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Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005-11. The reports are compared using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands.

The covid-19 pandemic has strained organizational systems, with the health care field particularly affected given sudden surges of demand and changes of policy. The pandemic showcases the need to understand how social systems can be resilient to such external shocks. Drawing on 'joint production motivation' theory, this article offers a theoretical framework linking a social system's resilience with individual behavior. We examine a population strongly affected by the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic: nursing students participating in internship programs before and during the crisis. Of the 141 nursing students in our sample, 23% opted to continue their internship. Four characteristics of work teams (collaborative contact, shared understanding, task interdependence, and collaborative organizational cultures) are hypothesized to explain students' continued occupational commitment during the crisis. Results from binomial logistic regression analyses show task interdependence and intrinsic motivation positively affect the decision for continued participation in internship programs during the pandemic.

Standard anticorruption interventions consist of intensified monitoring and sanctioning. Rooted in principal‐agent theory, these interventions are based on the assumption that corrupt acts follow a rational cost‐benefit calculation by gain‐seeking individuals. Given their mixed results, however, these interventions require closer scrutiny. Building on goal‐framing theory, the authors argue that rule compliance requires a salient normative goal frame, since monitoring can never be perfect. Being inherently brittle, it needs constant reinforcement through external cues operating alongside formal monitoring and sanctioning. Leaders and peers setting a good example can provide such cues. In line with this hypothesis, analysis of multilevel repeated measures data from a vignette study of 580 Indonesian senior civil servants shows that the perceived likelihood of a hypothetical civil servant accepting a bribe is lowest when monitoring and sanctioning are strong and when leaders and peers are known to have refused bribes in the past.

Objectives Integration into social networks reduces stress during adverse life events and improves coping with disability in late life. The aim was to investigate whether social network closure (frequent contact among ties) and balance (positive contact among ties) are associated with perceived stress. We expect lowest stress for older adults with highly closed and balanced networks. Method Panel data on self-reported egocentric networks stem from the population-based Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study. Five waves were collected between 2002 and 2006, with 708 observations from 160 participants aged 50–68 years at baseline. Data include information on the participants’ social relationships, that is, interaction frequency and relationship quality, for ego–alter ties and alter–alter ties, and participants’ perceived stress. The analytical strategy used fixed- and random-effects models. Results Participants reporting the highest number of balanced relationships (positive ties among alters) experience least stress. This effect holds independently of sociodemographic confounders, loneliness, and network size. Discussion The absence of a stress-reducing effect from network closure suggests that balance matters more. Future research would benefit from considering balance when examining the characteristics of social networks that impinge on mental health outcomes in older adults.

We develop a model of strategic network formation of collaborations to analyze the consequences of an understudied but consequential form of heterogeneity: differences between actors in the form of their production functions. We also address how this interacts with resource heterogeneity, as a way to measure the impact actors have as potential partners on a collaborative project. Some actors (e.g., start-up firms) may exhibit increasing returns to their investment into collaboration projects, while others (e.g., established firms) may face decreasing returns. Our model provides insights into how actor heterogeneity can help explain well-observed collaboration patterns. We show that if there is a direct relation between increasing returns and resources, start-ups exclude mature firms and networks become segregated by types of production function, portraying dominant group architectures. On the other hand, if there is an inverse relation between increasing returns and resources, networks portray core-periphery architectures, where the mature firms form a core and start-ups with low-resources link to them.

Reputation has been shown to provide an informal solution to the problem of cooperation in human societies. After reviewing models that connect reputations and cooperation, we address how reputation results from information exchange embedded in a social network that changes endogenously itself. Theoretical studies highlight that network topologies have different effects on the extent of cooperation, since they can foster or hinder the flow of reputational information. Subsequently, we review models and empirical studies that intend to grasp the coevolution of reputations, cooperation and social networks. We identify open questions in the literature concerning how networks affect the accuracy of reputations, the honesty of shared information and the spread of reputational information. Certain network topologies may facilitate biased beliefs and intergroup competition or in-group identity formation that could lead to high cooperation within but conflicts between different subgroups of a network. Our review covers theoretical, experimental and field studies across various disciplines that target these questions and could explain how the dynamics of interactions and reputations help or prevent the establishment and sustainability of cooperation in small- and large-scale societies. Funding:European Research Council (ERC)European Research Council (ERC)European Commission [648693]; National Research, Development and Innovation Office -NKFIH (OTKA)Orszagos Tudomanyos Kutatasi Alapprogramok (OTKA) [K132250]; Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO); DutchMinistry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) [024.003.025]

