激发你的正能量! 使整个企业建立积极、正向、阳光的文化

近期,"正能量"这个词在企业界非常风靡。它指一切可以使人们积极向上、促使人们不断追求、让生活变得圆满幸福的动力和感情。在经济不景气的大环境下,释放和挥洒正能量,让整个团队和企业家自身都能乐观向上、积极进取,勇于面对一切困难和挑战,对企业来说至关重要。那么,个人和团队的正能量如何激发和提升?如何将正能量充分而完整地释放出来,推动企业     

Building Strategic Technology Alliances for Teaching and Learning

There is a major need for higher education to confront intense competition, enhance academic programs to meet the challenges of this competition, and to develop new teaching and learning strategies to meet the demands of the global marketplace. Technology and the Internet are intended to break down the barriers of time and space and enable more students to participate and collaborate with faculty and other students. Critical thresholds must be met in order to use technology to communicate, collaborate, and transform teaching and learning. Strategic technology alliances establish a partnership between technology vendors and higher education that will achieve these thresholds to meet the teaching and learning needs of the 21st century student. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

基于服务化的制造企业与服务提供商的演化博弈分析

制造企业从传统制造向服务型制造转变是其转型升级、提升竞争力的重要路径之一。而企业在转型过程中受自身资源约束,往往需要服务提供商的配合。本文在构建制造企业与服务企业的收益函数基础上,建立两方非对称演化博弈模型,探究制造企业与服务提供商合作实施服务化策略的规律,并运用MATLAB仿真,深入研究相关因素对制造企业与服务提供商合作实施服务化策略的影响作用。研究表明,制造企业对服务提供商所提供服务的依赖度、服务化制造企业与未服务化制造企业间的差异化竞争度、双方合作前后的收益和成本、合作不成功造成的损失、收益的分配等因素是合作意愿的重要影响因素,且差异化竞争度比服务依赖度对合作意愿的影响作用更强烈、与收益相比博弈主体对成本的变化更敏感、服务提供商更易动摇合作的意愿、存在最优的收益分配系数使制造企业与服务提供商采取合作策略的意愿最强。     

A multi-user tool for enhancing the daily replanning and control of visits in home care services

The uncertainty associated with patients’ demands and operators’ availabilities is the main complexity factor in planning health care activities. Thus, activity replanning is required to react to the variations and to guarantee a good service quality. A particularly complex replanning activity is required in Home Care (HC) services, where any variation to the plans involves several decisions related, e.g. to nurses’ travels. Such complexity makes impossible for planners to integrate and to effectively handle all of the information in real time with the classical HC management tools. In this work, we design, implement and validate a new visualisation tool to support HC planners in handling the data, to better perform their replanning activities. The tool consists of a desk equipped with an interactive map, where up to four planners can manage the information together in a multilayer configuration. This solution allows to manage the high amount of data in a more effective and natural way than the tabular form of the current commercial tools, due to both the horizontal map visualisation and the multilayer information provisioning. The prototype has been tested with real HC planners and expert users; outcomes show the capability to meet the gap between planners and information complexity, and to provide adequate support for replanning HC activities.     

In search of rigor, relevance, and legitimacy: what drives the impact of publications?

In this study, we introduce the concept of legitimacy to the rigor-relevance debate and investigate empirically how rigor, relevance, and legitimacy are related to the process of knowledge dissemination within a research field. We argue that this analysis has been a missing piece in the debate on rigor and relevance when institutional logics about what constitutes both elements lead researchers to act according to what they perceive to be appropriate behavior in the research field. We draw on insights from the micro and macro levels of institutional theory to show how researchers aiming to bestow legitimacy on their own work conform to these “rules of the game”. Using meta-analytical techniques, we focus on the field of strategic entrepreneurship and analyze how rigor- and relevance-related characteristics of studies in this field are linked to their legitimacy and therefore to the impact they have in the research community.     

European community developments

The drive to construct a European market free of trade barriers by 1992 is now proceeding. The article below discusses some of the challenges and opportunities which this radical opening up of the European market will present to every industrial and commercial organisation, and how to prepare for them. It goes on to outline the establishment by the EEC of new networks of information agencies and consultancy services which are intended to enable firms, particularly small firms, to obtain the fullest information and support to enable them to expand into the new European market and to take advantage of EEC loans and grants for R&D, training and other business activities. In a final section the article discusses the opportunities for managers and higher educational institutions in the COMETT and ERASMUS Programmes as they become fully operational.     

