Profit generation or community resource? Studying attitudes to the operation of a post office by a charity

Purpose: For the past decade sub-post offices in the UK have been subject to intensive pressures to marketise their business. Actual or threatened closures have led charities to become involved in projects to preserve community post offices. This research investigated the attitudes of the trustees and staff involved in six charity-backed post offices (POs) to answer the research question ‘Do those involved with charity-backed POs prioritise profit generation or community resourcing?’ Prior work: There are few peer-reviewed studies of the potential of sub-post offices as sites for social enterprise, and none (that we could locate) on the role of charities. In this study, we contest Liu and Ko’s view (2014, p. 402) that the key task is “to install market-oriented managerial beliefs and values into the charity retailer’s decision-making”. We offer a counter view that trading can represent a further diversification of the innovations used to support charitable endeavours. Design / Methodology: This research adopted a neo-empiricist stance on the collection and interpretation of data. We treated ‘attitudes’ as real phenomena that are subjectively experienced and concretely expressed through activities in an objectively real world. Data was gathered from four or more people in each of six POs by sampling their services and conducting face to face interviews. The emphasis was on achieving verstehen – a rich understanding of a specific approach to social enterprise grounded in interpretations of human activity under conditions of naturalistic inquiry. Findings: We found that charity-backed POs were focussed on preserving POs as a community resource but articulated this by framing profitability in three distinct ways: as a PO generating a surplus that can be gifted or reallocated to a (parent) charity’s other activities; as an activity that offsets a charity’s fixed costs or enables or promotes its public benefit aims. Originality / Value: This is the first academic study to confront the complexities of differentiating ‘profitability’ from ‘profit generation’ in charity-backed POs. The subtleties in the articulation of this difference by study participants helped to account for the findings of the study and to make sense of the strong consensus that POs should be seen primarily as a community resource whilst responding to marketisation pressures

Entangling voluntarism, leisure time and political work: the governmentalities of neighbourhood planning in England

Neighbourhood planning was the first volunteer-led statutory planning tool to be created in the UK. Whilst it has provoked debate and critique covering numerous practical and theoretical aspects (Wargent and Parker, 2018), little attention has been paid to the actual experience and motives of the volunteers who spend their leisure time by volunteering to prepare a plan. Given the range of leisure activities that have been shaped in the context of a neo-liberalised policy environment we add to longstanding debates concerning the political nature of leisure and how neo-liberal policies require, and exploit, volunteer time and input while claiming to offer forms of empowerment. Qualitative data derived from neighbourhood plan volunteers is presented here to highlight the political work of neighbourhood planning, thus responding to calls to extend the analysis of the political in and through leisure (Rose et al, 2018). It is argued that neighbourhood planning pushes the boundaries of what can be legitimately asked of volunteers and expected in terms of delivering policy outcomes

The Impact of Neighbourhood Planning and Localism on House-building in England

© 2016 IBF, The Institute for Housing and Urban ResearchThe devolution of governance to communities is an integral aspect of the state strategy of localism but may conflict with a spatial restructuring dedicated to the liberalization of economic growth. In England, community opposition to house-building has been cited as one of the key factors in the decline in new housing supply over the last decade. The policy of neighbourhood planning was introduced there in 2011 to overcome this opposition by devolving limited powers to communities to influence development. It was anticipated that giving communities the right to draw up neighbourhood development plans would secure their compliance with a pro-growth agenda and increase the number of sites allocated for housing. This paper explores the impact of neighbourhood planning in England on housing development and analyses its lessons for the state strategy of localism. It argues that neighbourhood planning is emerging as the proponent of sustainability and social purpose in the English housing market, in conflict with the corporate interests of a liberalized housing development market

ULC: A File Block Placement and Replacement Protocol to Effectively Exploit

In a large client/server cluster system, file blocks are cached in a multi-level storage hierarchy. Existing file block placement and replacement are either conducted on each level of the hierarchy independently, or by applying an LRU policy on more than one levels. One major limitation of these schemes is that hierarchical locality of file blocks with nonuniform strengths is ignored, resulting in many unnecessary block misses, or additional communication overhead. To address this issue, we propose a client-directed, coordinated file block placement and replacement protocol, where the nonuniform strengths of locality are dynamically identified on the client level to direct servers on placing or replacing file blocks accordingly on different levels of the buffer caches. In other words, the caching layout of the blocks in the hierarchy dynamically matches the locality of block accesses. The effectiveness of our proposed protocol comes from achieving the following three goals: (1) The multi-level cache retains the same hit rate as that of a single level cache whose size equals to the aggregate size of multi-level caches. (2) The non-uniform locality strengths of blocks are fully exploited and ranked to fit into the physical multi-level caches. (3) The communication overheads between caches are also reduced. 1

Children living in shared custody arrangements: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging

This proposal focuses on multilocal families and more specifically on the lived experiences of children of separated parents, living between two fixed households (Gullov, Palludan, Winther, 2015). It is based on ongoing fieldwork conducted in Belgium with children aged 10 to 16 in the context of the ERC Starting Grant project “MobileKids”. In a comprehensive approach, I explore on the one hand, how the parents represent and design as more or less impermeable spatial, temporal and material contours of their respective dwellings. On the other hand, in response to these parents’ normative frameworks, I highlight how children construct their own reality by the study of the children’s multi-local way to inhabit (Morel-Brochet and Ortar, 2012). I focus on how children think and practice their various life spaces and how they appropriate their multi-residential situation as a way of life converting those spaces into one (dis)continuous meaningful and lived space (di Meo, 2012; Duchêne-Lacroix, 2013). In this purpose, I propose a preliminary typology of children’s way to inhabit multi-locally that includes their own representation of multi-locational configuration reflected through their belongings

Glasgow City Alcohol and Drug Partnership Prevention and Education Group: annual report 2024-2025

This report summarises the work of the Glasgow ADP Prevention and Education Group and its associated alcohol and drug prevention and education contracts during 2024–2025, highlighting key programmes, progress, and performance