Queuing mechanisms are commonly used in developing countries and in transition economies to allocate goods characterized by excess demand to citizens. Bribery and favoritism frequently accompany the use of such queuing mechanisms. Therefore, we first analyze a queuing model of resource allocation with bribery. Specifically, we determine the expected wait time of a citizen from the time he arriv…
We revisit seemingly settled questions of legislative organization, specifying a more general, realistic, informational model than previously. While theorists, unlike empiricists, have commonly inferred that the floor lacks incentive to allow committee influence via gatekeeping, we find otherwise. By assuming that (1) legislators know more about the status quo than alternative proposals, …
This Feature Topic contains four articles that address the determination of quality in qualitative research by exploring the use of criteria from the perspective of reviewers, editors, and/ or authors. In this introductory article, the authors assert that these explorations represent an important move away from employing listings of static criteria to adjudicate and develop qualitative research…
Within this article, the authors outline the political and institutional structures that work to formulate operating norms that govern what is considered to be ``acceptable'' qualitative organizational research, and the quality indicators attached to foundational, quasi-foundational, and nonfoundational research orientations. They argue that encouraging a plurality of methods and representation…
A study of qualitative researchers who have submitted and/or published their research in top-tier North American organizational and management journals reveals the evaluative criteria-in-use at these journals. Specifically, when asked to take the perspective of an (a) author, (b) evaluator (reviewer or editor), and (c) judge of the comparisons between qualitative and quantitative research, thre…
The last 30 years have seen a fragmentation of the radio station landscape in France. Since the 1980s, the liberalization of the French radio landscape has resulted in a strong trend towards the private youth music model of radio. But the process is neither a strict fragmentation by radio station or cluster of stations, nor a sharing out of listeners across all the nations. Such a structuring d…
The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of reflective counseling group supervision (RCGS) for military counselors. A convenience sampling method is adopted. Twenty-two military counselors participate in this study. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used for collecting and analyzing data. The results support our hypothesis that participants who received the RCGS …
Throughout the history of professional social work in the United States, the field has embraced a positivistic view of science, a view continuing to be held by the mainstream of the profession. All social workers, to some extent, embrace the fundamental tenets of positivism. However, the rhetoric espousing positivistic science has not been matched by corresponding actions on the part of our pro…
Recently, social work has been influenced by new forms of practice that hold promise for bringing practice and research together to strengthen the scientific knowledge base supporting social work intervention. The most recent new practice framework is evidence-based practice. However, although evidence-based practice has many qualities that might attract social workers to adopt it, use in pract…
The child welfare system in Germany has been described as family service-oriented because families in need are entitled to request family support services. If there is any form of child maltreatment, there may be some kind of mandatory state intervention to protect the child. Using trends in the number of children affected by maltreatment, the rate of maltreated children noted by the child prot…
This article elaborates on the centrality of interventions for social work practice and the importance of understanding the effects of interventions for a more efficient, harmless, transparent, and ethical social work practice. Low-bias research designs and meta-analyses are important means of generating the best possible evidence on what works in social work practice. An evidence-based practic…
Evidence-based practice (EBP) is an orientation to practice that values evidence as a resource for clinical decision making while recognizing that evidence alone is never sufficient to make a clinical decision. Critics of EBP typically ignore, negate, or misrepresent the role of practitioner thinking processes and expertise in clinical settings. The authors believe that, far from being a mechan…
The claim that professional social work should be based on scientific knowledge is many decades old with knowledge transfer usually moving in the direction from science to practice. The authors critique this model of knowledge transfer and support a hybrid one that places more of an emphasis on professional knowledge and action occurring in the real world. The authors particularly focus on the …
As evidence-based practice is increasingly accepted in social work, the challenges associated with its actual implementation become more apparent and pressing. This article identifies implementation as a critical issue for research; implementation itself must be better understood if evidence-based practices are to be used and resultant improvements to practice are to be realized. Social work ne…
The quest for making social work a discipline based entirely on empirical research findings is not new. In this article, the authors briefly review the field of social work in the United States during the past 100 years and discuss how the quest for the status of a profession forced the emphasis on empirical research. However, the authors claim that now and in the past, social work is a most co…
Recent technologies have reduced some of the major barriers to capturing, coding, and analyzing qualitative data from survey respondents. This has prompted a renewed interest in including open-ended questions on employee surveys and a corresponding need to better understand the potential biases of personnel who choose to provide comments. The present study used data from a climate survey (N = 6…
Recent developments in the literature provide us with a better understanding of the importance of and procedures for testing measurement equivalence in organizational research. However, whereas many constructs in organizational research are multidimensional and multifaceted, procedures for testing the measurement equivalence of higher-order constructs are not commonly known. This study first di…
Relational demography within groups, or an individual's demographic similarity to a group, is a type of cross-level theory labeled as an individual-within-the-group model. Previous researchers used three different approaches for measuring the core construct of demographic similarity: the difference score, interaction term, and perceptual approaches. This article provides an in-depth review of t…
Managers and scholars have always been ambivalent about the value of friendships among employees to the organization, although anyone who has worked in an office setting knows that working in a friendly place is much more preferable than the alternative. The major focus on office friendship has been on the negative side: Friendship can be related to nepotism; favoritism; gossip; displacement of…
This article brings to light the actual evaluation practices of reviewers when assessing qualitative manuscripts. The authors conducted the first empirical research entirely based on reviewer reports for a journal on management sciences over a 28-year period. Content analysis of 474 reviewer reports written by 56 reviewers identified 19 critical points and 10 criteria, making up a synthetic tab…