IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/cysrev/v38y2014icp101-112.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An empirical typology of private child and family serving agencies

Author

Listed:
  • Chuang, Emmeline
  • Collins-Camargo, Crystal
  • McBeath, Bowen
  • Wells, Rebecca
  • Bunger, Alicia

Abstract

Differences in how services are organized and delivered can contribute significantly to variation in outcomes experienced by children and families. However, few comparative studies identify the strengths and limitations of alternative delivery system configurations. The current study provides the first empirical typology of private agencies involved with the formal child welfare system. Data collected in 2011 from a national sample of private agencies were used to classify agencies into five distinct groups based on internal management capacity, service diversification, integration, and policy advocacy. Findings reveal considerable heterogeneity in the population of private child and family serving agencies. Cross-group comparisons suggest that differences in agencies' strategic and structural characteristics correlated with agency directors' perceptions of different pressures in their external environment. Future research can use this typology to better understand local service systems and the extent to which different agency strategies affect performance and other outcomes. Such information has implications for public agency contracting decisions and could inform system-level assessment and planning of services for children and families.

Suggested Citation

  • Chuang, Emmeline & Collins-Camargo, Crystal & McBeath, Bowen & Wells, Rebecca & Bunger, Alicia, 2014. "An empirical typology of private child and family serving agencies," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 101-112.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:38:y:2014:i:c:p:101-112
    DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2014.01.016
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740914000292
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.childyouth.2014.01.016?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David J. Hall & Maurice A. Saias, 1980. "Strategy follows structure!," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 1(2), pages 149-163, April.
    2. McBeath, Bowen & Meezan, William, 2009. "Interorganizational disparities in foster care service provision," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 513-525, May.
    3. Donald C. Hambrick, 1982. "Environmental scanning and organizational strategy," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(2), pages 159-174, April.
    4. Richard L Daft & Juhani Sormunen & Don Parks, 1988. "Chief executive scanning, environmental characteristics, and company performance: An empirical study," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(2), pages 123-139, March.
    5. Courtney, Mark E. & Needell, Barbara & Wulczyn, Fred, 2004. "Unintended consequences of the push for accountability: the case of national child welfare performance standards," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 26(12), pages 1141-1154, December.
    6. McCullough, Charlotte & Schmitt, Barbara, 2000. "Managed care and privatization: Results of a national survey," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 117-130, February.
    7. Flaherty, Chris & Collins-Camargo, Crystal & Lee, Elizabeth, 2008. "Privatization of child welfare services: Lessons learned from experienced states regarding site readiness assessment and planning," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(7), pages 809-820, July.
    8. Brush, Candida G. & Chaganti, Radha, 1999. "Businesses without glamour? an analysis of resources on performance by size and age in small service and retail firms," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 14(3), pages 233-257, May.
    9. Susan C. Schneider & Arnoud De Meyer, 1991. "Interpreting and responding to strategic issues: The impact of national culture," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(4), pages 307-320, May.
    10. Stroul, Beth A. & Blau, Gary M., 2010. "Defining the system of care concept and philosophy: To update or not to update?," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 59-62, February.
    11. Detelin S. Elenkov, 1997. "Strategic Uncertainty And Environmental Scanning: The Case For Institutional Influences On Scanning Behavior," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(4), pages 287-302, April.
    12. Rodriguez, H.P. & Chen, J. & Owusu-Edusei, K. & Suh, A. & Bekemeier, B., 2012. "Local public health systems and the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 102(9), pages 1773-1781.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Collins-Camargo, Crystal & Hollie, Mary & McBeath, Bowen, 2014. "Private child and family serving agencies: Implications of national survey results for policy and managerial practice," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 142-149.
    2. Zinn, Andrew, 2015. "A typology of supervision in child welfare: Multilevel latent class and confirmatory analyses of caseworker–supervisor relationship type," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 98-110.
    3. Huggins-Hoyt, Kimberly Y. & Briggs, Harold E. & Mowbray, Orion & Allen, Junior Lloyd, 2019. "Privatization, racial disproportionality and disparity in child welfare: Outcomes for foster children of color," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 125-131.
    4. McBeath, Bowen & Jolles, Mónica Pérez & Chuang, Emmeline & Bunger, Alicia C. & Collins-Camargo, Crystal, 2014. "Organizational responsiveness to children and families: Findings from a national survey of nonprofit child welfare agencies," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 123-132.
