Kinder Institute report says institutional barriers, competition limit cooperation

Nearly a quarter of a million people in the Houston area lack access to healthy food. A new report from Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research says collaboration between hunger-fighting organizations is necessary to address the problem.

“Challenges of Social Sector Systemic Collaborations: What’s Cookin’ in Houston’s Food Insecurity Space?” is authored by Doug Schuler, a Kinder Fellow and associate professor of business and public policy at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Balaji Koka, an associate professor of strategic management at the Jones School, examines the nature of collaborations between nonprofit, for-profit and governmental organizations working on food insecurity and food deserts in Houston.

Research shows that unequal access to healthy food is likely to blame for some of the negative health outcomes in the Houston metropolitan area.

“In Harris County alone, about 1 in 3 children is likely to be obese and about 1 in 3 children born since 2000 is likely to develop diabetes,” the report says. “These health challenges result in additional health care costs of $3 billion in just Harris County.”

Schuler and Koka found four major types of collaborations among these organizations: dominant player supply chain, where dominant organizations share a common agenda and have a self-reinforcing relationship; neighborhood wrap-around, which concentrates on directing persons who access pantries to receive other social services; umbrella, which involves large organizations that recruit smaller groups to deliver a bundle of services; and informational, which gathers information about delivery of services.

However, the authors said none of these forms of collaboration lead to the level of integration and coordination required over an extended period to solve such an important social issue.

The researchers said the biggest hurdles for accomplishing long-term positive change include institutional barriers stemming from funders, government policies and politics, and a mindset of competition in which organizations strive for resources and market dominance often at the expense of cooperation.

The researchers suggest the following:

• Funders should invest in efforts that focus beyond short-term, quickly visible outcomes.
• Funders should require recipients to report activities across multiple dimensions, including how they contribute to other organizations and what they receive outside of their own programs.
• Governments should make policies as flexible as possible to support collaborations between entities.
• Organizations should focus less on competition and more on a mindset of altruism and civic consciousness. If the goal is to address food insecurity, it should not matter which organization receives credit.
• Organizations should be willing to share knowledge and collaborate for the common good.

The authors hope their research will inspire funders, policymakers and other organizations to adopt policies, processes and mindsets that encourage collaborations and flexible operations while avoiding competitive actions.

The report was based on data collected from interviews, experiential field visits and focus groups of individuals living in one food desert neighborhood. The interviews and visits occurred over 33 months between 2015 and 2018.

The report is available online at https://kinder.rice.edu/.

For more information, contact Amy McCaig, senior media relations specialist at Rice, at 713-348-6777 or amym@rice.edu.

This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/.

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Photo link: https://news.rice.edu/files/2019/03/61925602_l-1tq528r.jpg

Photo credit: 123rf.com

Kinder Institute website: https://kinder.rice.edu/

Report link: https://kinder.rice.edu/research/challenges-social-sector-systemic-collaborations-whats-cookin-houstons-food-insecurity

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, one of the country’s top-ranked business schools, will make its South by Southwest (SXSW) debut during this year’s conference in Austin.

Rice Business is partnering with Texas Monthly to co-host a brand house on South Congress Avenue March 11-15. The store, located next to Allens Boots, will be transformed into a retro hotel-like space with special daily programming from the school’s professors and student musicians from Rice’s Shepherd School of Music. The space will have a concierge, bar and pop-up shopping from Stetson and Lucchese.

Rice Business professors presenting include Anastasiya Zavyalova, who will reveal startling truths about public-facing scandals from the NCAA to the Roman Catholic Church; Erik Dane, who will discuss how epiphanies happen, at work and in our personal lives, and what they tell us about the nature of problem solving; Doug Schuler, who will examine the challenges in social sector collaborations to address food insecurity; and Utpal Dholakia, a marketing expert who encourages people to buy and consume prudently to maximize pleasure.

The school’s dean, Peter Rodriguez, will speak at 2 p.m. March 13 on research into what live performances can tell us about the country’s economic future.

For more insights from and information about Rice Business faculty research, visit the school’s Rice Business Wisdom online ideas magazine at https://business.rice.edu/wisdom.

SXSW is an annual music, film and interactive media gathering that attracts hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to the Texas capital.

Members of the news media with questions about access to SXSW should go to https://www.sxsw.com/press.

Related materials:

Follow Rice Business via Twitter @Rice_Biz.

Follow Rice Business Wisdom via Twitter @RiceBizWisdom.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Based on research by Vikas Mittal, Yinlong Zhang and Lawrence Feick

• Negative word of mouth can tank a product, even if the criticism is unearned.
• In general, women are less likely than men to share unfavorable feedback far and wide.
• How you see yourself and how much you care about the effect your words have on others plays a big part in how likely you are to spread unfavorable word of mouth.

