Strategic quest and the search for the primal mother

This paper seeks to offer a Jungian perspective on the purposive behaviour of organizations and to throw light on the recent preoccupation with various organizational initiatives such as quality management, benchmarking, and even strategic approaches to HRD. The paper is unconventional in its approach in that it seeks to engage with the issues it discusses in both its form and its content. The purpose of the paper is to give attention to feminine aspects of the organization and, in particular, to the relegation of the feminine from the organization and, by implication, from social life. Here the feminine equates to the Jungian anima, the archetype of the male feminine. The ideas in the paper operate in the space between the organization as regulation and purposive rationality and the organization as living, physical bodies: between the Law and the Body. The form of the paper replicates these divisions and so text boxes run throughout the text to exemplify the captured otherness which is a central concern of the paper. The rationale for the text boxes is understated to allow the relationship between the rational and the physical to remain playful and ambivalent (see Baudrillard 1990). The paper is concerned with the questing behaviour of organizations and the expression of loss of the feminine, with the construction of masculine emblems that seek to substitute for the lost feminine, and with the impossibility of fulfilment.     

Service quality in the legal profession: a review

Research into the management of professional service quality, other than in health care, has been very limited, despite being particularly problematical. This paper focuses on the interactive, highly customized and labour-intensive service offered by solicitors to their commercial and corporate clients. The intangible nature of legal services, the natures of the professionals themselves and the firms within which they operate, and the perceptions of risk brought to the service by the client create additional difficulties in managing the service and measuring client perceptions of it. Yet solicitors must understand the requirements of the group of clients they seek to serve in order to design their service to match those needs. Clients have to assume the technical competence of their solicitor. Moreover, they seek confidence when buying legal services. Our research, therefore, sought to gain an understanding of the process used by commercial and corporate clients when evaluating legal service, and of the factors that are key drivers in the creation of confidence.     

Planar graphs without 4-cycles and close triangles are (2, 0, 0)-colorable

For a set of nonnegative integers \(c_1, \ldots , c_k\), a \((c_1, c_2,\ldots , c_k)\)-coloring of a graph G is a partition of V(G) into \(V_1, \ldots , V_k\) such that for every i, \(1\le i\le k, G[V_i]\) has maximum degree at most \(c_i\). We prove that all planar graphs without 4-cycles and no less than two edges between triangles are (2, 0, 0)-colorable.     

中美老人对专业帮助服务的态度比较研究

文章本着探索中国老人和美国老人对使用以咨询为基础的服务的不同态度的目的,以150位中国老人和145位美国老人为样本,采用"害怕亲近量表"调查了中美老年人对专业帮助服务态度的现状,比较了中美老年人对专业帮助服务所持态度的不同特点。结果发现:相较美国老人,中国老人对专业帮助的态度更不积极;不同的因素影响着中国老人和美国老人对帮助服务的信心。     

Comparing the Childrearing Lifetimes of Britain's Divorce-Revolution Men and Women

British men and women who became parents in the 1960s and 1970s were about to experience a new regime of marital instability. The effect of this on the balance between men's and women's contributions to childrearing is potentially very large. This study estimates the co-residential foundations of the new gender balance, focusing on the measurement of lifetime number of years of living with dependent-aged children. A variant of the family-status life table is used to combine two data sources: census panel observations of family status across three points ten years apart, and survey data on the years between censuses. One-quarter of women who became parents in the 1960s, and one-third of women who became parents in the 1970s, have been or will be a lone mother at some point. Lone parenthood is the main way in which women's childrearing lifetimes differ from men's, with seven and eight years respectively of lone motherhood per ever-lone-mother of the 1960s and 1970s parenting cohorts. Men's lone-father years and greater numbers of years spent in second families together provide an average of two years offset against women's lone mother years.