    5. Russell, Luke T. & Ganong, Lawrence & Schramm, David G. & Warzinik, Kelly & Roach, Andrea & Doubledee, Rachael, 2016. "A comparison of intergovernmental and private agency collection of child support arrears," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 166-173.
    6. Chenhong Peng & Yik-Wa Law, 2023. "How Do Consumption Patterns Influence the Discrepancy Between Economic and Subjective Poverty?," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 24(4), pages 1579-1604, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Joel Bigley, 2018. "Assembling Frameworks for Strategic Innovation Enactment: Enhancing Transformational Agility through Situational Scanning," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 8(3), pages 1-20, July.
    2. Wayne H. Stewart Jr. & Ruth C. May & Arvind Kalia, 2008. "Environmental Perceptions and Scanning in the United States and India: Convergence in Entrepreneurial Information Seeking?," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 32(1), pages 83-106, January.
    3. Wai Fong Boh & Cheng‐Jen Huang & Anne Wu, 2020. "Investor experience and innovation performance: The mediating role of external cooperation," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(1), pages 124-151, January.
    4. Ritu Singh & Parikshit Charan & Manojit Chattopadhyay, 2019. "Dynamic capabilities and responsiveness: moderating effect of organization structures and environmental dynamism," DECISION: Official Journal of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Springer;Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, vol. 46(4), pages 301-319, December.
    5. Ebrahimi, Bahman P., 2000. "Environmental complexity, importance, variability and scanning behavior of Hong Kong executives," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 9(2), pages 253-270, April.
    6. McBeath, Bowen & Collins-Camargo, Crystal & Chuang, Emmeline & Wells, Rebecca & Bunger, Alicia C. & Jolles, Mónica Pérez, 2014. "New directions for research on the organizational and institutional context of child welfare agencies: Introduction to the symposium on “The Organizational and Managerial Context of Private Child Welf," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 83-92.
    7. Hsieh, Chia-Chun & Ma, Zhiming & Novoselov, Kirill E., 2019. "Accounting conservatism, business strategy, and ambiguity," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 41-55.
    8. Pettus, Michael L. & Kor, Yasemin Y. & Mahoney, Joseph T., 2007. "A Theory of Change in Turbulent Environments: The Sequencing of Dynamic Capabilities Following Industry Deregulation," Working Papers 07-0100, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Business.
    9. Ralf Meinhardt & Sebastian Junge & Martin Weiss, 2018. "The organizational environment with its measures, antecedents, and consequences: a review and research agenda," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 68(2), pages 195-235, April.
    10. D. Sue Schafer, 1991. "Level of Entrepreneurship and Scanning Source Usage in Very Small Businesses," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 15(2), pages 19-32, January.
    11. Andreea N. Kiss & Dirk Libaers & Pamela S. Barr & Tang Wang & Miles A. Zachary, 2020. "CEO cognitive flexibility, information search, and organizational ambidexterity," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(12), pages 2200-2233, December.
    12. Rizwan Ellahi & Noman Mahmood & Bazla Ali Khan, 2020. "Concept of Inclusive Optimal Performance (IOP): Theoretical and Conceptual understanding on the inclusive relationship between Internal Simultaneous Performance (ISP) and External Simultaneous Perform," IBT Journal of Business Studies (JBS), Ilma University, Faculty of Management Science, vol. 16(1), pages 101-124.
    13. Christian Engau & Volker Hoffmann, 2011. "Corporate response strategies to regulatory uncertainty: evidence from uncertainty about post-Kyoto regulation," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 44(1), pages 53-80, March.
    14. McBeath, Bowen & Briggs, Harold E. & Aisenberg, Eugene, 2009. "The role of child welfare managers in promoting agency performance through experimentation," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 112-118, January.
    15. Willem Smit, 2023. "Top Manager Heuristics Under Knightian Uncertainty: Control Versus Prediction and the Moderating Impact of Framing," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(5), pages 1302-1340, July.
    16. Natalia García-Carbonell & Fernando Martín-Alcázar & Gonzalo Sánchez-Gardey, 2021. "Facing crisis periods: a proposal for an integrative model of environmental scanning and strategic issue diagnosis," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 15(8), pages 2351-2376, November.
    17. van den Oever, Koen, 2017. "Uncharted waters : A behavioral approach to when, why and which organizational changes are adopted," Other publications TiSEM 0136c8c2-ecdd-4f82-8ca7-d, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    18. Murphy, Paul R. & Smith, Jonathan E., 1993. "An Empirical Analysis of Organizational Scanning Practices: A Survey of LTL General Freight Carriers," Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, Transportation Research Forum, vol. 33(1).
    19. Chenhall, Robert H., 2005. "Integrative strategic performance measurement systems, strategic alignment of manufacturing, learning and strategic outcomes: an exploratory study," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 30(5), pages 395-422, July.
    20. Steen, Julie A. & Smith, Sarahlin, 2012. "An organizational view of privatization: Is the private foster care agency superior to the public foster care agency?," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 851-858.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:38:y:2014:i:c:p:101-112. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/childyouth .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.