Background The decentralization of the Indonesian healthcare system, launched in the year 2000, allowed the authorities of local community health centers (CHCs) to tailor their services to the needs of their clients. Many observers see this as an opportunity to increase CHC efficiency. Building on the Context Design Performance Framework, this paper assesses the extent to which efficiency variations between CHCs can be explained by the degree of fit between their organizational design characteristics and aspects of the communities in which they are embedded. Methods Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was applied to construct a measure of CHC efficiency for a sample of 598 CHCs in 2011, drawn from a publicly available Ministry of Health (MoH) dataset. Tobit regression analysis was applied to assess the impact of organization design and community characteristics and their interplay on efficiency. ResultsLarge variations in CHC efficiency were discovered, suggesting that not all CHCs are equally capable of finding the optimal design to operate most efficiently. A significant inverted U-shape relationship was found for the organization design-efficiency link: efficiency is highest for CHCs with 1-2 horizontal units and decreases for CHCs exceeding or not reaching this number. No significant association was found between community characteristics (proportion of poor people, remote location of CHC) and CHC efficiency. Conclusion Organizational design matters for CHC efficiency, but no evidence was found for the hypothesis that a better fit between community characteristics and CHC design increases efficiency. A potential reason for this might be that CHC management’s main design challenge is how to cope with the scarce availability of well-trained health personnel.

Most of the current literature on gossip describes gossipmongers as incessantly sharing evaluative and valuable information about an absent third party in teams, groups, communities, and organizations. However, potential gossipers can similarly decide not to share what they know, depending on the content, the context, or their relationship with the other actors in the gossip triad. We argue that understanding the reasons why people do not gossip may provide useful insights into individual motives, group dynamics, and collective behaviors. This theoretical contribution first critically surveys the existing gossip literature with the aim of highlighting the conditions under which people might refrain from sharing third party information. We then propose to apply Goal Framing theory as a way to bridge a theory of the micro-foundations of human behavior with an analytical model of the gossip triad that disentangles the various ways through which senders, receivers, and objects of gossip may be interrelated. From a goal framing perspective, most research on gossip illustrates the mechanisms in which the hedonic gratification derived from gossiping is reinforced by gain or normative goals. However, a normative or a gain goal frame can prevent the gossip monger from spreading the information, and we argue that depending on different configurations of frames and relations between actors the perceived costs of sending gossip may be far higher than much of the previous literature suggests.

The continuous rise in CEO compensation over the past few decades has been attributed either to efficient labor market processes (efficient market theories) or to corporate governance failures leading to insufficient control of boards over CEOs (managerial power theories). We argue that both approaches are incomplete and fail to explain why executive compensation remained stable for almost forty years, before it suddenly started to increase in the early 1980s. We present an alternative framework that complements both approaches, relational signalling theory. It conceives the transactions between boards and CEOs as a “gift exchange relationship” and explains the consistent use of premiums on top of reservation wages as an inherent element of the exchange. We argue that the sudden and subsequently continuous rise of CEO compensation is due to a major change in the signalling environment caused by the requirement to publicly disclose perquisites, introduced by the SEC in 1977.

In this exploratory study, we present findings from semi-structured interviews with 11 self-identified lesbian and gay (LG) humanitarian aid workers of Doctors without Borders (MSF). We investigate their perceptions of workplace inclusion in terms of perceived satisfaction of their needs for authenticity and belonging within two organizational settings, namely office and field. Through our combined deductive and inductive approach, based on grounded theory, we find that perceptions of their colleagues' and supervisors' attitudes and behaviors, as well as organizational inclusiveness practices play a role in LGs' perceived authenticity, but not belonging, in the workplace. However, these organization-level characteristics do not account for between-participant differences in perceived authenticity. Therefore, we inductively construct a typology of three groups, which we coined conscious first-missioners, authentic realists, and idealistic activists, based on how LG humanitarian aid workers assess and deal with not being able to be their authentic selves when they are in the field, because homosexuality is illegal in many project countries. Conscious first-missioners are separated from the other two groups based on having gone to the field once, whereby they felt in control over the decision on how to manage their sexuality. Alternatively, authentic realists and idealistic activists alike felt they did not really have a choice in how to manage their sexuality, but handled that differently. We find the importance of one's sexuality as well as adherence to the overarching organizational mission relevant individual-level factors herein. Furthermore, we find disclosure of sexual identity to be strongly context-dependent, as participants are 'out of the closet' in the office, but go back into the closet when they enter the field, with different country contexts even leading to different decisions concerning self-disclosure, thus demonstrating the importance of careful sexual identity management. This so-called disclosure dilemma, we find, may not be merely an individual choice, but rather a shared dilemma involving multiple stakeholders, such as the organization and fellow team members. We discuss the findings' contributions to existing literature on LGs' workplace experiences and implications for future research on inclusion of sexual and other invisible minorities in the workplace.

