Local legislation and municipal law: The New York City experience

Local law represents a difficult terrain for reference service. Using the New York City experience as an example all the major sources of local law are examined, including city codes, local legislative proceedings, mayoralty orders and administrative regulations. Comparisons are made to state and federal law and omissions and difficulties in legal publishing on the local level are also noted. A bibliography of some of the major reference sources available on New York City legislation is included.     

Environmental scanning and forecasting in strategic planning—The state of the art

The objective of this paper is to shed some light on the practical state of the art of the environmental scanning and forecasting function in organizations. Planners were questioned through a multi-faceted survey and the findings supported the conclusion that organizations have not yet widely developed sophisticated systems and integrated their outputs into the strategic planning process.     

The New York State government documents: Their distribution and information retrieval

This article examines some of the problems involved with the distribution and bibliographic control of New York State government documents as experienced by the Library of the State University of New York at Stony Brook which has been a full depository library for New York state documents since 1965.     

组织环境的不确定性研究综述

不确定性作为组织理论研究中的一个重要概念一直在解释组织与环境的关系上占有重要的地位。本文首先探讨了环境不确定性概念的演化过程,然后对环境不确定性的来源和度量进行了总结,并在此基础对环境不确定性对组织的影响进行了归纳和分析,最后提出一些有待继续研究的方向和建议。     

Environmental impact analysis: A synthetic approach

The authors analyse approaches to environmental impact analysis each of which offers certain advantages. They suggest a new approach which synthesizes the best features of the available approaches and illustrates it with an example of an EIA of a coalfield.     

The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools

Parents gauge school quality in part by the level of student achievement and a school's racial and socioeconomic mix. The importance of school characteristics in the housing market can be seen in the jump in house prices at school district boundaries where peer characteristics change. The question of whether schools with more attractive peers are really better in a value‐added sense remains open, however. This paper uses a fuzzy regression‐discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effects of peer characteristics. Our design exploits admissions cutoffs at Boston and New York City's heavily over‐subscribed exam schools. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the least selective of these schools move from schools with scores near the bottom of the state SAT score distribution to schools with scores near the median. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the most selective of these schools move from above‐average schools to schools with students whose scores fall in the extreme upper tail. Exam school students can also expect to study with fewer nonwhite classmates than unsuccessful applicants. Our estimates suggest that the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.     

The reporting of grief by one newspaper of record for the U.S.: the New York Times

One source people can rely on for clues on how to grieve a loss is through accounts of such experiences reported in the mass media. This research examines how grief has been reported at one newspaper of record for the U.S.: The New York Times. Using theories of social construction and the sick role, this exploratory study attempts to observe whether grieving is portrayed by media as a social problem, particularly as a health or medical issue which can be treated and cured, and also discusses those who are not identified in the mourner role in newspaper reports.     

An examination of four housing policies for New York City

Using JW Forrester's Urban Dynamics city model as a starting point, an economic model of the housing market of New York City was constructed incorporating City data on housing stock, rent levels, operating expenses and return on capital. Several possible housing policies were examined over a range of model parameters. It was found that, as Forrester found, artificially restricting new housing construction and increasing slum housing demolition would serve to drive the poor from the City by making adequate housing unavailable but, in contrast to Forrester's conclusions, this would have little effect on upward mobility, the availability of jobs, or influx of labor population.     

Leadership, affect and emotions: A state of the science review

This paper presents a selective, qualitative review of affect, emotions, and emotional competencies in leadership theory and research published in ten management and organizational psychology journals, book chapters and special issues of journals from 1990 to 2010. Three distinct themes emerged from this review: (1) leader affect, follower affect and outcomes, (2) discrete emotions and leadership, and (3) emotional competencies and leadership. Within each of these themes, we examine theory (construct definition and theoretical foundation) and methods (design, measurement and context) and summarize key findings. Our findings indicate that the study of affect and emotions in leadership fares well with regard to construct definitions across the first two themes, but not in the last theme above. Design and measurement issues across all three themes are a little less advanced. One serious gap is in a lack of focus on levels-of-analysis theoretically and methodologically. Our review concludes with recommendations for future theoretical and empirical work in this area.     

The ebbing of municipal documents and the flow of public information in New York

Local documents are an important element for effective communication between city hall and the citizen. The City of New York attempted to improve both the physical output, and the cost-savings of municipal publications through the establishment of a Central Publications Office. In this effort control would have been exercised over the issuance of all public documents. The program foundered for several reasons. Nonetheless, this and all other municipalities must continue to show innovation and aggressiveness if they are to adequately keep open the flow of public information. A variety of other methods that supplement a local publications program are discussed and weighed.     

The state of decision support systems: A review

Many organisations are now realising that information technology can make a significant contribution to their operations. Recent developments in decision support software are such that the time may have come when information technology will contribute significantly to managerial decision-making. This paper considers these developments alongside the organisational issues involved in decision-making, and the current position of IT in many mature organisations. The conclusion is that the new range of decision support software, whilst opening up further areas for computerised decision support, is unlikely to compete successfully for corporate IT funds. Use of the new tools will be restricted to small, isolated applications.     

