Book Lovers. The purpose of the article is to examine the role of fees in the structure of the organisation’s income and identify contradictions that arose within the Society in their relation. The article refers to the company’s accounting documents, materials of congresses, the corporate newspaper Knizhnoe Obozrenie, and letters of book lovers to the leadership of the society. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that the management of the organisation and ordinary participants treated the annual fee with different pragmatics. Officials needed money for the structure, so they sought to increase the number of collective and individual members of the Society and fees from them. Initially, collective participants provided the flow of money to the organisation. Later, their share in the total budget decreased with the growth of contributions from ordinary book lovers. The popularity of reading and book hunger caused the new organisation to be seen by its members as a means to get books: they directly connected membership fees with the opportunity to get books that were in deficit. The lack of official guarantees for books and subscriptions caused outrage among book lovers who meticulously paid their fees and could lead to their refusal to pay to the Society. In a situation like this, the existence of the organisation and the format of the mass organisation were doubted. The ambiguous perception of the state initiative in the field of reading on the part of citizens helps examine the relations of society and government in the late Soviet period in a more detailed way.

Poetry in motion: Qualitative analysis, I-poems and disabled cyclists

In this article, I present three I-poems from a larger research project in which I explore the health, identity and social impacts of cycling for people with physical disabilities. I used I-poems as a means of kick-starting an in-depth, multi-perspective engagement with my interview transcripts after struggling to formulate insightful and productive thematic analysis. For me, this research project is something of a departure from my normal research processes and practices as it is taking place in partnership with a voluntary organisation. This organisation facilitated the recruitment of the research participants and had specific inputs into the research questions as well as maintaining ongoing interests in the research findings. My usual research tends to be much less structured and much more exploratory and messy than this. And yet, for me, this messiness facilitates insight and creative engagement which is intensely productive in terms of both findings and outputs – often via the use of creative methods. Therefore, as much as I have enjoyed conducting the research for this project and liaising with the organisation and meeting the participants, I struggled to find my ‘researcher mojo’ when working with the transcripts. In this context, I-poems became a creative stimulant for productive engagement with the transcripts and deepening my critical and reflective insights into the data.

Homeless Hope: a voluntary, nurse-led organisation working to educate and support people sleeping rough

This article describes the development of a nurse-led voluntary organisation that provides basic foot care to the homeless at street level in three Welsh cities. There is a large percentage of street sleepers who choose not to access professional health and care services for various reasons, and many of these individuals have foot health problems, such as sore, painful, swollen feet from continuous walking, calluses, dried skin, blisters that are often de-roofed and trench foot. Through support and education, however, several of these people have been able to take ownership of their identified problems, by building trusting relationships with Homeless Hope nurses. Through collaborative communication with professional services, Homeless Hope nurses provide an informal link between non-engaging rough sleepers and the services in place to help support them.

A radical take on co-production? Community partner leadership in research

This chapter explores the process of a community-based researcher and two academics working together on one of the sub-projects of the wider Imagine project described in Chapter 1. This sub-project was a collaboration between the research officer at Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation, and two academics at the University of Brighton. Many research collaborations are based on the notion that the research expertise is situated within the university, with community partners providing practical expertise. This chapter is about inverting this dynamic, with the community partner becoming the lead researcher. We reflect on our own experience of working together in the broader context of the findings of our research study and on how Community-University partnership working can contribute to community development especially, through the subsequent actions of the community partners.

Application of game theory and new institutional economics in establishing a National Voluntary Organisation for Professional Evaluation in Nigeria

Background: In Nigeria, there is a plethora of evaluators found in the over 90 universities, specialised educational institutions and private research organisations. However, there is limited or no opportunity for networking among the evaluators from similar and different programmatic specialisations. After applying the determinant framework to assess the evaluation capacity development situation in Nigeria, we agree on the importance of supporting the establishment of a National Voluntary Organisation for Professional Evaluation (VOPE).Objectives: Several leaders in evaluation were competing recently for occupying the national space reserved for a National VOPE. The main objective was to encourage partnership.Methods: We used a powerful theoretical framework provided by game theory and new institutional economics. We analysed the situation and identified the challenge they are facing as a Nash Equilibrium-of-a-Game View of Institutions: each player knows the equilibrium strategies of the other players and no player has anything to gain by changing only his or her own strategy. This explains why Nigerian evaluation leaders were not able to cooperate for the last two decades.Results and conclusion: To break this barrier, we proposed a new deal to the leaders that had the advantages of reshaping the ‘rules of the game’. We proposed a federation of associations, akin to a coalition in game theory. The result was that all leaders came together under this umbrella organisation, to celebrate the evaluation year in 2015 and committed under the Abuja Declaration on Evaluation to register and establish an association, with an elected board, a written constitution and election bylaws. The association is governed by a Board of Trustees, which is chaired by the former Minister of Planning. Elections are planned for the end of 2017.