Somers, A. B. (2005). Shaping the balanced scorecard for use in UK social enterprises. Social Enterprise Journal, 1(1), 43-56.

Pages:  14

Selected Quotes:

"The initial assessment of performance measurement tools revealed that those currently being piloted for quality and impact measurement focus on external results rather than internal analysis of the organisation. However, as much of the value created by social enterprises occurs inside, many existing tools overlook this contribution. The study presented in this paper found that the original Balanced Scorecard could be adapted successfully for use with UK social enterprises. The SEBC places social goals at the top of the strategy map, aligns social and economic priorities, and organises activity around the most important driver(s) whilst also ensuring financial sustainability. In the SEBC, social goals are prioritised over financial goals; the financial perspective is amended to refer to financial sustainability, thus creating an indicator for revenue growth, cost reduction, and the costs of advocacy and stakeholder engagement; and the stakeholder perspective is widened. It was found that the SEBC has the potential to communicate performance to internal and external stakeholders and presents an opportunity to build credibility among investors, funders, customers, and stakeholders."

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Gibbon, J., & Affleck, A. (2008). Social enterprise resisting social accounting: reflecting on lived experiences. Social enterprise journal, 4(1), 41-56.

Pages: 16

Selected Quotes:
"The process of getting social enterprises to agree to take up SA took much longer than anticipated. It has been suggested that it is “a good sign” that trustees and managers have a “sceptical curiosity” towards performance improvement methods (Paton, 2003, p. 164). Social enterprises ought not to immediately reject all forms of social impact measurement including frameworks within measurement can be reported, but think about which method is appropriate to their organisation (www.proveandimprove.org). The VtD project offered only SA, and this research supports other work recognising that “embedding new knowledge requires time and space in the
organisation” (Somers, 2005, p. 54). The layered structure of certain social enterprises with a voluntary board, management, employees and volunteers could make it a more difficult to embed SA throughout the organisation. The results from the experiences of VtD participants and JSP would agree with earlier findings that acceptance by senior management and the board was an obstacle (Raynard and Murphy, 2000)"

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Edwards, G. (2010). Mixed-method approaches to social network analysis.

Pages: 30

Selected Quotes: "Social Network Analysis (SNA) has developed as an approach for studying ‘social relations’ rather than ‘individual attributes’ (Burt 1978). The ‘social network’ at the focus of inquiryconsists of a set of actors and a set of relations between them (Wasserman and Faust 1994). Quantitatively-driven SNA generates numerical data on social relations by using quantitative methods like surveys, and maps and measures the structural properties of social networks using sophisticated quantitative techniques (Carrington et al. 2005). Despite the current dominance of this approach, there is also a tradition of qualitatively-driven SNA (see Heath et al. 2009), which builds upon early anthropological network studies (Barnes 1954; Bott 1957; Mitchell 1969) and generates observational, narrative, and visual data on social relations by using ethnography (Trotter 1999), in-depth interviews (Pahl and Spencer 2004), and participatory mapping techniques (Emmel 2008)."

"The strengths of a mixed-method approach were reinforced in Crossley’s (2008b; 2009) other work on the networks of the early Punk scene in Manchester and London, and in Edwards and Crossley’s (2009) examination of the personal network of a militant suffragette. In both these studies, relational data were constructed from historical archives, including suffragette letters and speeches, and secondary sources like published auto-biographies and newspaper accounts. This historical material provided not only relational data for quantitative network analysis about the structure of these networks, but rich, narrative accounts about the meaning of ties over time and the perception of the network from those within it. Using historical letters as a source of data on suffragette networks was seen as particularly useful for example, as letters contained relational data in terms of ‘who was writing to whom’, and writers would further ‘talk their ties’ within the course of letter writing. Also, letters tend to be dated, allowing for an analysis of the evolution of ties over time (Edwards and Crossley 2009)"

"Constructing relational data from historical sources is not an unproblematic exercise, however. In particular, consistent criteria of judgment need to be applied in terms of what ‘counts’ as a tie (e.g. any contact? Proven friendship?), but this can be difficult to sustain across different historical sources which contain varying amounts of information on the quality and content of ties. For example, there are big variations in how social relationships are written about in newspapers, compared with letters, or autobiographies or diaries. The advantage of using historical and archival sources however is that they can be referred back to when considering just what the ties presented in a sociogram mean to various actors involved, even if there are inevitable gaps. The sociograms in this research therefore never ‘stand alone’, but are in constant dialogue with the qualitative sources from which they were constructed in the first place. It is also important to acknowledge that sociograms are representations of the relational data specific to certain types of interactions (in Edwards and Crossley’s case, political activism) and as contained within these surviving sources. They are ‘abstractions’ and models rather than the actual network of interaction (Peay 1980)."

