Planning for technology as a corporate resource: a strategic classification

This paper describes a classification of business identities based on the double dichotomy of doing vs thinking and product vs capacity. Successful business units, in the sense of social units having their own style and shared values, tend to fit into one of the four basic identities: License Giver, License Taker, Jobber or Consultant. Conversely, a mixture of these in one unit tends to lead to a lack of clear identity, organizational stress and lack of strategic impact. Related organizational dilemma's can be resolved by restructing the organization according to the four basic identities of the strategic classification.     

Planning with Preschoolers: City Mapping as a Planning Tool

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that children ‘have the right to be heard in matters affecting them’ (Article 12). Given that planning matters such as housing, transport, services and recreation provision affect children, it is necessary, therefore, for planners to engage with children. While planning has made considerable progress in working with older children, preschool children have been overlooked. Preschoolers are commonly seen as lacking the understanding necessary to comprehend the city scale. This paper presents a tile-based city-mapping method that demonstrates preschool children do understand city-scale features and relationships. Further, this method could be used in planning to advocate for and to engage with very young children in planning conversations.     

Environmental Performance as a Basis for Competitive Strategy: Opportunities and Threats

Increasingly, companies are considering environmental differentiation as a basis for their competitive strategy. As they formulate and implement their strategy, these companies must decide upon an appropriate device to signal a superior environmental performance to consumers and other stakeholders. This article examines three of these devices: Corporate environmental reports (CER), eco-labeling programs, and the ISO 14001 environmental management systems (EMS) standard. Specific challenges and limits associated with their use are discussed and insight into ways to overcome potential barriers are offered. One of these challenges relates to skepticisms, whereas another resides with the risk of imitation from competitors. Hence, companies must both build trusting relationships, and continuously maintain and develop resources and competencies that will enable them to sustain their competitive advantage over competitors.     

Managing Internet Product Returns: A Focus on Effective Service Operations

Product returns present one of the biggest operational challenges in the world of Internet retailing due to the sheer volume and cost of processing returns. But returns also represent an often‐missed opportunity to manage customer relationships and build customer loyalty to the retailer. Based upon data from a survey of 464 customers of five different Internet retailers, this article explores how firms' returns management systems affect loyalty intentions. We draw upon extant literature in the fields of Internet retailing, service quality, supply chain management, and customer satisfaction/loyalty to develop a model and a set of hypotheses relating ten latent variables in the service returns offering area. Our resulting structural equation model provides evidence of the impact of the returns management system upon customer loyalty intentions. The model also identifies effects on loyalty intentions arising from customers' satisfaction with, and perceptions of, the value of the returns service offered. These findings will help inform managers' choices regarding investment in the returns management system as an element of service quality improvement and a potential means of improved profitability. In addition, this study's empirical exploration and testing of a returns management model in the Internet retailing environment is a contribution to the currently underrepresented body of academic literature linking marketing and supply chain management in the context of end consumers.     

Diversity as a Basis for Shared Organizational Identity: The Norm Congruity Principle

Although the social identity approach is generally used to explain the negative consequences of diversity for the formation of a common identity within organizations, we propose that social identity processes can also lead employees to evaluate their differences in a positive way. We propose norm‐congruency as a central principle to understand these issues. We argue that when differences among team members in organizations are congruent with norms and expectations, diversity can become a basis for organizational identification.     

Performance as a Basis for Price-setting in the Capital Goods Industry:: Concepts and Empirical Evidence

This paper discusses a new pricing strategy, which leads to a certain variability of prices as the supplier offers to fix prices to performance parameters of long-lasting industrial goods. The underlying idea is to give a signal of the supplier’s competence and/or to conclude a contract, which contains additional value for both parties to the market. Some theoretical findings are applied to this concept and lead to 13 hypotheses, especially dealing with the perceptions of the buyer. Empirical research covered 131 German mechanical engineering companies. The data were used to evaluate the use of performance-based pricing and test the hypotheses. The results show a mixed picture. Uncertainty-reducing effects are well perceived while other assumptions could not be confirmed. Based on the results recommendations are developed on how and when to apply performance-based pricing.     

Planning Systems as Institutional Technologies: a Proposed Conceptualization and the Implications for Comparison

Abstract

Spatial planning systems have become the subject of much comparative research in recent years. This has resulted in very general classifications, while a definition of the subject of comparison remains vague. Any attempt at comparative evaluation has proved therefore to be difficult and controversial, impeding further theoretical and institutional progress. Against this backdrop, the present contribution is aimed as an effort towards conceptualization. The notion of ‘institutional technology’ is adopted in order to understand planning systems as specific social constructs, thus encompassing also the shaping of respective planning cultures. Implications for analysis and comparison are discussed.     

