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The purpose of this paper is to explore unstably housed persons satisfaction with representative payee services.

Surveys were distributed through two different methods, which consisted of mailings and dispersal by program staff members.

Participants overwhelmingly reported that they were satisfied with representative payee services with 77 percent of the stand-alone housing participants and 86 percent of the scattered site participants reported being “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with representative payee services. Similarly, 92 percent of stand-alone participants and 82 percent of scattered site participants reported being satisfied with their abilities to care for their needs. The lowest reported satisfaction with the program was with the timeliness of getting spending checks, with 85 percent of participants being satisfied in the stand-alone location and only 63 percent of participants reporting satisfaction in the scattered site setting.

This research is limited by the fact that it is an evaluation of one program and does not have a comparison group. Additionally, clients self-selected to participate in the research and results are not generalizable. Future research should ascertain whether aspects of harm reduction and peer staff have an impact on client outcomes as well as representative payee satisfaction. The study was conducted in a metropolitan area in the Northeast USA, which includes the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and surrounding areas. Given that this region includes both city and suburban areas, it is likely the results are translatable to multiple geographic areas.

Results of this research indicate that use of harm reduction and peer staff could be factors in client satisfaction with representative payee services thereby increasing the possibility that clients will sign up for this service and receive the benefits of the program.

Having a representative payee program imposed on clients whether voluntarily or involuntarily can be an extremely anxiety provoking experience. Increasing satisfaction with this service will lend to improved quality of life for clients as well as improved relationships with providers which may lead to more engagement in care.

This paper provides a new perspective on representative payee programs since it shows positive satisfaction, as well as use of harm reduction and peer staff, which varies from previous studies.

Discusses an extensive research project relating to the quality and quantity of training available to life assurance representatives. The research was undertaken for LAUTRO, the industry′s self‐regulatory body, and provided background information prior to the issue of training and competence standards which will operate industry‐wide from April 1993. Based on data relating to over 140,000 life assurance representatives, pinpoints the extensive variety in training and recruitment practices between companies in the industry and between categories of representatives, even within one company. Outlines the arguments in favour of providing comprehensive training for life assurance representatives, while concluding that there may need to be flexible forms of training to take account of the differing characteristics of representatives and their companies.

Global marketing expansion is being widely promoted in both the professional and domestic communities. Domestic markets alone cannot provide the revenue and growth opportunities required by many business organizations. Many business firms want to sell in international markets but lack the expertise and financial resources to sell overseas effectively. In domestic markets, manufacturers’ representatives currently provide the sales function for many such firms, especially small manufacturers. Investigates the potential role that manufacturers’ representatives will play in global marketing expansion. A survey of 119 representative agencies was made to identify and study their experiences and/or perceptions about expanding their client base to world markets. Results show that 60 per cent of representatives were optimistic about their future opportunities in a global economy but were hardly aggressive (up to now) when it comes to entering world markets. Over 80 per cent of the representatives had enquiries from foreign principals, but only 47 per cent initiated the contacts. Moreover, only 23 per cent sought global markets for their current principals’ products.

This chapter analyses the private financial sector's policy responses, lending practices and various forms of engagement with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), communities and institutional clients involved in controversial commodity industries. The chapter demonstrates that secrecy plays a constitutive role in this engagement. For investment banks, client-confidentiality is the ultimate limit to transparency. At the same time, NGOs campaign to make public and reveal links between investment banks and clients in commodity industries. The chapter also explores techniques within the financial sector for the assessment of social and environmental risk. The chapter argues that these techniques combine both practices of uncertainty and practices of risk. For civil society organisations, NGOs and local communities, these techniques remain problematic, and various campaigns question both the robustness of the financial sector's social risk screening methods as well as the sustainability of the investments themselves.

Using data from the 2013 European Company Survey, this chapter operationalizes the representation gap as the desire for greater employee involvement in decision-making expressed by the representative of the leading employee representative body at the workplace. According to this measure, there is evidence of a substantial shortfall in employee involvement in the European Union, not dissimilar to that reported for the United States. The chapter proceeds to investigate how the size of this representation gap varies by type of representative structure, information provided by management, the resource base available to the representatives, and the status of trust between the parties. Perceived deficits are found to be smaller where workplace representation is via works councils rather than union bodies. Furthermore, the desire for greater involvement is reduced where information provided the employee representative on a range of establishment issues is judged satisfactory. A higher frequency of meetings with management also appears to mitigate the expressed desire for greater involvement. Each of these results is robust to estimation over different country clusters. However, unlike the other arguments, the conclusion that shortfalls in employee involvement representation are smaller under works councils than union bodies is nullified where trust in management is lacking.