Prevention,Adaptation, and Threat Denial: Flooding Experiences in the Netherlands

Delta areas such as the Netherlands are more and more at risk of future flooding due to global climate change. Motivating residents living in flood-prone areas to effectively cope with local floods may lead to minimization of material losses and loss of life. The aim of this research was to investigate whether the extent to which residents had been exposed to flooding in the past was a key factor in motivating residents to effectively cope with future flooding. We also focused on the psychological variables that mediated this relationship. We conducted a survey (N = 516) among flood victims and nonvictims. We assessed subjective experiences due to past flooding, affective and cognitive appraisals, and coping responses. Results show that victims reported stronger emotions (negative and positive), and the receipt of more social support due to past flooding than did nonvictims. Moreover, victims worry more about future flooding, perceive themselves as more vulnerable to future flooding, perceive the consequences of future flooding as more severe, and have stronger intentions to take adaptive actions in the future than nonvictims. Structural equation modeling reveals that the latter effect was fully mediated by specific experiences and appraisals. Insights into factors and processes that have the potential to motivate residents to effectively cope with future floods may prove helpful in developing interventions to inform residents how to act effectively in case of an imminent flood.     

Resilience of organisations and territories: The role of pivot firms

How can organisations and territories contribute to maintain a high level of innovation while at the same time adapting to a turbulent environment? We give an answer to this question by mobilizing the concept of resilience. In order to do this, we develop a conception of resilience based on two dimensions. First, an organisational dimension which refers to the capacity of an organisation to manage a disturbance to its environment and to develop a new pathway and, a territorial dimension which refers to the collective capacity of the actors to contribute to facilitate the development of territorial responses to external disturbances. We illustrate this double dimension of resilience by focusing on the role of pivot firm as major actor in a territory.     

Risk Assessment for Invasive Species

Although estimates vary, there is a broad agreement that invasive species impose major costs on the U.S. economy, as well as posing risks to nonmarket environmental goods and services and to public health. The domestic effort to manage risks associated with invasive species is coordinated by the National Invasive Species Council (NISC), which is charged with developing a science-based process to evaluate risks associated with the introduction and spread of invasive species. Various international agreements have also elevated invasive species issues onto the international policy agenda. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement establishes rights and obligations to adhere to the discipline of scientific risk assessment to ensure that SPS measures are applied only to the extent required to protect human, animal, and plant health, and do not constitute arbitrary or unjustifiable technical barriers to trade. Currently, however, the field of risk assessment for invasive species is in its infancy. Therefore, there is a pressing need to formulate scientifically sound methods and approaches in this emerging field, while acknowledging that the demand for situation-specific empirical evidence is likely to persistently outstrip supply. To begin addressing this need, the Society for Risk Analysis Ecological Risk Assessment Specialty Group and the Ecological Society of America Theoretical Ecology Section convened a joint workshop to provide independent scientific input into the formulation of methods and processes for risk assessment of invasive species to ensure that the analytic processes used domestically and internationally will be firmly rooted in sound scientific principles.     

Selection of resilient supply portfolio under disruption risks

This paper deals with the optimal selection and protection of part suppliers and order quantity allocation in a supply chain with disruption risks. The protection decisions include the selection of suppliers to be protected against disruptions and the allocation of emergency inventory of parts to be pre-positioned at the protected suppliers. The decision maker needs to decide which supplier to select for parts delivery and how to allocate orders quantity among the selected suppliers, and which of the selected suppliers to protect against disruptions and how to allocate emergency inventory among the protected suppliers. The problem objective is to achieve a minimum cost of suppliers protection, emergency inventory pre-positioning, parts ordering, purchasing, transportation and shortage and to mitigate the impact of disruption risks by minimizing the potential worst-case cost. As a result a resilient supply portfolio is identified with protected suppliers capable of supplying parts in the face of disruption events. A mixed integer programming approach is proposed to determine risk-neutral, risk-averse or mean-risk supply portfolios, with conditional value-at-risk applied to control the risk of worst-case cost. Numerical examples are presented and some computational results are reported.     