An increasing number of people combine paid work with the provision of informal care for a loved one. This combination of work and care may cause difficulties, necessitating adaptations at work, i.e. work arrangements. The present study explores what types of work arrangements are used by working caregivers, and which caregiver, care and work characteristics are associated with the use of these work arrangements. Within the Lifelines Informal Care Add-on Study (Lifelines ICAS), data on 965 Dutch informal caregivers in the North of the Netherlands were collected between May 2013 and July 2014 (response rate 48%), and data on 333 working adult-child caregivers (aged 26-68years, 82% female) were used in this study. A small majority (56%) of the working caregivers used one or more work arrangement(s): taking time off (41%), individual agreements with supervisor (30%), formal care leave arrangement (13%), and reduction in paid work hours (6%). Logistic regression analyses showed that long working hours (OR 1.06, 95% CI 1.01-1.08), and the experience of more health problems (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.56-4.05) or a disrupted schedule due to caregiving (OR 2.50, 95% CI 1.66-3.78) increased the chance to have used one or more work arrangements. Lower educated working caregivers were less likely to have used a formal care leave arrangement (tertiary vs. primary education OR 2.75, 95% CI 1.13-6.67; tertiary vs. secondary education OR 1.27, 95% CI 1.27-5.09). Policy makers should inform working caregivers about the availability of the different work arrangements, with specific attention for low educated working caregivers. Employers need to consider a more caregiver-friendly policy, as almost half of the working adult-child caregivers did not use any work arrangement.

A technocratic pathway to public management reform stresses the need for committing sizeable resources to reform implementation. Building on an institutional framework, we argue that there are alternative pathways to compliant implementation for government agencies with limited resources. Our comparative study of 55 Mexican government agencies that were the object of the 2003 Civil Service Reform Act reveals the co-occurrence of both technocratic and institutional pathways to compliant implementation. The common denominator across pathways in organizations with limited resources was the absence of strong oppositional norms (patronage) and the presence of robust interpersonal trust. We conclude that the role played by available resources in compliant reform implementation is far from straightforward, and depends on different combinations of public organizations' endogenous characteristics.

Research suggests that doctor–patient relations have evolved from a doctor-centered, paternalistic approach towards a more patient-centered, egalitarian model of interactions between physicians and their patients. Given the long-running debate on the positive relationship between education and health, the question arises how this development in doctor–patient relations affects social inequalities in health. First, we test to what extent egalitarian (e.g. discussing treatment decisions with patients) doctor–patient relations are underlying the education–self-reported health association. Second, we test whether egalitarian and paternalistic (e.g. withholding some information from patients) doctor–patient relations show differential effects on self-reported health across educational groups. Analyses of the European Social Survey (ESS) 2004/2005 for 24 countries demonstrate that a more egalitarian doctor–patient relationship does not substantially reduce educational inequalities in self-reported health. However, some direct positive effects of egalitarian and direct negative effects of paternalistic doctor–patient relations on health ratings can be found. Finally, results show how the health status of the lower educated can improve with a more egalitarian and less paternalistic doctor–patient relationship.