A new product just came out, backed by a high-voltage marketing strategy. But then something unexpected happened. Perhaps there was a glitch in the first run. Perhaps a competitor ran a negative ad campaign. But for whatever reason, the word on the street is that the product doesn’t live up to expectations. In a few months, negative word of mouth has devastated its chances of success.

How did this happen?

Understanding how word of mouth functions is critical to any firm’s chances of success. If your product is perceived as useful, word of mouth becomes a force multiplier for sales and enhanced reputation. If it’s seen as inferior, word of mouth travels in the opposite direction. But word of mouth isn’t always an accurate representation of a product’s strengths. New research shows that it can say more about the people doing the talking — about how they see themselves, how much they care about the impact of their actions on others, and whether they are male or female.

Rice Business Professor Vikas Mittal, along with Yinlong Zhang at UT San Antonio and Lawrence Feick at the University of Pittsburg, undertook a series of studies to investigate the different ways people spread negative feedback within (and outside of) their social circles, starting with the differences between women and men.

The researchers hypothesized that because women tend to focus on those closest to them, they’d be unlikely to bad-mouth a product to people outside their inner circle. Conversely, the team predicted that men, who tend to be more self-focused, would spread negative word of mouth to anyone who would listen.

Their research provides critical insights into how the grapevine can make or break a product. In three different studies, they discovered that women tended to be more concerned about spreading negative word of mouth if they believed that doing so would negatively affect their image in the eyes of others. The first study revealed that women were indeed less likely to voice their concerns about a product to casual acquaintances than to people they had known for some time. Men, on the other hand, tended to have no problem at all sharing negative feedback with everyone — close friends and casual acquaintances alike.

In the second study, the researchers investigated whether people who were less concerned about how others saw them would be more likely to spread negative word of mouth. Respondents were told first to think about how their actions would affect other people, then to consider only how their actions would affect themselves. The team found that women were much less likely to share unfavorable opinions when the others were casual acquaintances than close friends and relations. This effect was particularly high among women who were concerned about their own image; men, on the other hand, were unaffected by such concerns.

In the final study, the research team looked at how different kinds of self-image impacted people’s tendency to broadcast critical opinions of products. They were curious whether people who saw themselves as independent would be more willing to spread criticism than those who saw themselves as interdependent with others.

The results of this survey were consistent with the previous two: People who considered themselves independent were more likely to spread negative word of mouth to all acquaintances — close or casual — than those who saw themselves as inextricably linked with their communities.

What does this mean for us? If you want honest product reviews — especially critical opinions — check with a diverse group of friends: close and casual, male and female, independent and community-minded.

It’s important to note, however, that the study focused primarily on the likelihood that people would engage in negative word of mouth, not on the specific content of the criticisms they shared. Moreover, the digital age enables people to share their thoughts anonymously, which makes it harder to determine who is behind any critical feedback. And anonymity itself may make both men and women more uninhibited when it comes to talking trash about products — and thereby tanking their chances of success.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing and Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Zhang, Y., Feick L., Mittal, V. (2014). How Males and Females Differ in Their Likelihood of Transmitting Negative Word of Mouth. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(6): 1097-1108.

Howard Schultz, former chairman and CEO of Starbucks, will visit Rice University March 6 for a discussion on leadership and the lessons he has learned over the course of his life and business career. Schultz will also share insights from his biography, “From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America.”

The presentation, hosted by Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business and Baker Institute for Public Policy, is by invitation only. Members of the news media who want to attend should RSVP to Jeff Falk at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.

Who: Howard Schultz, former chairman and CEO of Starbucks, in a discussion with Mark Jones, professor of political science in Rice’s School of Social Sciences and fellow at the Baker Institute and Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

When: Wednesday, March 6, 6:30-7:30 p.m.

Where: Rice University, James A. Baker III Hall, Doré Commons, 6100 Main St.

For a map of Rice University’s campus with parking information, go to www.rice.edu/maps. Media should park in the Central Campus Garage (underground).

Follow the Jones Graduate School of Business on Twitter @Rice_Biz.

Follow the Baker Institute via Twitter @BakerInstitute.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Founded in 1993, Rice University’s Baker Institute ranks among the top three university-affiliated think tanks in the world. As a premier nonpartisan think tank, the institute conducts research on domestic and foreign policy issues with the goal of bridging the gap between the theory and practice of public policy. The institute’s strong track record of achievement reflects the work of its endowed fellows, Rice University faculty scholars and staff, coupled with its outreach to the Rice student body through fellow-taught classes — including a public policy course — and student leadership and internship programs. Learn more about the institute at www.bakerinstitute.org or on the institute’s blog, http://blogs.chron.com/bakerblog.