Human resources are vital to an organization’s success and are a driving force behind innovation processes. This study examines the influence of various employee characteristics and their effect on the innovation culture with public and nonprofit organizations (innovation climate). Using data collected from 1220 public and nonprofit employees, we evaluate the role of various elements such as work motivation, job flexibility, and financial motivation, and how they affect an innovation culture within organizations. Findings from a series of OLS regressions suggest that job flexibility, the quality and reputation of the organization, and importance placed on work are positively related to both public and nonprofit innovation climates. Personnel inflexibility negatively affects the innovation climate in both the public and nonprofit sectors, and the effects of other variables, including advancement motivation, vary by sector.

This study explores challenges among inter-organizational managers in community-based enterprises. According to transaction cost theory (TCT), associated transactions and mechanisms control and limit market failures within supply chain relationships. Using semi-structured interviews and an embedded case study, community-based supply chain managers participated in this study. Four salient themes capture the transactional issues that influence transaction costs in the community-based inter-organizational supply chain. This paper marks the first attempt to conceptualize the role of transactional issues in the community-based supply chain design. The study uses TCT to evaluate the applicability of supply chain challenges and the need for shared value creation in community-based contexts. The research acknowledges that limitations exist due to the scope and extent of research.

There is an assumption in much of the electoral engineering literature that domestic episodes of electoral system choice occur in a vacuum, isolated from international influences. Yet this assumption remains largely untested, despite the comparative focus of much of that literature. This article focuses on part of this gap by considering two electoral mechanisms that seek to limit party system fragmentation under proportional representation – low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds – and shows that the mechanisms have spread across many European countries during the post‐1945 period. Analyses reveal that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of peer countries have made similar choices within the last two or three years. This effect is robust to various model specifications and to the inclusion of multiple controls. The article also offers some qualitative evidence from case studies and parliamentary debates.

This article examines reforms to citizenship, a highly politicized issue, in France and Germany in the 1990s. It begins with the fact that, against a dominant strain of scholarly thought emphasizing path dependence and policy continuity, nationality law was reformed four times in the two countries. Taking this puzzling outcome as its starting point, the article attempts to account for the evolution of nationality law in the two countries. The argument has three components. First, following a now-established line of research, we argue that the terms of political debate have sharply narrowed since the Second World War. Appeals to ethnic bases of identity, national hierarchies and racial homogeneity, easy and natural before 1945, are now politically unacceptable. Second, this narrowing of the terms of discourse has not eliminated political debate over concepts of nationality, belonging and integration, but rather shifted it to a narrower sphere. In other words, political actors express their support for integration (as demanded by political necessity), but seek to redefine integration in a manner that continues to serve exclusionary ends. Third, the eventual policy outcome in citizenship reform reflects in large measure the definition that emerges triumphant from this battle over discourse. The article ends with a reflection on the broader role of argument, language and strategy in the study of comparative politics.

The development of political science was closely connected to the democratic changes and the restoration of statehood at the end of the 1980s in Lithuania. This paper examines the historical and contemporary social and academic roots of political science in the country. The other issue investigated in detail is the institutionalisation of political studies, which required the development of new academic curricula. Major vehicles for the institutionalization of political science were the decentralisation of academic activities and the establishment of new institutions, such as the Institute of Political Science and International Relations (University of Vilnius) and the Lithuanian Political Science Association, and intensive cooperation with Western universities and funding organizations. Nonetheless, the growth and efficiency of political studies and research depend very much on their successful integration into the environment of the existing universities. The research output of Lithuanian political science is characterised by a widening of research interests and the further introduction of statistical and computer methods of investigation, with problems of Lithuania's foreign and security policy and issues of democratisation as topics of continuing popularity.

Instead of using an all-encompassing model of individual voting behaviour for drawing aggregate inferences from individual level data, this article proposes an alternative approach by employing a normal vote-model. Three levels of abstraction are distinguished in the notion of a normal vote: the normal vote-concept, the normal vote-approach and the normal vote-model. A discussion of the most detailed empirical elaboration of the notion of the normal vote, that by Converse, is given and then an inventory of criticisms is made. Although valid in their own right, these criticisms fall short of damaging the very concept of a normal vote. Finally, it is argued that if one intends to transfer the concept to an electoral context other than the American, normal vote-approaches (and consequently normal vote-models) may differ across countries and over time.

This paper describes how estimates of individual charitable giving are derived from two major continuous surveys: the Family Expenditure Survey and the Individual Giving Survey. It explores the reasons for and the significance of the differences between the two estimates. Conclusions are drawn on the relative merits and demerits of the two survey datasets, and the circumstances in which it might be appropriate to use each of them.

This paper reports on a study of the microprocesses of stability and change in a nonprofit welfare organization in Australia. We position volunteering and voluntarism as core constitutive phenomena in and of nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector more generally, and examine volunteer agency in action. Developing a model drawn from neoinstitutional theory and adopting an ethnographic approach, the paper illustrates theoretically and empirically how volunteers create and revise institutional orders operative within organizations in ways hitherto poorly articulated and understood.

Globalisation has entered the academic vocabulary despite, or perhaps because of, its conceptual imprecision. Indeed it has been argued that:

it is largely because of their ambiguities that mere words are capable of… independent action as forces in history. A term, a phrase, a formula which gains currency or acceptance because one of its meanings, or of the thoughts which it suggests, is congenial to the prevalent beliefs, the standards of value, the tastes of a certain age, may help to alter beliefs, standards of value and tastes, because other meanings or suggested implications, not clearly distinguished by those who employ it, gradually become the dominant elements of its signification (Lovejoy, 1936: 14).

The future will decide if this evolution is to happen to globalisation, a term born in a period of diminishing economic expectations, poor economic performance, ‘the end of socialism’ had conquered all before it as a disorganised capitalism superseded the Keynesian interregnum of the West and arose from the rubble of the command economies in the East.

Empirically estimated politico-economic models which study the interdependence between the economy and the polity are confronted with competing models using the hard test of ex ante forecasts. The politico-economic models in which the government is taken to act in a political framework (it wants to be reelected and to put its ideology into action) yield superior forecasts compared to the models in which a ‘benevolent dictator’ government directly reacts to macroeconomic conditions. These results suggest that political influences are indeed important and can be adequately analysed in the framework of politico-economic models.

This paper explains the key themes and areas of debate covered by this symposium. While the focus of these papers is predominantly on the US higher education system – with just one paper from the context of a UK HEI – it is clear that some common themes and issues can be identified from the various case studies that are discussed. The question of how to define internationalisation; the process of how to encourage and measure internationalisation; and the design and delivery of an internationalised curriculum – particularly in relation to study abroad schemes – are themes that run across the five papers. Drawing from the work undertaken in this symposium, this paper concludes by suggesting a number of areas and questions that merit further investigation and evaluation.

Meals-on-wheels services in Ireland and elsewhere rely heavily on volunteers to operate. Meals-on-wheels services that draw extensively on volunteers’ contributions both benefit from and augment social capital within communities. Based on interviews with voluntary and paid meals-on-wheels coordinators and staff carried out in early 2007, this article examines: (1) the recruitment and retention of volunteers; (2) motivations for volunteering; (3) the nature of the contributions of volunteers; and, (4) the future role of volunteering within the service. The article argues that volunteerism in meals provision for older adults in Ireland is in crisis. The recruitment and retention of volunteers may be improved if service providers gain a better understanding of the motivations of volunteers and develop strategies to ensure that volunteers have an opportunity to engage in work that corresponds to their original motivations, which includes enhancing the social capital of their communities.