“中国管理学”发展中的范式问题

尽管中国管理学的研究可能要结合中国传统文化的某些特点,但中国管理学的研究目的并不是单纯为延续中国传统文化.中国管理学建立的初衷和目的,是在中国文化语境下研究组织如何达成管理目标及其效率问题.以这一目的而言,西方管理学主流范式目前是可以借鉴的.中国管理学借鉴这一成熟的范式,将它运用到本土文化语境下,就能得到快速发展.     

上海、香港和纽约股市的波动结构比较

为了比较不同市场中信息因素和行为因素对市场波动影响的差异,利用收益率分布主观模型,以投资者对小概率的反应偏差来衡量投资者有限理性程度,以资产内在价值波动代表资产信息,建立波动结构实证模型.利用1991年～2004年上证综指、香港恒生指数和道琼斯指数对上海、香港和纽约市场的波动结构进行比较分析,结果表明市场间的波动程度差异来自于行为因素差异,上海市场的市场波动和非理性程度在3个市场中相对最大,但与香港市场无显著差异,且上海市场呈现独有的新兴市场发展特征,行为因素对市场波动的影响与市场发达程度负相关,市场的过度波动主要源于行为因素.     

Quantitative Risk Assessment of the New York State Operated West Valley Radioactive Waste Disposal Area

This article is based on a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) that was performed on a radioactive waste disposal area within the Western New York Nuclear Service Center in western New York State. The QRA results were instrumental in the decision by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to support a strategy of in‐place management of the disposal area for another decade. The QRA methodology adopted for this first of a kind application was a scenario‐based approach in the framework of the triplet definition of risk (scenarios, likelihoods, consequences). The measure of risk is the frequency of occurrence of different levels of radiation dose to humans at prescribed locations. The risk from each scenario is determined by (1) the frequency of disruptive events or natural processes that cause a release of radioactive materials from the disposal area; (2) the physical form, quantity, and radionuclide content of the material that is released during each scenario; (3) distribution, dilution, and deposition of the released materials throughout the environment surrounding the disposal area; and (4) public exposure to the distributed material and the accumulated radiation dose from that exposure. The risks of the individual scenarios are assembled into a representation of the risk from the disposal area. In addition to quantifying the total risk to the public, the analysis ranks the importance of each contributing scenario, which facilitates taking corrective actions and implementing effective risk management. Perhaps most importantly, quantification of the uncertainties is an intrinsic part of the risk results. This approach to safety analysis has demonstrated many advantages of applying QRA principles to assessing the risk of facilities involving hazardous materials.     

New organizational designs for promoting creativity: A case study of virtual teams with anonymity and structured interactions

Companies organize teams to enhance creativity and innovation. Creativity refers to the generation of new and novel ideas, whereas innovation encompasses both idea generation and the commercialization of these ideas to add value to the enterprises. Standard teams are those, wherein participants meet face-to-face to develop new ideas and/or to commercialize them. Asynchronous virtual teams are those which allow participants to interact via digital means without face-to-face meetings. Asynchronous virtual teams are especially convenient for participants at global locations.The objective of this paper is to outline a third kind of teams, the virtual teams with anonymity and structured interactions (VTASIs), in which participants remain anonymous, follow a modified Delphi brainstorming process, communicate with one another asynchronously via electronic means, apply a set of streamlined idea generation strategies (the Combinatorial Heuristic and Normatively Generic Method), and conduct multiple rounds of structured interactions under the guidance of a knowledgeable team leader. Individual team member works alone, yet interacts indirectly with all others in a group setting.After having briefly reviewed the factors that are known to constraint the performance of both the standard and asynchronous virtual teams, this paper describes a study conducted in Spring 2009 Semester at University at Buffalo, involving eight VTASI teams of a total of 72 graduate engineering students who worked on generating new ideas for improving four specific projects. Key results are discussed.For global operations, the asynchronous virtual teams represent an improvement over the standard teams in terms of reach, costs, and execution. The VTASI teams advocated in this paper represent yet a further improvement over the Asynchronous virtual teams, and hold promise to be the most effective among the three types of teams in promoting creativity.     

Constructing the New Economy: A Discursive Perspective

The rise and fall of the 'New Economy' at the turn of the millennium, most visibly evidenced by the stellar rise and subsequent collapse of the Nasdaq composite index of technology stocks, represents one of the most significant business phenomena in recent times. This paper examines the 'New Economy' phenomenon as a culturally embedded discourse through an analysis of 133 print advertisements collected from the UK edition of the Financial Times between February and December 2000. It investigates the social construction of the concept 'New Economy' in a rapidly changing business environment. The contribution of the paper lies in the empirical study of discursive phenomena in late capitalist societies. From a discursive perspective, the 'New Economy' can be seen as a signifier that points to itself, whose form is its very content. The paper suggests the 'New Economy' must be understood in terms of its ability to accommodate multiple meanings, and it is this very ability which is profoundly ideological, in that it allows essentially socio-historical obsessions and anxieties (e.g. about novelty and change) to appear as seemingly 'natural' or logical behaviour.     

Robot: A case of the wrong name for the right technology

The fact that people in general are reluctant to change is well documented. This paper presents a case of cross-cultural technology transfer where employee resistance to the new technology was due to a conceptual difference between what they perceived that a robot was, and what a robot actually is.