The Relationship Laws that Drive Success There are powerful but invisible laws that determine whether your relationships -with your clients, colleagues, and friends-will thrive or wither. These relationship laws are ever-present. When you align with them, the results are dramatic. Your network will grow rapidly. You'll be seen by clients as a trusted partner rather than an expense to be managed. And you'll find the people around you eager to help you succeed. When you ignore the laws, however, your efforts will falter. Relationship building will seem like very hard work. Power Relationship
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Purpose – Business to business (B2B) professional services depend on inter-firm cooperation for the co-creation of value. Such cooperation rarely happens overnight; it requires time for the relationship to develop. The purpose of this research is to investigate how different performance attributes of a professional service differ with the tenure of the relationship.
Design/methodology/approach – This exploratory study utilizes seven years of longitudinal customer data provided by a B2B professional service firm. The firm's customers assess satisfaction, value, loyalty, performance quality and their image of the firm after each project.
Findings – Data were classified into three tenure related groups – i.e. transactional, emergent and mature relationships. MANOVA and post hoc contrasts of the average attribute scores of the three groups were conducted. The data support the conclusion that high performance in professional services is evident in mature relationships.
Research limitations/implications – Data come from company archives and reflect the firm's efforts for tactical management of client relationships, not independent informant reports from randomly selected accounts.
Practical implications – Satisfaction surveys can be employed tactically by professional service providers to develop stronger relationships with their clients en route to co-creating extraordinary value from high levels of service quality and the client's high regard for the provider's professional qualities, such as expertise, customer focus and initiative.
Originality/value – To the authors' knowledge, no one has shown empirically the dramatic performance advantage stemming from relationships. This is important because theory suggests that customer relationships hold strategic value. Because they are immobile and inimitable, they represent a potential sustainable competitive advantage. However, relationships take time to develop. This begs the question of whether they are worth the time and effort to develop. In the professional service context, where buyer and seller seemingly must collaborate to co-create value, mature relationships indeed yield higher performance, compared to transactional and emerging relationships.
Dealing with the complex and discomforting 'grey 'area where sex, love and money collide, this book highlights the general materiality of everyday sex that takes place in all relationships. In doing so, it draws attention to and destigmatizes the transactional elements within many 'normative' partnerships - be they transnational, inter-ethnic or otherwise. Focusing on Cambodia, and on a subculture of young women employed in the tourist bar scene referred to as 'professional girlfriends', the book shows that the resulting transnational relationships between Cambodian women and t.
1. Professional girlfriends and transactional sex -- 2. Methods, ethics and intimate ethnography -- 3. Sex, work and agency -- 4. Politics, history and the sexual landscape -- 5. Sexuality, subculture and alternative kinship -- 6. Constructions of love and the materiality of everyday sex -- 7. Moving beyond sex work.
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The study explored principal-teacher relationships in four Junior High schools in the Sekyere South District of Ashanti in Ghana. One of the things that government, policy-makers and educators in Ghana rarely or never discuss is the value and significance of human connections - the relationships in schools. The focus of the study was to uncover the significance of developing and sustaining a high-quality relationship between principals and teachers for effective leadership and performance. Again, the study projects a broader conception of leadership, one that shifts away from the traditional thinking approach where the figure-head is seen as ultimately responsible for the school outcomes, to involve all staff members as a collective responsibility pro-cess. The qualitative case study adopted semi-structured one-to-one interviews to collect data from one principal and a teacher from each of the four schools selected. The data was analyzed through a content analysis approach. The results revealed that a quality exchange relationship between principals and teachers has a significant influence on cooperation, commitment and performance to both principals and teachers. The results also showed that working together in a cordial relationship and in a more democratic environment brings long-lasting dividend for the school and the learners. But these vital elements are mostly hampered by the mundane procedures, dictatorial decisions, strict supervision of the directorate of education and some principals. This had not only negatively affected the principals' and teachers' work roles and exchange relationship, but teaching and learning as well. These traditional behaviors have also created fear, pressure and resentment in teachers, and prevent them from sharing innovative ideas and being committed to school activities. The interpretation of this study was purely engrained in the respondents' context. The study recommends a further study in a larger scale to ascertain the affect and effect of the results or the hypothesis revealed. Perhaps it might be good if further discussion can be done on enhancing a quality exchange relationship among principals, teachers, circuit supervisors and the directorate of education. Effective leadership occurs as a result of building a quality relationship with the leader and the led.
