Ties that Bind? An empirical exploration of values in the voluntary sector: value importance, hierarchy and consensus in independent hospices in the UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation was to undertake a systematic exploration of voluntary sector values. Values are frequently referred to in published voluntary sector literature as operating at the core of voluntary organizations and being widely shared across the sector. Yet a review of this same literature found that there was little empirical or theoretical evidence on which to support these claims. This research was designed to address this shortfall. First, a well established theoretical values framework was outlined and the relationship between this framework and values commonly affiliated with the voluntary sector was established. Second, I undertook an empirical study of values held by chief executives and board chairs in independent hospices across the UK using the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) which is based on the this framework. Findings from the survey show that benevolence is a value which is held in high regard by both groups while others differ significantly. Differences in the mean scores for values such as tradition, achievement and self direction, reflect areas of potential value conflict between board chairs as ‘value holders’ and chief executives as ‘value implementers’. This theoretical framework and SVS survey was successfully applied across a wide number of hospice leaders to identify their values and the ‘ties that bind’. In the future this survey tool could be applied across organizations and the sector-at-large to enrich and verify the understanding and role of values in the voluntary sector.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".