BackgroundInformal care is taking an increasingly important role in our health care system, and an improvement in our understanding of caregiving experiences and outcomes has become more relevant. The Lifelines informal care add-on study (Lifelines ICAS) was initiated within the Lifelines Cohort Study to cover the large heterogeneity in the caregiver population and to investigate the complex interplay among the characteristics of the caregiver, care recipient, and care situation and positive and negative caregiver outcomes. In this paper, we discuss the study design and data collection procedures of Lifelines ICAS, provide a detailed overview of its measures, and describe the caregiver study population.MethodsLifelines participants who participated in the 2nd Lifelines follow-up questionnaire were asked whether they provided informal care. Subsequently, they were invited to participate in Lifelines ICAS. Descriptive statistics were used to describe all informal caregivers in the 2nd Lifelines follow-up questionnaire and to describe the subsample of informal caregivers participating in Lifelines ICAS.ResultsA total of 11,651 Lifelines participants were self-identified as an informal caregiver and provided basic information about their care situation. A subsample of 965 informal caregivers participated in Lifelines ICAS and completed a comprehensive questionnaire about their care situation. In this subsample, the average age of caregivers was 53 years (SD 9.8), 75% were female, and 56% cared for a parent (in-law). Care recipients were on average 68 years old (SD 23.5), and 64% were female.DiscussionConsidering that informal caregivers are a huge resource for our health care system, Lifelines ICAS enables the study of differences among caregivers, care recipients, and care situations, as well as the study of common characteristics and features across caregiver groups. Notably, data from the Lifelines Cohort Study and Lifelines ICAS are available to all researchers on a fee-for-service basis, and Lifelines ICAS data may be enhanced by one or more follow-up measurements or linkages with other data sources.

Building enforcement capacity, that is, attaining and sustaining control in order to implement changes, is crucial for the success of public management reforms. However, this aspect of public management reform does not receive much theoretical or empirical attention. This paper analyzes the process of building enforcement capacity for the case of the Mexican Professional Civil Service reform. Although this reform experienced several complications (e.g., limited support, resources, and credibility), important goals were attained and some control was achieved. We study how officials attained control over implementation through the adaptive management of combinations of different types of control strategies (regulatory, normative, and procedural). The case study, focused on the analysis of in-depth interviews with the highest officials involved in the implementation of this reform, finds evidence for three combinations of strategies next to a general pattern characterized by a trade-off between compliance and coordination. This trade-off shows that the process of building enforcement capacity may affect the goals of the reform, deviating from lawmakers' original intentions Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Organizations represent deliberately designed social contexts that are characterized by multi-level hierarchies. Interests and opportunity structures at each level usually do not overlap. We suggest that one of the reasons why intentional change efforts often fail to reach their objectives is because they are likely to trigger competing social mechanisms at different levels of the hierarchy. In order to illustrate this argument, we analyze the consequences of timely communication of planned organizational changes on perceived success of reorganizations. Two competing mechanisms are derived and tested with data from a telephone survey (carried out in 2003), among a sample of n = 412 Dutch business organizations that performed a reorganization. The commitment perspective predicts that early announcement of reorganization plans to middle management increases the likelihood of reorganization success, since it increases commitment and empowers middle management. The influence mechanism predicts that early information of non-managerial employees decreases the likelihood of reorganization success, because it enables employees to use the information to their own advantage, anticipate on the strategies of management, and organize opposition against the plans. We found that timely communication with middle management indeed increases chances for success, whereas timely communication with employees correlates with reorganization failure. However, not communicating with employees has an even stronger negative effect on reorganization success. No evidence could be found for our argument that the severity of the reorganization's expected negative effects on the workforce moderates both mechanisms.

A limited body of research has examined satisfaction with work–life balance of expatriate workers who live abroad, residing outside the typical “family” or “life” domain. This study aims to demonstrate how and under which organizational circumstances job autonomy can increase work–life balance satisfaction of humanitarian aid expatriates. We hypothesize that especially in humanitarian work, trust in management can buffer potential negative effects of high autonomy. We test our hypothesis by means of ordinal logistic regression, using survey data collected among expatriates of the Operational Center Amsterdam of Médecins Sans Frontières ( N = 142). Results reveal that high levels of autonomy are positively related with work–life balance satisfaction when trust in the management of the organization is high. When trust in management is low, the effect of high autonomy on work–life balance satisfaction is negative. This implies that trust in management indeed buffers negative effects of high autonomy among expatriate humanitarian aid workers.

