Institutional Dynamics in European Industrial Relations

Since the end of the 1970s, all European systems of industrial relations have experienced some common developments. In order to shed some light on this subject we look for common as well as specific changes within some selected systems of industrial relations in Europe. Therefore, we deal with the moving forces behind these tendencies which are, on the whole, global in character. We discuss the institutional responses to these general developments in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. These countries have been chosen because their industrial relations are generally seen as belonging to different types of systems. We conclude that many responses are still national specific and, in line with the distinguished national logics of collective action, to be defined respectively as the logic of contract, the logic of opposition and the logic of cooperation. At the end some reflections about the future of European industrial relations are presented.     

Information system design,organisational control and optimality

The paper identifies the importance of the Model of the User which is implicit in the development of formal information systems. The nature of the model is examined with particular reference to social variables; the relation between the criterion function and organisational goals is also discussed. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the implications for the nature of an appropriate methodology for systems development, and for its role in the organisation.     

Social forecasting: An integral part of corporate planning?

The increasing need for business to monitor the social dimensions of its environment and, hopefully make some forecasts of future trends has met with some constructive response from academics and consultants although not as yet on a very liberal scale. The published literature does not indicate to what extent companies in general attemp social forecasting and, where they do, the degree of integration which exists within their corporate planning systems. The authors, therefore, decided to survey a sample of British organizations to see if they could shed some light on these issues and thereby add some information to the excellent accounts of individual cases of social forecasting in, they suspect, the more advanced and atypical companies. The survey suggests a general picture of: awareness of the value of social forecasting; fairly widespread ignorance of the techniques which do exist, primitive though these may largely be; successful integration of social forecasting into the corporate planning systems of a substantial number of organizations but not in the majority.     

A model with shortage of places for educational and manpower systems

If in a system the size of some grades either has or is going to outgrow some desired value, it will be necessary to impose some restraints, in the form of capacity limits, to the size of the grades. In this paper a stochastic model in discrete time for such kind of educational and manpower systems is developed. Here, the flow of people to some grades will not be determined by the number of people able to be promoted or recruited, but by the number of vacancies in such grades. A set of equations is derived to obtain the equilibrium structure of such systems. A new technique is explained for treating steady-state control through recruitment in a Markov system.     

The Implementation of European Community Equality Legislation on Social Security: International Experiences*

Abstract. The article evaluates the EC Equality Directives in matters of social security adopted by the Council in 1978 and 1986. We ask whether these EC Directives are appropriate instruments to reduce manifest disadvantages women face in the national social security systems. In the first part, some features are singled out in the European pension systems which are particularly disadvantageous to women. In the second, the EC Directives are analysed with respect to their material scope and the underlying normative concepts. Thirdly, some problems with respect to the legislative implementation of the Social Security Directives in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany are discussed. It is argued that the Directives, in prescribing equal treatment, do not lead to substantial improvement for women.     

Analysis of Affordance,Time, and Adaptation in the Assessment of Industrial Control System Cybersecurity Risk

Industrial control systems increasingly use standard communication protocols and are increasingly connected to public networks—creating substantial cybersecurity risks, especially when used in critical infrastructures such as electricity and water distribution systems. Methods of assessing risk in such systems have recognized for some time the way in which the strategies of potential adversaries and risk managers interact in defining the risk to which such systems are exposed. But it is also important to consider the adaptations of the systems’ operators and other legitimate users to risk controls, adaptations that often appear to undermine these controls, or shift the risk from one part of a system to another. Unlike the case with adversarial risk analysis, the adaptations of system users are typically orthogonal to the objective of minimizing or maximizing risk in the system. We argue that this need to analyze potential adaptations to risk controls is true for risk problems more generally, and we develop a framework for incorporating such adaptations into an assessment process. The method is based on the principle of affordances, and we show how this can be incorporated in an iterative procedure based on raising the minimum period of risk materialization above some threshold. We apply the method in a case study of a small European utility provider and discuss the observations arising from this.     

The use of formal inventory control models: A preliminary survey

Of the many papers and texts on the subject of inventory control, relatively few report the successful implementation of systems based on formal mathematical models developed with specific objectives in mind. This could be considered rather strange in the light of the relatively high number of papers reporting the development of models for dealing with a multitude of different hypothetical situations, and the widespread availability of computer systems capable of exploiting such models. Various reasons for this anomaly can be put forward. This paper reports the results of a preliminary survey designed to investigate this more deeply, and draws some necessarily tentative conclusions relating to factors contributing to the successful application of such systems.     

Planning,information technology and the post-industrial society

In the course of attending exhibitions and conferences dealing with online systems and data bases and software packages, the author has collected information on the new technology of interest to the planner. He finds that in some cases design systems are being developed with no clear idea of planners' needs or of the planning function. He believes that it is necessary to establish a dialogue with the systems designer and information scientist to ensure that they are informed about the planning process, as otherwise the current breed of planners, and planning organizations, could be made obsolete and a new planner, au fait with the developing software, would take over the role.     

Expert knowledge,expert systems and commercial interests

Experience to date in building expert systems has brought a general realization of the complexity of the effort required for producing systems capable of operating on ‘real-world’ problems. The most successful knowledge-based/expert systems built to date, e.g. DENDRAL, MYCIN, PROSPECTOR and R1 have demonstrated that a considerable investment in time and dedication on the part of systems designers and experts is required to create a fully operational system. The great majority of development projects attempting to harness this new programming technology do not extend beyond creation of a prototype system largely due to lack of necessary resources, i.e. time, money and know-how. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the more important issues associated with development of expert systems and to provide an overview of the commercial and industrial efforts of putting expert systems to work. This paper should be of interest to those who have gained their knowledge of expert systems from the reading of non-specialist publications and thus may have been exposed to somewhat over enthusiastic accounts of the subject.     