This paper deals with the organizing of interactive product development. Developing products in interaction between firms may provide benefits in terms of specialization, increased innovation, and possibilities to perform development activities in parallel. However, the differentiation of product development among a number of firms also implies that various dependencies need to be dealt with across firm boundaries. How dependencies may be dealt with across firms is related to how product development is organized. The purpose of the paper is to explore dependencies and how interactive product development may be organized with regard to these dependencies.

The analytical framework is based on the industrial network approach, and deals with the development of products in terms of adaptation and combination of heterogeneous resources. There are dependencies between resources, that is, they are embedded, implying that no resource can be developed in isolation. The characteristics of and dependencies related to four main categories of resources (products, production facilities, business units and business relationships) provide a basis for analyzing the organizing of interactive product development.

Three in-depth case studies are used to explore the organizing of interactive product development with regard to dependencies. The first two cases are based on the development of the electrical system and the seats for Volvo’s large car platform (P2), performed in interaction with Delphi and Lear respectively. The third case is based on the interaction between Scania and Dayco/DFC Tech for the development of various pipes and hoses for a new truck model.

The analysis is focused on what different dependencies the firms considered and dealt with, and how product development was organized with regard to these dependencies. It is concluded that there is a complex and dynamic pattern of dependencies that reaches far beyond the developed product as well as beyond individual business units. To deal with these dependencies, development may be organized in teams where several business units are represented. This enables interaction between different business units’ resource collections, which is important for resource adaptation as well as for innovation. The delimiting and relating functions of the team boundary are elaborated upon and it is argued that also teams may be regarded as actors. It is also concluded that a modular product structure may entail a modular organization with regard to the teams, though, interaction between business units and teams is needed. A strong connection between the technical structure and the organizational structure is identified and it is concluded that policies regarding the technical structure (e.g. concerning “carry-over”) cannot be separated from the management of the organizational structure (e.g. the supplier structure). The organizing of product development is in itself a complex and dynamic task that needs to be subject to interaction between business units.

In general, factors influencing the level of female representation have been grouped into three broad areas – cultural/historical, socio-economic, and institutional (Matland, 1998). Of those subsumed under the institutional category, one factor has been cited repeatedly as being of particular significance in the success of women as a political representative, i.e., the role played by political parties as gatekeepers to parliamentary access (Rule, 2000; Norris, 1997; Lovenduski, 1993; Duverger, 1955; Christmas & Kjaer, forthcoming).

Companies spend millions on training their sales representatives. Thousands of textbooks have been published; thousands of training videos have been recorded. Hundreds of good pieces of advice and tips for sales representatives have been presented along with hundreds of sales methods and techniques. Probably the largest number of indicators and measures are applied in sales and distribution. On the one hand, this is a result of the fact that sales provide revenue and profit to a company; on the other hand, the concept of management by objectives turns out to be most effective in regional sales teams with reference to sales representatives and methods of performance evaluation. As a result, a whole array of indices has been created which enable the evaluation of sales representatives’ work and make it possible to manage goods distribution in a better way.

The indices presented in this chapter are rooted in the consumer market and are applied most often to this type of market (particularly in relation to fast-moving consumer goods at the level of retail trade). Nevertheless, many of them can be used on other markets (services, means of production) and at other trade levels (wholesale).

Although the values of many indices presented herein are usually calculated by market research agencies and delivered to companies in the form of synthetic results, we have placed the emphasis on the ability to determine them independently, both in descriptive and exemplifying terms. We consider it important to understand the genesis of indices and build the ability to interpret them on that basis. What is significant is that the indices can be interpreted differently; the same index may provide a different assessment of a product’s, brand or company’s position in the market depending on the parameters taken into account. Therefore, we strive to show a certain way of thinking rather than give ready-made recipes and cite ‘proven’ principles. Sales and distribution are dynamic phenomena, and limiting them within the framework of ‘one proper’ interpretation would be an intellectual abuse.