Strategic planning as an organizational change process—Some guidelines from practice

Learning to cope with the problems and uncertainties created by today's changing business environment is a task which faces ever company. Coping with the challenge of change is not just a question of adapting or reacting to the changes, it may also involve taking new initiatives in relation to the environment itself in order to exploit the opportunities which exist.A company may need to make fundamental adjustments to its philosophy, strategies, organization and practices in order to meet the newer demands of the environment. A prime difficulty is that companies are rarely in a position to start from scratch, they have existing organizational arrangements, power distributions, well established strategies and vested interests all of which tend to resist any kind of change which is likely to upset the ‘status quo’. They also have to overcome outdated beliefs and norms if they are to progress.This article considers the use of a modified approach to strategic planning as a mechanism for helping a company to acquire the norms, organization and strategies needed to cope with today's business environment. It is based on experience gained in helping to re-organize business enterprises engaged in textiles, steel tube manufacture, light engineering, distribution (world wide) and vehicle sales and servicing and also the Government of Jersey, Channel Islands.     

考虑灾民痛苦感知的应急避难所选址与物资分配优化

大规模灾害发生初期,应急物资往往不能及时供应,受灾群众因缺乏物资和服务产生痛苦感知。针对该问题,设计数值评定量表(NRS)构建痛苦函数,刻画灾民痛苦感知成本,将灾民感知因素纳入应急总成本的决策考量。提出以总社会成本(物流成本和痛苦心理成本之和)最小为应急救援目标,构建了一个考虑灾民疏散与重新安置、临时避难所选址和物资分配的集成优化模型。设计经典混合整数规划方法和改进的遗传算法对所构模型进行求解,并应用于海南威马逊台风案例。案例分析表明,模型和算法能有效解决考虑灾民痛苦的避难所选址与物资分配问题,揭示了随着受灾规模的增加和疏散时间的减少,遗传算法的求解结果优于经典求解方法。     

Size, book-to-market, and momentum during the business cycle

The Fama–French-Methodology (1993–1998) offers cross-sectional explanations of returns by taking the specially designed portfolios SMB and HML as additional factors. It is acknowledged that these factors are related to some forms of risk (they bear premia) which, by researchers is often proposed to be related to the uncertainty with respect to macroeconomic production and aggregate consumption. In more recent research a momentum factor is included in order to improve the explanatory power of the Fama–French-Model. We use data from business cycles 1926–2007 to show that SMB represents the risks related to the very early phase of an upswing while HML may be related to the uncertainty whether a business cycle will continue to gain depth and strength (or shifts back into recession). In contrast to SMB and HML, we do not find momentum to be related to risks associated with particular phases of the business cycle.     

Reconsidering ordinary and dynamic capabilities in strategic change

Dynamic capabilities research explains the ability of firms to respond to dynamic environments by reconfiguring inert and insufficiently flexible ordinary capabilities. However, more recent research ascribes the routines that constitute ordinary capabilities the ability to evolve endogenously. This study aims to develop dynamic capability research by increasing our understanding of the relations between and the roles played by ordinary and dynamic capabilities in producing purposeful responses to environmental dynamism. Drawing on longitudinal, qualitative data, we show how ordinary capabilities make important contributions to organizational responses to dynamic environments. Our findings pose challenges to key assumptions of extant dynamic capabilities research and allow us to explicate new roles for ordinary and dynamic capabilities, thus advancing the understanding of the relation between dynamic and ordinary capabilities and advancing understanding of one of the central issues in dynamic capabilities research: firms’ capacity to respond to changing environments.     

Joined-Up Government for Welfare Administration Reform in Norway

One of the largest public sector reforms in Norway is the welfare administrative reform of 2005. The aims are to get passive beneficiaries back into work and to make the administration more user-friendly, holistic and efficient. The aims are to be achieved by increasing the administration’s capacity to address “wicked issues” by cutting across existing policy fields and administrative levels. This joined-up-government approach poses three main challenges: 1) to get a merged central government agency to work, 2) to establish constructive cooperation between the central and local authorities and 3) to coordinate front-line services with user-oriented employment and welfare offices. The article shows that increasing the capacity of government to cut across existing policy fields and handle transboundary wicked issues are still struggling to be implemented. Cooperation between sectors is however easier to achieve than cooperation between levels. The joined-up-government-approach also tends to make accountability relations more ambiguous.     