Reducing Bushfire Risk by Planning and Design: A Professional Focus

While links between planning and resilience are increasingly touted as fundamental to managing urban settlements, there are limited practical examples. This paper provides an example via regulatory processes, in parallel with the exercise of professional discretion. Using analysis of diverse urban planning proposals in bushfire prone areas of Victoria Australia, a systematic and site-specific approach for bushfire risk assessment is set out. A three-step process is proposed as a basis for delivery of design solutions to manage bushfire risks. The paper concludes by arguing that professional judgement is a fundamental part of bushfire risk reduction within a regulatory framework.     

Understanding the Ecological Validity of Relying Practice as a Basis for Risk Identification

Understanding the reliability of hazardous organizations and their protective systems is central to understanding the risk they produce. Work on “high reliability organization” has done much to illuminate the conditions in which social organization becomes reliable in highly demanding conditions. But risk depends just as much on how relying entities do their relying as it does on the reliability of the entities they rely on. Patterns of relying are often opaque in sociotechnical systems, and processes of relying and being relied on are mutually influencing in complex ways, so the relationship between relying and risk may not be at all obvious. This study was an attempt to study relying as a social practice, in particular analyzing how it had ecological validity in a social organization—how practice was responsive to the conditions in which it took place. This involved observational fieldwork and inductive, qualitative analysis on an offshore oil and gas production platform that was nearing the end of its design life and undergoing refurbishment. The analysis produced four main categories of ecological validity: responsiveness to formal organization, responsiveness to situational contingency, responsiveness to information asymmetry, and responsiveness to sociomateriality. This ecological validity of relying practice should be a primary focus of risk identification, assessing how relying can become mismatched to reliability in certain ways, both when relying practice is responsive to circumstances and when it is not.     

BSE Risk Assessment as a Basis for Updating French Screening Policy

The current French bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) surveillance system, based on rapid testing of all cattle over 24 months of age and on clinical diagnosis, detects all clinical cases and some preclinical cases of BSE. Several indicators point to a marked shrinkage of the French BSE epidemic in recent years, owing to risk reduction measures. Meat and bone meal, the only known vector of the BSE agent, was banned in feed for all farmed species in November 2000. Thus the surveillance system may be relaxed. The objective of this risk assessment study was to provide information for decisionmakers on the minimum age at which healthy and high-risk cattle now need to be screened with rapid tests. For this purpose, we used the back-calculation method to project the course of the BSE epidemic. We examined the predicted patterns of the number and age distribution of cases of BSE that would be detected by the different existing surveillance streams. Various theoretical sensitivities of rapid tests were explored. Assuming that feed-borne sources of infection no longer exist, and that BSE does not occur spontaneously, our models suggest that it would have been possible to raise the minimum age for rapid tests to 66 months in early 2006, whereas theoretical reasoning, based on the assumption that the total meat and bone meal ban was effective in November 2001, suggests that this age cutoff could only be raised to 48 months in early 2006. These results only apply to cattle born and bred in France. If the situation remains unchanged, the age cutoff could be raised incrementally each year.     

Workers’ Perception of Chemical Risks: A Focus Group Study

Workers’ perceptions with respect to health and safety at work are rarely taken into account when considering the development of prevention programs. The aim of this study was to explore workers’ perceptions of chemical risks at the workplace, in order to investigate the prerequisites for a workplace health program. A qualitative study was conducted involving seven focus groups of 5–10 participants (blue‐collar workers) each. All groups were homogeneous in terms of sex, work status, language, and company membership. Results showed that several factors have an important influence on workers’ perception of chemical risks. Workers assess risks by means of both sensory and empirical diagnosis and are concerned about the long‐term health consequences. They perceive the threat of chemical risks as high. Despite this, they are resigned to accepting the risks. Existing formal sources of information are rarely consulted because they are judged to be difficult to understand and not user friendly. Instead, workers tend to obtain information from informal sources. Communication problems with and lack of trust in prevention advisers and hierarchy are frequently mentioned. Workers feel that their specific knowledge of their working conditions and their proposals for practical, cost‐effective solutions to improve health and safety at the workplace are insufficiently taken into account. The use of focus groups yielded a useful insight into workers’ perceptions of chemical risks. Our findings suggest that training programs for prevention advisers should include topics such as understanding of workers’ perceptions, usefulness of a participatory approach, and communication and education skills.     