Collective action is a community resource crucial to ensure the resilience of communities. However, maintaining cooperation over time is also a significant challenge. Arguing that a major, though neglected, precondition for community resilience is sustained cooperation, this paper analyses the conditions triggering collective action in collective housing communities. Particular attention is paid to micro-level pathways through which characteristics of the common courtyard and the related rules for its use play for the maintenance or decay of collective action. The contours of an integrated theory of sustained cooperation is sketched. Drawing on Goal Framing (GF) theory and Common Pool Resource (CPR) theory, it is argued that CPR management institutions can only be effective in a community in which a normative goal frame is salient. Empirical material is presented from a multi-method comparative case study of four low-income urban collective housing communities in Mexico City in 2010. This evidence corroborates both approaches: the two communities characterized by sustained collective action exhibit a salient normative frame in combination with all elements of CPR managing institutions, whereas the two communities with failed collective action do not meet these conditions. The results suggest that both mechanisms are necessary for sustained cooperation to occur.

Background Informal caregiving is becoming more relevant with current trends such as population ageing. However, little is known about nonconsent and nonresponse bias in caregiving research. We investigated nonconsent and nonresponse bias in a sample of informal caregivers who participated in the LifeLines Cohort Study, and were invited for participation in an additional caregiving study. Methods We compared socio-demographic characteristics, caregiver health, caregiving situation, and caregiver outcomes of nonconsent and consent caregivers, and nonresponse and response caregivers, on LifeLines data, by using Chi-square tests, Independent Sample T-tests, and Mann-Whitney tests. Furthermore, we examined the influence of nonconsent and nonresponse on the presence and magnitude of the associations between caregiver characteristics and two commonly used caregiving outcomes (caregiver burden and satisfaction). We conducted multinomial logistic regression analyses, including interaction terms with nonconsent and nonresponse. Results Within a subcohort of 8443 caregivers, aged >18 years, 5095 caregivers (60 %) gave consent for participation in the caregiving study. Within the subgroup of 2002 caregivers who received the questionnaire, 965 (48 %) responded. Caregivers who were highly involved in caregiving (i.e. high time investment, high caregiver burden), gave more commonly consent to participate, and responded more often to the questionnaire. Nonconsent and nonresponse influenced the associations between caregiver characteristics and caregiver burden for only a few characteristics, mainly indicating the level of caregiving involvement (e.g. time investment, caregiving duration). Especially for caregiver burden, these indicators were stronger for consent and response caregivers than for nonconsent and nonresponse caregivers. Conclusions Our findings are important for caregiving research, as they emphasized that participation might not be evenly distributed among caregivers, and that the possibility of nonconsent and nonresponse bias should be considered. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-016-2948-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This study investigates the co-evolution of friendship and gossip in organizations. Two contradicting perspectives are tested. The social capital perspective predicts that friendship causes gossip between employees, defined as informal evaluative talking about absent colleagues. The evolutionary perspective reverses this causality claiming that gossiping facilitates friendship. The data comprises of three observations of a complete organizational network, allowing longitudinal social network analyses. Gossip and friendship are modeled as both explanatory and outcome networks with RSiena. Results support the evolutionary perspective in that gossip between two individuals increases the likelihood of their future friendship formation. However, individuals with disproportionately high gossip activity have fewer friends in the network, suggesting that the use of gossiping to attract friends has a limit. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

'Representative voice' can be defined as actions in which one or more speakers represent others when speaking up about a problem at the workplace or making a suggestion. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of representative voice, assess the frequency of its occurrence and examine department characteristics associated with its frequency. We present a theoretical framework and develop and test hypotheses about the effects of characteristics of the departmental context on the frequency of representative voice. Our focus is on organizational design features, i.e. characteristics that can be directly implemented by management. Data on 40 departments of a large Dutch childcare organization suggested that representative voice occurred in most of the organization's departments, although not frequently. Multilevel analyses showed that representative voice was best predicted by the presence of shared problems. Further, representative voice was more frequent in departments in which employees worked directly with clients (i.e. children), and in larger departments. Frequent contact with the department's manager and among the department's employees had no effect.

This paper focusses on organisational governance during a process of organizational restructuring. We analyse reorganization processes in terms of four types of problems that emerge during the tran...

