Confidentiality Constraints Within Mergers and Acquisitions: Gaining Insights Through a ‘Bubble’ Metaphor*

Mergers and acquisitions are extremely sensitive, both within and outside the organizations involved. Confidentiality agreements are therefore essential for allowing teams the ‘space’ to develop potential scenarios for future integration. Despite the importance of confidentiality in practice, the subject has received little coverage in the management literature. By adopting a case‐study approach, this research explores aspects of confidentiality in a four‐year post‐acquisition integration programme in a FTSE100 pharmaceutical company. The paper identifies a range of personal impacts on the signatories, as well as various dimensions of information transfer despite the agreement being in place. Through the use of a metaphor, the research suggests that a confidentiality agreement has many similarities with the properties and characteristics of a bubble. This bubble trope is used to enhance conceptual understanding of confidentiality constraints in an organizational‐change context. The paper concludes by suggesting some ‘key learnings’ in relation to using confidentiality agreements in strategic change programmes such as a merger or acquisition.     

Statutory Bodies: How Distinctive and In What Ways?

This article sets the organizational scene for the symposium. It does this by addressing statutory bodies, first in terms of their distinctive statutory foundations, and thereafter with reference to arrangements which they have in common with other types of organizations. Their distinctiveness results from the required legislative action, coupled with forms of political maneuvering and policy analysis. Their other features include their structures, ownership, work, legal power and relationships. Overall, they are legitimate, purposeful and responsible entities with a need to respond to various integration and autonomy arenas in which they are located.     

Making Sense of Organizations in Public Management: A Back-to-Basics Approach

This article addresses some basic facts and ideas about organizations as a way of concluding the symposium. It identifies different types of organizations in terms of their legal-structural characteristics, and considers aspects of their legal power, ownership, financing, staffing, and outsourcing. It ends with some suggestions for further related research on organizations.     

Organizations in the Public Sector in Hong Kong: Core Government, Quasi-Government and Private Bodies with Public Functions

Twenty-five years ago, the Hong Kong government was lauded as the model of a small, restricted government which was most suited to capitalist economic growth. Since that time, the government and the organizations which it has created have expanded to such an extent that there has been widespread concern that the public sector has grown too large. This article examines the reasons for the rapid growth in the size of the public sector, reflects on the organizational forms outside the traditional civil service that have been adopted, and analyzes the attempts that have been made to reduce the public bureaucracy by corporatizing and privatizing some of the services that it provides. Central to the argument presented is the question of whether an ideological commitment to small government or other functional and political factors have been the critical determinants of organizational change.     

Life cycle impact assessment: a challenge for risk analysts.

Modern technology, together with an advanced economy, can provide a good or service in myriad ways, giving us choices on what to produce and how to produce it. To make those choices more intelligently, society needs to know not only the market price of each alternative, but the associated health and environmental consequences. A fair comparison requires evaluating the consequences across the whole "life cycle"--from the extraction of raw materials and processing to manufacture/construction, use, and end-of-life--of each alternative. Focusing on only one stage (e.g., manufacture) of the life cycle is often misleading. Unfortunately, analysts and researchers still have only rudimentary tools to quantify the materials and energy inputs and the resulting damage to health and the environment. Life cycle assessment (LCA) provides an overall framework for identifying and evaluating these implications. Since the 1960s, considerable progress has been made in developing methods for LCA, especially in characterizing, qualitatively and quantitatively, environmental discharges. However, few of these analyses have attempted to assess the quantitative impact on the environment and health of material inputs and environmental discharges Risk analysis and LCA are connected closely. While risk analysis has characterized and quantified the health risks of exposure to a toxicant, the policy implications have not been clear. Inferring that an occupational or public health exposure carries a nontrivial risk is only the first step in formulating a policy response. A broader framework, including LCA, is needed to see which response is likely to lower the risk without creating high risks elsewhere. Even more important, LCA has floundered at the stage of translating an inventory of environmental discharges into estimates of impact on health and the environment. Without the impact analysis, policymakers must revert to some simple rule, such as that all discharges, regardless of which chemical, which medium, and where they are discharged, are equally toxic. Thus, risk analysts should seek LCA guidance in translating a risk analysis into policy conclusions or even advice to those at risk. LCA needs the help of RA to go beyond simplistic assumptions about the implications of a discharge inventory. We demonstrate the need and rationale for LCA, present a brief history of LCA, present examples of the application of this tool, note the limitations of LCA models, and present several methods for incorporating risk assessment into LCA. However, we warn the reader not to expect too much. A comprehensive comparison of the health and environmental implications of alternatives is beyond the state of the art. LCA is currently not able to provide risk analysts with detailed information on the chemical form and location of the environmental discharges that would allow detailed estimation of the risks to individuals due to toxicants. For example, a challenge for risk analysts is to estimate health and other risks where the location and chemical speciation are not characterized precisely. Providing valuable information to decisionmakers requires advances in both LCA and risk analysis. These two disciplines should be closely linked, since each has much to contribute to the other.     