chapter 1. Professional social work and the professional social work identity -- chapter 2. Being a social work professional -- chapter 3. Practising reflexivity : nurturing human practice -- chapter 4. Understanding contemporary social work : we need to talk about relationships -- chapter 5. The emotionally competent professional -- chapter 6. The new radical social work professional? -- chapter 7. Ethical tensions in social work -- chapter 8. Professionalism and practice-focused research -- chapter 9. Understanding continuing professional development -- chapter 10. Understanding and using supervision in social work -- chapter 11. Working with the media -- chapter 12. Fifty years of professional regulation in social work education -- chapter 13. Professional social work in the future
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AbstractPartnership has become a dominant concept in current thinking about the parent–professional relationship within a variety of interventions aimed at child welfare, including family support practice. However, despite the burgeoning policy and research attention, the meaning of partnership in practice remains unclear. Based on interviews with professionals in a family support intervention in Flanders (the Dutch‐speaking part of Belgium), this paper offers an insight into professionals' daily interactions with parents. The analysis reveals a tension between professionals' commitment towards parents on the one hand, and the way professionals take up this commitment in an expert role on the other. Consequences for professionals' relationships in child and family welfare interventions are discussed, as well as some implications for the realization of proper partnerships that acknowledge the power imbalances that exist in such partnerships.
Relationships are central to the profession of social work; relationships with allied disciplines, among professional social work organizations, and between classroom and field education. However, embedded within these relationships are historical tensions, and contemporary opportunities that can advance both the science of social work and the status of the profession. This article mainly highlights opportunities for advancing professional relationships between Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) and National Association of Social Work (NASW) and provides exemplars for strengthening relationships between the classroom, field education, and practicing social work professionals. We argue that deepening the connections between CSWE and NASW as well as the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR) require parallel efforts to link research, evidence-based practices, and the training and education of future social workers.
Few children nowadays are placed for adoption with no form of contact planned with birth relatives and it has become common professional practice to advocate direct rather than indirect contact. Practice has outstripped evidence in this respect and not enough is known about how contact arrangements actually work out, particularly for older children adopted from state care. Such children have often experienced neglect, and sometimes abuse, and have frequently been adopted without parental agreement. Based on research with a large number of adoptive parents, children and birth relatives, After
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Winner of the Everett Lee Hunt Award 2014.Winner of the NCA Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award 2013 from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet ResearchThe crisis of incivility plaguing today's workplace calls for an approach to communication that restores respect and integrity to interpersonal encounters in organizational life. Professional civility is a communicative virtue that protects and promotes productivity, one's place of employment, and persons with whom we carry out our tasks in the workplace. Drawn from the history of professions as dignified occupations providing valuable contributions to the human community, an understanding of civility as communicative virtue, and MacIntyre's treatment of practices, professional civility supports the «practice» of professions in contemporary organizations. A communicative ethic of professional civility requires attentiveness to the task at hand, support of an organization's mission, and appropriate relationships with others in the workplace. Professional civility fosters communicative habits of the heart that extend beyond the walls of the workplace, encouraging a return to the service ethic that remains an enduring legacy of the professions in the United States
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This book treats seriously one of the fundamental trends characterizing contemporary institutions--namely, the inability to establish a ground from which purpose and direction can be defined. It questions the core trope of "permanent change" and exposes its emptiness in a thorough and considered manner which enriches the way we question organizational orders. Bogdan Costea, Lancaster University, UK What does it mean to organize when the only established premise is that everything is transient? How is it possible for an organization to manage expectations based on the expectation of the unexpected? In this thought-provoking book Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen uses a unique combination of deconstruction, systems theory and discourse theory to critically discuss topics such as the management of feelings, partnerships as second order promises, and worklife-balance as an immune defense against over-socialized employees. He assesses the parallels between layoffs in intimate organizations and modern professional divorce discourses, and explores the dichotomy of double-bounded management commanding both do as I say and be autonomous. In so doing, Professor Andersen encourages the reader to look at relationships in the workplace in new ways. This unique book will prove invaluable for academics and students of human resource management, organizational behavior and critical management studies