High employee turnover rates constitute a major challenge to effective aid provision. This study examines how features of humanitarian work and aid workers' individual characteristics affect retention within one humanitarian organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Holland. The study extends existing research by providing new theoretical explanations of employment opportunities and constraints and by engaging in the first large-scale quantitative analysis of aid worker retention. Using a database of field staff (N=1,955), a logistic regression is performed of the likelihood of reenlistment after a first mission. The findings demonstrate that only 40 per cent of employees reenlist for a second mission with MSF Holland, and that workplace location and security situation, age, and gender have no significant effect. Individuals are less likely to reenlist if they returned early from the first mission for a personal reason, are in a relationship, are medical doctors, or if they come from highly developed countries. The paper reflects on the findings in the light of policy.

Background The combination of informal care and paid work is becoming increasingly common. Currently, in the Netherlands more than 70% of all informal caregivers aged 65 or younger combines informal care with paid work, and an increase is expected. Findings of research on consequences of this combination for caregiver quality of life are inconclusive. Our aims are to examine differences between working and non-working caregivers, and to study whether determinants of quality of life differ for working and non-working …

Three hypotheses about the effects of different informal social network structures on gossip behavior are developed and tested. Gossip is defined as a conversation about a third person who is not participating in the conversation. Having analyzed the costs and benefits of gossip, we prefer the coalition hypothesis.~It states that gossip will flourish in social networks that have a relatively large number of coalition triads, that is ego and alter having a good relationship amongst themselves and both having a bad relationship with tertius, the object of gossip. Two rivalling hypotheses are developed. The constraint hypothesis predicts that the inclination towards gossip is greater, the larger the number of structural holes in the personal network of the gossipmonger.~The closure hypothesis predicts that more gossip will be found in networks with a large number of closed triads, that is where both gossipmonger and listener have a good relationship with the absent third person. The hypotheses are tested using a newly developed instrument to measure gossip behavior and network data from six work organizations and six school classes. The data support the coalition hypothesis and do not support the two rivalling hypotheses.

To date, the gaps between actual and preferred working hours are mostly theorised and analysed at the individual level. This article provides new insights as to what extent different household arrangements relate to matches or mismatches concerning the achievement of a desired time allocation. The concept of household governance refers to regulations and practices families apply to keep work–family relationships under control, like the earner model, outsourcing of household task and household rules. This article explores by linear regression analyses how these are related to time-use problems of families: the gap between actual and preferred working hours, lack of free time and the experience of time pressure. The rivalling perspectives of flexibility, regulation and boundary theory have different predictions as to which modes of governance produce favourable outcomes. The results generally support boundary theory. However, households often are unable to choose their earner model optimally.

Proponents of new public management (NPM) expect public organizations to become more flexible and adaptive after administrative reforms, effectively showing convergence with patterns of organizational change in the private sector. This "convergence argument" is tested with a sample of 61 public and 61 private organizations in the Netherlands. We analyze whether public organizations, after 20 years of NPM reform, have changed their organizational structures and internal policies in relation to competitive, regulatory, and autonomy pressures, similarly to private organizations. Statistical analyses show that competition increases the incidence of change both in public and private organizations. High managerial autonomy and exposure to regulatory pressures relate to increased incidence of change in public organizations, but not in private ones. The results support the idea that NPM reform has made public organizations more similar to private organizations but that some concrete differences persist between private and public management in the Netherlands.

To study life course trajectories and ageing, scientific expertise is needed beyond epidemiology. More specifically, appropriate models of life course require a theoretical micro-foundation, need to incorporate multi-level context conditions and the interplay between them. It also requires the application of additional social scientific research methods that go beyond the application of statistical methods based on the multi-stage life table. These research theories and methods are available in disciplines like sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, demography and economics. To effectively study healthy ageing of populations the individual approach of epidemiology has to be extended with the macro-population and socio-cultural approach of (social) demography and the institutional and network approaches of sociology.