"There are both practical and theoretical arguments for combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to network research which arise out of the review in section two. The practical strand of the argument seems to suggest that different research questions require different methods. In particular, research questions about the structure of social relations require quantitative (sociometric) methods, whereas research questions about the processes that produce networks, the perception and meaning of networks, or change over time, require qualitative methods. In the business literature, Monsted (1995) for example, argues that quantitative methods can enable research of stable, well established network structures, but are not appropriate for looking at the processes by which new network structures emerge (in Monsted’s case this is the process of networking involved in establishing a new business). Monsted suggests therefore that ‘certain methodologies limit the concept [of network] and change its contents to more structural and static characteristics’ (Monsted 1995, 194, my italics). He suggests further that some types of ties, in particular latent, very weak, or emerging ties, are not readily recorded in data matrices but are sometimes the most important ties for bringing about change7 . Monsted argues that quantitative SNA ‘blinds us’ to the more fluid aspects of networks and their potential for transformation (1995, 201)."

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DeVault, M. L. (2006). Introduction: What is institutional ethnography?. SOCIAL PROBLEMS-NEW YORK-, 53(3), 294.

Pages: 5

Selected Quotes: "'Institutional ethnography' is the label that has come to be used for an approach to investigation of the social that focuses on “textually-mediated social organization” (Smith 1990b). Developed and named by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1987) in the early 1980s, institutional ethnography has matured over the past several decades and spread not only internationally in sociology but through a number of other fields such as nursing, education, social work, planning, and so on."

"Institutional ethnographies are built from the examination of work processes and study of how they are coordinated, typically through texts and discourses of various sorts. Work activities are taken as the fundamental grounding of social life, and an institutional ethnography generally takes some particular experience (and associated work processes) as a “point of entry.” The work involved could be part of a paid job; it might fall into the broader field of unpaid or invisible work, as so much of women’s work does; or it might comprise the activities of some “client” group. In any case, there is recognition that institutional ideologies typically acknowledge some kinds of work and not others. Thus, the investigator attends to all of the work that’s done in the setting, and also notes which activities are recognized and accounted institutionally and which are not. Analysis proceeds by way of tracing the social relations people are drawn into through their work (with the term “social relations” taken in its Marxist sense to mean not relationships but connections among work processes). The point is to show how people in one place are aligning their activities with relevances produced elsewhere, in order to illuminate the forces that shape experience at the point of entry. Many institutional ethnographers have adopted a rhetoric of “mapping” to highlight the analytic goal of explication rather than theory building; the analysis is meant to be “usable” in the way that a map can be used to find one’s way."

"In organizational studies textual coordination may be quite focused—relatively easy to see—and institutional ethnographies of organizational work often focus on specific texts such as policy documents (Eastwood 2005; Ng 1995; Stooke 2003), funding proposals and planning documents (Grahame 1998; Turner 2001), the accounting records of bureaucratic workplaces (McCoy 1998; Mykhalovskiy 2001), or the charts and records of professional-client relations in health care, social work, and educational settings (André-Bechely 2005; Parada 2002; Rankin 2001). Life outside of these formal organizational sites—in households and family groupings, for example—is more diffusely and unevenly coordinated through texts and discourses (indeed, the closer alignment of some individuals or households than others with the coordinative logics of other institutions may be a primary mechanism for the reproduction of inequalities)."

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Diani, M. (1997). Social movements and social capital: a network perspective on movement outcomes. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2(2), 129-147.

Pages:  19

Selected Quotations:  "By "social capital" I mean ties which, while they do not necessarily imply the presence of collective identity, are however based on sentiments of mutual trust and mutual recognition among actors involved. The broader the range of social capital ties that emerge from a period of sustained mobilization, the greater a social movement's impact is expected to be."

