The role of community: CSA member retention

PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to better understand motivations for CSA participation with an emphasis on membership retention. Food-related and community-related motivations for participation were examined.Design/methodology/approachCurrent and former CSA members across Wisconsin completed an online survey. Participants were grouped based on their CSA membership status. The four groups were as follows: Keepers (current members planning to renew their membership with their current farm); Switchers (current members planning to switch their membership to a new farm); Stoppers (current members planning to stop purchasing a CSA share from any farm) and Formers (former CSA members). The groups were compared through ANOVA.FindingsKeepers had stronger community-related motivations, and they had more favorable perceptions about communication with their CSA farm. Food-related motivations were reduced among Stoppers but were similar among Keepers and Switchers.Research limitations/implicationsThis study used online purposive sampling; thus, generalizability of results is limited. Switchers were identified as a distinct group that trends younger and appears more willing to change CSA farms but is committed to CSA because of food-related motivations.Practical implicationsInvestment by CSA farmers in community building may improve member retention. They may achieve this, in part, through communication with members that taps into factors related to community, such as offering support and making emotional connections. Offering exemplary product is broadly important to keep individuals committed to CSA, but it does not uniquely keep individuals invested in a particular CSA farm the way community-related motivations may.Originality/valueThis is the first analysis to highlight differences between individuals who plan to renew their membership with their current CSA farm, those who plan to switch CSA farms and those who plan to stop purchasing CSA.

Collaborative matrix factorization mechanism for group recommendation in big data-based library systems

Purpose Academic groups are designed specifically for researchers. A group recommendation procedure is essential to support scholars’ research-based social activities. However, group recommendation methods are rarely applied in online libraries and they often suffer from scalability problem in big data context. The purpose of this paper is to facilitate academic group activities in big data-based library systems by recommending satisfying articles for academic groups. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose a collaborative matrix factorization (CoMF) mechanism and implement paralleled CoMF under Hadoop framework. Its rationale is collaboratively decomposing researcher-article interaction matrix and group-article interaction matrix. Furthermore, three extended models of CoMF are proposed. Findings Empirical studies on CiteULike data set demonstrate that CoMF and three variants outperform baseline algorithms in terms of accuracy and robustness. The scalability evaluation of paralleled CoMF shows its potential value in scholarly big data environment. Research limitations/implications The proposed methods fill the gap of group-article recommendation in online libraries domain. The proposed methods have enriched the group recommendation methods by considering the interaction effects between groups and members. The proposed methods are the first attempt to implement group recommendation methods in big data contexts. Practical implications The proposed methods can improve group activity effectiveness and information shareability in academic groups, which are beneficial to membership retention and enhance the service quality of online library systems. Furthermore, the proposed methods are applicable to big data contexts and make library system services more efficient. Social implications The proposed methods have potential value to improve scientific collaboration and research innovation. Originality/value The proposed CoMF method is a novel group recommendation method based on the collaboratively decomposition of researcher-article matrix and group-article matrix. The process indirectly reflects the interaction between groups and members, which accords with actual library environments and provides an interpretable recommendation result.

The Retention of Expertise and Productivity in State Legislative Committees

Legislative committees rely on the expertise and experience of their members, but instability in committee systems threatens the enhancements in productivity associated with specialization. This can occur in two ways, both of which are more common in state legislative committees than they are in Congress. First, membership retention on committees is generally lower, even after accounting for differing levels of legislative turnover across legislatures. Second, many state legislative committee systems undergo reorganization between sessions, changing the policy jurisdictions, and, therefore, the applicability of members’ previously developed expertise. In this article, I examine the consequences of these two sources of committee instability on legislative output in 14 state legislatures. I find that both membership retention and jurisdictional reorganization significantly affect the number of bills processed through committees and the number of bills ultimately enacted. These linkages are also conditioned on several committee and institutional factors, particularly legislative turnover. Last, I find a weaker but discernible effect of membership retention on committees’ propensity to perform their gatekeeping role.

The Sheep-Stealing Dilemma

Among Kenyan Christians, the distinction between the terms ‘church member’ and ‘visitor’ is widely used, and occasional visits to non-membership churches are a common practice. In our ethnographic research in urban Kenya (Nairobi and Kisumu), we observed how, across denominations, church visits abide by similar, formalized, and ritualized codes. Through an analysis of the subtleties of this institutionalized practice, we expose a fundamental tension in which even as church leaders are expected to act in the spirit of Christian unity and avoid proselytizing visitors from other churches, they also seek to maximize the use of church visits as an effective instrument for recruiting new members. Investigating how churches manage this ‘sheep-stealing dilemma’, we analyze some institutional strategies that favour membership retention and attraction without formally undermining the social legitimacy of church visits.