Workplace bullying as predicted by non-prototypicality,group identification and norms: a self-categorisation perspective

ABSTRACT

Research and theory on deviance in work groups suggest that non-prototypical members risk devaluation and mistreatment by their peers. Drawing on the self-categorisation theory, we propose and test a contextual model to explain workplace bullying from a target perspective, using non-prototypicality as a predictor and social identification and anti-bullying norms at the work group level as two- and three-way cross-level moderators. Multilevel modelling and a sample of employees from the university sector in the Low Lands (n?=?572) was employed. In line with our first hypothesis, we found that risk of exposure to workplace bullying is particularly high for non-prototypical work group members. We also hypothesised that work group social identification would facilitate bullying of non-prototypical members, while anti-bullying norms would buffer it. Results showed, however, that both conditions acted as buffering moderators on the main association. Lastly, the combination of the two also entailed a cross-level three-way interaction effect, showing that non-prototypicality is associated with bullying only in work groups characterised by low levels on both moderators. These novel and partly unexpected results demonstrate the relevance and significance of group level explanations for workplace bullying, holding significant implications for scholars and practitioners.     

Individual Performance as a Function of Group Contingencies and Group Size

The effects of small group incentive plans on the individual performance of a simple assembly task were studied in a simulated work environment. Subjects were 28 college students who worked under an individual monetaty incentive system, and then under a group incentive system in groups of two, four, five or nine. Following the group incentive condition, subjects again worked under the individual incentive system. Individual performance did not change significantly when subjects were exposed to the group incentive svstem nor did overall group productivitv differ as a function of group size. However, performance variability across individuals in the groups was dependent upon group size, with the greatest variability occurring in the groups of two, and the least variability occurring in the group of nine.     

把教育作为转变领导干部作风的基础——学习胡锦涛同志在中央纪委第七次全体会议上的重要讲话

胡锦涛同志在中央纪委第七次全体会议上的重要讲话,深刻阐述了新的历史条件下加强领导干部作风建设的重要性和紧迫性,大力倡导八个方面的良好风气,要求各级党组织切实把加强领导干部作风建设放在更加突出的位置,下决心抓紧、抓实、抓出成效。胡锦涛同志强调,必须进一步抓好领导干部教育,真正做到为民、务实、清廉。深刻领会和贯彻落实这一重要精神,对于转变领导干部作风、加强党的建设,具有重要意义。     

Improving Health Risk Assessment as a Basis for Public Health Decisions in the 21st Century

One-fifth of the way through the 21st century, a commonality of factors with those of the last 50 years may offer the opportunity to address unfinished business and current challenges. The recommendations include: (1) Resisting the tendency to oversimplify scientific assessments by reliance on single disciplines in lieu of clear weight-of-evidence expressions, and on single quantitative point estimates of health protective values for policy decisions; (2) Improving the separation of science and judgment in risk assessment through the use of clear expressions of the range of judgments that bracket protective quantitative levels for public health protection; (3) Use of comparative risk to achieve the greatest gains in health and the environment; and (4) Where applicable, reversal of the risk assessment and risk management steps to facilitate timely and substantive improvements in public health and the environment. Lessons learned and improvements in the risk assessment process are applied to the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century such as, pandemics and climate change. The beneficial application of the risk assessment and risk management paradigm to ensure timely research with consistency and transparency of assessments is presented. Institutions with mandated stability and leadership roles at the national and international levels are essential to ensure timely interdisciplinary scientific assessment at the interface with public policy as a basis for organized policy decisions, to meet time sensitive goals, and to inform the public.     

Risk and Planning in Agriculture: How Planning on Dairy Farms in Ireland Is Affected by Farmers’ Regulatory Focus

This article examines how planning on dairy farms is affected by farmers' motivation. It argues that farmers' choice of expansion strategies can be specified in terms of risk decision making and understood as either prevention‐focused or promotion‐focused motivation. This relationship was empirically examined using mediated regression analyses where promotion/prevention focus was the independent variable and its effect on total milk production via planned expansion strategies was examined. The results indicate that promotion focus among farmers has an indirect effect on farm expansion via planning strategies that incur greater risk to the farm enterprise. Regulatory focus on the part of farmers has an influence on farmers' planning and risk management activities and must be accounted for in the design and implementation of policy and risk management tools in agriculture.