"In other words, social movements do not merely rely upon existing social capital: they also reproduce it, and sometimes create new forms of it (Sirianni and Friedland 1995). We can regard their performance in this regard as an indicator of their social and political impact. This implies that we move our focus away from causality, which we have seen can be properly addressed only at the cost of restricting our investigations to specific movement organizations or protest campaigns, and concentrate instead on the preconditions of success, i.e., on the structural position occupied by movement actors after phases of sustained political and/or cultural challenge."

"On the other hand, movement actors' chances to be influential will also depend on the extent and strength of their linkages to their environment, in particular to political and cultural elites. In this perspective, social movement impact will be higher when the conclusion of a wave of collective action will see a greater integration of movement leaders and activists within elite circles (both nationally and locally), or simply within the associational networks of their societies, than was the case before collective action started. Movement impact will be similarly higher the stronger the ties of movement intellectuals to the social circles (mass media, corporate cultural operators, intelligentsia) where dominant interpretations of reality are generated."

Click here to read "Diani, M. (1997). Social movements and social capital: a network perspective on movement outcomes. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2(2), 129-147."
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Click here to watch "Mario Diani. Logic and Method of Social Network Analysis in Social Movement Research (NetGloW2014)"

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Small Changes in Teaching: The First 5 Minutes of Class (2016) by James M. Lang

Pages:  6

Selected Quotations:  "Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. "The material I want students to learn," he writes in his book Why Don’t Students Like School?, "is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting."

"Take advantage of that fact in the opening few minutes of class by asking students to "remind" you of the key points from the last session. Write them on the board — editing as you go and providing feedback to ensure the responses are accurate — to set up the day’s new material. Five minutes of that at the start of every class will prepare students to succeed on the memory retrieval they will need on quizzes and exams throughout the semester."

"Asking students to tell you what they already know (or think they know) has two important benefits. First, it lights up the parts of their brains that connect to your course material, so when they encounter new material, they will process it in a richer knowledge context. Second, it lets you know what preconceptions students have about your course material. That way, your lecture, discussion, or whatever you plan for class that day can specifically deal with and improve upon the knowledge actually in the room, rather than the knowledge you imagine to be in the room."

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Review: Dead Aid (By Dambisa Moyo) By Madeleine Bunting

Pages:  2

Selected Quotations:  "The danger is that this book will get more attention than it deserves. It has become fashionable to attack aid to Africa; an overdose of celebrity lobbying and compassion fatigue have prompted harsh critiques of what exactly aid has achieved in the past 50 years. Not all of the criticism has been unjustified - $300bn of aid has gone to Africa since 1970, yet average incomes across much of the continent have stagnated or fallen. Dead Aid offers a disastrous history of how aid was used as a tool of the cold war.

The problem is that this kind of analysis (much of which is now only of historical relevance) provides ammunition for those who are sceptical of international responsibilities and always keen to keep charity at home. And here they have the perfect protagonist to advance their arguments: an African woman who speaks their language."

Click here to read Review: Dead Aid (By Dambisa Moyo) By Madeleine Bunting

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The Death of International Development (2014) by Jason Hickel

Pages: 4

Selected Quotations:  "This crisis of confidence has become so acute that the development community is scrambling to respond. The Gates Foundation recently spearheaded a process called the Narrative Project with some of the world's biggest NGOs - Oxfam, Save the Children, One, etc. - in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of defection. They commissioned research to figure out what people thought about development, and their findings revealed a sea change in public attitudes. People are no longer moved by depictions of the poor as pitiable, voiceless "others" who need to be rescued by heroic white people - a racist narrative that has lost all its former currency; rather, they have come to see poverty as a matter of injustice."

Click here to read The Death of International Development by Jason Hickel

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Drummond, R., & Stoddard, A. (1991). Job satisfaction and work values. Psychological reports, 69(3f), 1116-1118.

Article pages: 3

"Summary. - The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship of work values with job satisfaction. 69 graduate and undergraduate female education majors working in the helping professions were administered the Work Values Scale and the Minnesota Job Satisfaction Scale. Scores on five values scales, measuring instrinsic values, were correlated significantly with scores on job satisfaction. The correlations indicated a negative relationship. Way of Life, Altruism, and Achievement were rated the highest work values by the group."

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