Meeting the challenges of information systems planning

Strategic information systems planning (SISP) is the process of deciding the objectives of computing for an organization and then identifying the applications that the organization should computerize. SISP has become increasingly important as information systems have begun to play a more critical role in implementing business strategies. However, SISP is beset with problems that hinder organizations from determining their computing objectives and applications. This article identifies the impediments to SISP and offers some constructive actions for business planners to take to increase their chances of success. It also suggests that planners may face greater difficulties implementing their information systems plans than in initially creating them.     

A FRAMEWORK FOR THE SYSTEM DESIGN PROCESS1

Much discussion and writing about “systems” is often superficial, glib, and of a non-operational nature. This paper presents a cohesive framework for the process of system design which is felt to be of operational value in the design and management of systems. The framework's central tenet is that all systems are made up of entities and the relationships among the attributes of those entities; and that in designing systems, two processes are used, inclusion and structuring. Inclusion is concerned with what entities to include in a system and structuring with how their attributes are to be related. The system design process is directed or driven by a set (system) of criteria. Systems must be viewed with a time dimension: evolution will and should take place, both in the systems themselves and, more importantly, in the criteria that drive the design and evolution of those systems. In this framework, all problem solvers can usefully regard themselves as system designers. Presentation of the framework is followed by examples, discussion of the criteria set, system design tools, and some implications for teachers and practitioners.     

Formal strategic planning in the United States today.

The author sets out an appraisal of the state of corporate-strategic planning in the United States. He deals with the chronology of planning development before appraising the 'state of the art'. The appraisal utilizes the author's own set of criteria which are comprehensive and provide a framework against which individuals and companies can assess their own systems. The author deals in some detail with the nature of planning systems in different types of organization and provides valuable insight into the current state of strategic planning and a useful framework for critical analysis.     

Study tour examines health care systems in Germany, Holland--Part I: A comparison of three health care systems

In October 1992, the American College of Physician Executives sponsored a study tour to Berlin, Germany, and Amsterdam, Holland. Meetings were held with government officials, third-party payers, and providers, and onsite visits were made at hospitals, clinics, and academic centers. The purpose was to study the health care delivery system in those countries and to share some insights with the countries' hosts on the U.S. system. Beginning in this issue of the journal, 5 of the 10 study tour participants describe their impressions of the tour and of the health care systems in the countries that were visited. This first report compares the health care delivery systems of the United States, Germany, and Holland. In subsequent reports, the German and Dutch health care systems will be described in greater detail and the ability of the United States to adopt European health care systems will be assessed.     

Some initial specifications for a strategic information system

Much of the discussion and published literature on information systems to date has been about systems concerned with the internal administration and operations of an organization. Considerably less attention has been given to the information requirements of the more strategic managerial activities of planning and policy making, in which the future directions and objectives of the organization are decided. Internal information systems in many organizations have now grown to maturity. At the same time, managers have become aware of the need for an additional component of the overall information system to support their more strategic activities. This paper considers the broad characteristics of a strategic component of an organizational information system and derives some initial specifications from which a more comprehensive design can be developed.     

ON THE STABILITY OF DIFFERENT FINANCIAL SYSTEMS

An economy in which deposit‐taking banks of a Diamond and Dybvig style and a financial market coexist is modeled in a simple framework closely related to Diamond (1997). Solely depending on the fraction of naïve households who cannot efficiently invest directly in the corporate sector, two different types of financial systems emerge. With the fraction comparatively low, the evolving financial system can be interpreted as market‐oriented, whereas a high fraction brings about a bank‐dominated financial system. In market‐oriented systems, banks only provide naïve households with access to efficient investments; in bank‐dominated systems, banks' deposit contracts also offer some degree of liquidity insurance. Consequently, compared to market‐oriented financial systems, the household sector in bank‐dominated financial systems holds a larger portfolio fraction in deposits and a smaller part in direct investments. Analyzing the resilience of the different financial systems to various types of shocks shows that moderately bank‐dominated (or hybrid) financial systems are particularly fragile, because only in these systems do fire sales of assets by distressed banks cause a deterioration in asset prices that also precipitates other banks into crisis. (JEL: D52, E44, G10, G21)     

On network two stages variable returns to scale Dea models

Multiplicative decomposition of stages indices is shown to be consistent with Vrs network technologies. It is also shown why the primal dual correspondence breaks for serial network Vrs models. Different Vrs models can be associated with alternative transfer pricing systems, within the network. Multiplicative decomposition implies marginal cost pricing across stages. While other pricing systems (full cost) correspond to some of the known non-multiplicatively decomposable Vrs models, proposed in the literature. Stages indices, therefore, respond not only to efficiency, but also to the network’s distributive criteria across stages. The distributive contents of stage indices provide the key element for a solution to the problem of measuring scale efficiency in network systems. Multiplicative decomposable Vrs models can be extended to more general network systems, containing both parallel and in series structures. The cost of this generalisation is that efficiency indices are referred to modified stages, that is to stages that include dummy processes. In perspective, these results contribute to show how organisational aspects, such as transfer pricing systems, could be modelled once network technologies are approached from the multiplier (ratio) side.