Based on the distinction between expressive and instrumental motives, six theoretical mechanisms for the formation of trust relationships are elaborated and empirically tested. When expressive motives drive tie formation, individuals primarily attach emotional value to social relationships. Three mechanisms have been tested: the homophily, the balancing, and the gossiping effect. When instrumental, control-related, motives drive tie formation, actors strategically establish relationships because of their potential use for the realization of material benefits or the avoidance of material losses. Again, three mechanisms have been tested: the signalling, the sharing group and the structural hole effect. Longitudinal data come from a sociometric panel study of 17 members of the management team of a German paper factory. Actor-oriented statistical modelling shows that all effects significantly affect trust formation separately. In a simultaneous test incorporating all six mechanisms, the pattern of structural holes turns out to be the major predictor of network evolution. The implications of structural hole theory for modelling the evolution of intra-organizational networks are discussed. keywords: balance, control, gossip, homophily, relational signalling, sharing groups, structural holes

The continuous rise in CEO compensation over the past few decades has been attributed either to efficient labour market processes (efficient market theories) or to corporate governance failures lea...

In a study of conflict in organizations, Lindenberg's relational signaling theory is used to develop hypotheses on the impact of relationship strength, network embeddedness, and organizational change on social escalation. Social escalation is defined as the involvement of one or more third parties in a conflict. An empirical test is conducted with data on 67 conflicts involving 22 managers, gathered during three years of ethnographic fieldwork and a longitudinal network study in a management team of a German paper factory. Multilevel analysis indicates that strong ties between conflicting parties decrease the level of social escalation, whereas informal power advantage of one party increases the chances for social escalation. Both effects disappear over time. It is argued that the dissolving impact of relationships and networks is due to the disappearance of so-called solidarity frame-stabilizing activities in the firm. The results highlight the context-dependence of network effects and escalation processes. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies are inconclusive on whether poor socioeconomic conditions in the neighborhood are associated with major depressive disorder. Furthermore, conceptual models that relate neighborhood conditions to depressive disorder have not been evaluated using empirical data. In this study, we investigated whether neighborhood income is associated with major depressive episodes. We evaluated three conceptual models. Conceptual model 1: The association between neighborhood income and major depressive episodes is explained by diseases, lifestyle factors, stress and social participation. Conceptual model 2: A low individual income relative to the mean income in the neighborhood is associated with major depressive episodes. Conceptual model 3: A high income of the neighborhood buffers the effect of a low individual income on major depressive disorder.METHODS: We used adult baseline data from the LifeLines Cohort Study (N = 71,058) linked with data on the participants' neighborhoods from Statistics Netherlands. The current presence of a major depressive episode was assessed using the MINI neuropsychiatric interview. The association between neighborhood income and major depressive episodes was assessed using a mixed effect logistic regression model adjusted for age, sex, marital status, education and individual (equalized) income. This regression model was sequentially adjusted for lifestyle factors, chronic diseases, stress, and social participation to evaluate conceptual model 1. To evaluate conceptual models 2 and 3, an interaction term for neighborhood income*individual income was included.RESULTS: Multivariate regression analysis showed that a low neighborhood income is associated with major depressive episodes (OR (95 % CI): 0.82 (0.73;0.93)). Adjustment for diseases, lifestyle factors, stress, and social participation attenuated this association (ORs (95 % CI): 0.90 (0.79;1.01)). Low individual income was also associated with major depressive episodes (OR (95 % CI): 0.72 (0.68;0.76)). The interaction of individual income*neighborhood income on major depressive episodes was not significant (p = 0.173).CONCLUSIONS: Living in a low-income neighborhood is associated with major depressive episodes. Our results suggest that this association is partly explained by chronic diseases, lifestyle factors, stress and poor social participation, and thereby partly confirm conceptual model 1. Our results do not support conceptual model 2 and 3.

We live in a world where the diffusion of information is incredibly easy. There are abundant recent examples of information dissemination that have captured global attention, such as WikiLeaks (Leigh and Harding, 2011), or the Snowden case (Greenwald, 2014) and, to add entertainment value because of its saucy implications, the breach of the on-line dating service Ashley Madison.1,2 At first sight, these events may appear to be cases of good old gossip on steroids. However, we should not jump to such conclusion, because the current definitions of gossip are too generic to account for the novelties of Internet-mediated communication. This chapter revolves around a conceptual framework which addresses such short-coming, while accommodating a vast variety of communication activities, gossip being one of them. The proposed characterization of concepts permits analytical clarity when considering forms of Internet-supported communications, and moreover organizes the analyses of a series of interesting questions. Among them, we are particularly concerned with forms of governance that are enabled by the Internet, and in particular by so-called “Internet-based reputation systems,” which allow people to voice their assessments of products that they have acquired, or of services that they have experienced.