Infrastructure Vulnerability Assessment Model (I-VAM)

Quantifying vulnerability to critical infrastructure has not been adequately addressed in the literature. Thus, the purpose of this article is to present a model that quantifies vulnerability. Vulnerability is defined as a measure of system susceptibility to threat scenarios. This article asserts that vulnerability is a condition of the system and it can be quantified using the Infrastructure Vulnerability Assessment Model (I-VAM). The model is presented and then applied to a medium-sized clean water system. The model requires subject matter experts (SMEs) to establish value functions and weights, and to assess protection measures of the system. Simulation is used to account for uncertainty in measurement, aggregate expert assessment, and to yield a vulnerability (Omega) density function. Results demonstrate that I-VAM is useful to decisionmakers who prefer quantification to qualitative treatment of vulnerability. I-VAM can be used to quantify vulnerability to other infrastructures, supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA), and distributed control systems (DCS).     

An Illustration of Matrix Formulation for a Probabilistic Risk-Assessment Study

A matrix formulation is described and numerically illustrated to calculate the public risk and identify the dominant contributors to it arising from the operation of a nuclear power plant. The matrix methodology is used as a superstructure in a probabilistic risk-assessment study to organize the calculated probabilities and to facilitate the analysis and documentation effort. The matrix structure is built to manipulate the large amount of data arising from event and fault-tree analysis and other supporting analyses. It lends itself easily to computerization and provides an analytic capability to identify dominant contributors to risk. It is a useful tool for aiding sensitivity analyses and also a potential formalism for standardization of risk-assessment studies. This tool is already used in the two recent comprehensive nuclear power plant risk-assessment efforts, the Zion and Indian Point Safety Studies.     

Forgoing the Flexibility of Real Options: When and Why Firms Commit to Investment Decisions*

Real option investments benefit from the flexibility associated with the possibility of abandonment should investment returns prove insufficient. But a firm also benefits from making commitments that engender reciprocal commitments on the part of employees and partner firms, and that allow the firm to address markets that exhibit increasing returns with the speed and scale required for success. I investigate the conditions under which large firms commit to investments in small firm equity alliances and acquisitions, and find that large firms commit to relationships that they initiate and that are subject to a high degree of rivalry. Uncertainty was not a significant predictor of the choice to commit. My findings point to the discretionary nature of the choice to commit and to firms' willingness to commit to investment decisions, despite high uncertainty, during periods of strong growth.     

The death of mourning: from Victorian crepe to the little black dress

Mourning is a natural response to loss. In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, in England and France, the bereaved was expected to follow a complex set of rules, particularly among the upper classes, with women more bound to adhere to these customs than men. Such customs involved wearing heavy, concealing, black costume and the use of black crepe veils. Special black caps and bonnets were worn with these ensembles. Widows were expected to wear these clothes up to four years after their loss to show their grief. Jewelry often made of dark black jet or the hair of the deceased was used. To remove the costume earlier was thought disrespectful to the deceased. Formal mourning culminated during the reign of Queen Victoria. Her prolonged grief over the death of her husband, Prince Albert, had much to do with the practice. During the succeeding Edwardian rule, the fashions began to be more functional and less restrictive, but the dress protocol for men and women, including that for the period of mourning, was still rigidly adhered to. When World War I began, many women joined the workforce. Most widows attempted to maintain the traditional conventions of mourning, but with an increase in the number of casualties, it became impractical for them to interrupt their work in order to observe the seclusion called for by formal mourning etiquette. Never had the code of mourning been less strictly applied than during this period. The mourning outfits of the time were modest and made of practical materials. Little jewelry and few other accessories were used. Certain aspects of traditional mourning were still followed, such as the use of jet beading, crepe trim, and widows' caps. However, the hemlines fell above the ankle, the veil was used to frame the face instead of cover it, and the v-neckline left the chest and neck bare. During the following decades, gradually the rules were relaxed further and it became acceptable for both sexes to dress in dark colors for up to a year after a death in the family.