Sexual Frequency and the Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions

Prior research found that lower sexual frequency and satisfaction were associated with higher rates of divorce, but little research had examined the role of sexual activity in the dissolution of cohabiting unions. We drew upon social exchange theory to hypothesize why sexual frequency is more important in cohabitation: (a) cohabitors' lower costs of finding sexual alternatives, (b) cohabitors' lower barriers to ending the relationship in the form of union‐specific economic and noneconomic capital, and (c) cohabitors' higher expectations for sexual activity. Using the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 5,902), we examined the relationship between sexual frequency and union dissolution. Results indicated that low sexual frequency was associated with significantly higher rates of union dissolution among cohabitors than married couples.     

Transition from school for youths with a disability: issues and challenges

Australian research has demonstrated that students with a disability are more likely to remain out of the full‐time workforce. These research findings have been the catalyst for a call for a comprehensive career development and transition planning approach for all students with disabilities in schools as well as for employers to rethink the role of people with disabilities in the workforce. In the Australian context the transition from school for individuals with a disability is complicated by a disparate and fragmented group of service agencies providing a range of services, including employment, supported accommodation, recreation and leisure pursuits, as well as training and placement, along with, at times, a deep‐seated prejudice towards people with disabilities in the market place. This paper reviews a number of issues and challenges confronting individuals with a disability making the transition from school to the post‐school environment.     

Demographic Influences on Risk Perceptions

Over the past 15 years, psychologists have empirically investigated how people perceive technological, consumer, and natural hazards. The psychometric-attitudes to risk being summarized by three factors: "dread," whether the risk is known, and personal exposure to the risk. The results have been used to suggest that certain types of hazards are viewed very differently from other hazards. The purpose of this paper is somewhat different, in that it investigates whether individual demographic characteristics influence psychometric perceptions of risk. This paper makes use of a large, professionally conducted, survey of a wide cross-section of the residents of metropolitan Chicago. One thousand adults were interviewed in a random-digit dial telephone survey, producing a useable dataset of about 800. Data on the three risk factors mentioned above were obtained on 7-point scales for four common hazards: aviation accidents, fires in the home, automobile accidents, and stomach cancer. The survey also collected demographic data on respondents'age, schooling, income, sex, and race. Regressions were then conducted to relate the demographic characteristics to risk perceptions. Some strong general conclusions can be drawn. The results suggest that women, people with lower levels of schooling and income, younger people, and blacks have more dread of hazards. The exception being age-related illnesses which, not unnaturally, are feared by older people. Unlike previous literature, we cannot substantiate the argument that these groups of people are less informed about hazards and thus less accepting of them. The most likely leading explanation of the relationship between demographic factors and dread of a hazard is the perceived personal exposure to the hazard. People with greater perceived exposure to a hazard are more fearful.     

Hybrid Processing of Stochastic and Subjective Uncertainty Data

Uncertainty analyses typically recognize separate stochastic and subjective sources of uncertainty, but do not systematically combine the two, although a large amount of data used in analyses is partly stochastic and partly subjective. We have developed methodology for mathematically combining stochastic and subjective sources of data uncertainty, based on new "hybrid number" approaches. The methodology can be utilized in conjunction with various traditional techniques, such as PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) and risk analysis decision support. Hybrid numbers have been previously examined as a potential method to represent combinations of stochastic and subjective information, but mathematical processing has been impeded by the requirements inherent in the structure of the numbers, e.g., there was no known way to multiply hybrids. In this paper, we will demonstrate methods for calculating with hybrid numbers that avoid the difficulties. By formulating a hybrid number as a probability distribution that is only fuzzily known, or alternatively as a random distribution of fuzzy numbers, methods are demonstrated for the full suite of arithmetic operations, permitting complex mathematical calculations. It will be shown how information about relative subjectivity (the ratio of subjective to stochastic knowledge about a particular datum) can be incorporated. Techniques are also developed for conveying uncertainty information visually, so that the stochastic and subjective components of the uncertainty, as well as the ratio of knowledge about the two, are readily apparent. The techniques demonstrated have the capability to process uncertainty information for independent, uncorrelated data, and for some types of dependent and correlated data. Example applications are suggested, illustrative problems are shown, and graphical results are given.     

Rehabilitation outlooks for rural Louisiana: educational developments,economic trends,and global perspectives

The objective of this article is to examine current medical, economic, and social trends affecting the provision of rehabilitation services for rural citizens with disabilities. While the population of interest is citizens of Louisiana, the concepts are applicable across all geographic boundaries. The article is a review of clinical practice, job placement alternatives, economic trends, and assessment of process applications. It is concluded numerous steps may be taken to enhance the availability and quality of services provided for rural citizens with disabilities: greater statistical inquiry into rural disability trends, increased incorporation of the Internet into all aspects of rural economic and educational developments, further development of distance learning, promotion of sensitivities towards rural cultures, and continued recruitment of rural allied and vocational rehabilitation professionals.