Ackoff's Fables revisited: stories to inform operational research practice

This paper considers Ackoff's Fables, a set of short stories published by Ackoff in 1978 as guides to creative problem solving. The paper argues that storytelling of this kind contributes usefully to management and MS/OR education, before addressing how such Fables might be interpreted. It is demonstrated, using one of Ackoff's Fables, The Smart Jackass, for illustrative purposes, that interpretation of even apparently straightforward stories such as these is not unambiguous. The Fables can be interpreted in a multitude of different and sometimes contradictory ways, and the truths they might contain are not self-evident. Yet, as the basis for discussion, they still have much to offer as educational tools. The paper concludes with a discussion of literal truth in stories, and presents a classification of story types according to their relationship to literal truth.     

Domestic Credit and Diversification of Manufactured Exports from Developing Countries

This article uses panel data to analyse the effect of domestic credit on the diversification of manufactured exports from developing countries. Given the evidence that export variety of manufactured goods affects productivity positively, the results imply that policy reforms that improve access to domestic credit for firms can raise productivity and hence economic growth in many poor countries. In addition, the results also show that building infrastructure and implementing reforms in governance that improve the quality of government regulations are important for encouraging diversification of manufactured export products in developing countries.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY

This essay is about the fate of Cultural Studies in the new context of the market-based reform of Higher Education and the resurgence of liberal capitalism. As the global corporate demand for educational services increases, universities are becoming more like businesses. The trend toward a corporate style university can be seen in the way that its educational mission is being subordinated to the criteria of the flexible labour market. Neo-Liberal forms of governance introduce economic calculation into what were previously social and bureaucratic domains. The emergence of Cultural Studies in the 1960s was a challenge from the New Left to both the humanities and to the historic national mission of the university. The rise of the corporate university and its Benthamite utilitarianism in the 1980s confronted Cultural Studies with its own hiatus. The essay argues that we need to revisit Cultural Studies’ early rejection of humanism and work out a new kind of'humanism without guarantees, if we are to adequately confront this conjuncture and find the moral and intellectual resources to restore Cultural Studies as a critical and engaged practice.     

Partial Round-Robin Comparisons with Perfect Rankings

In teaching the development of uniformly most powerful unbiased (UMPU) tests, one rarely discusses the performance of alternative biased tests. It is shown, through the comparison of two independent Bernoulli proportions, that a biased test (the Z test) can be more powerful than the UMPU test (Fisher's exact test—randomized) in a large region of the alternative parameter space. A more general example is also given.     

Participation in different types of volunteering at young, middle and older adulthood

Around 35?% of Australian adults volunteer. It has been found that participation in volunteering varies with life course stage: people tend to participate less in early adulthood, which has been referred to as a ??demographically dense?? period, and more in middle adulthood, which has been characterized as a more stable period of life. This paper extends this research to investigate the types of organizations for which people volunteer at different life course stages. This paper uses data from the Negotiating the Life Course project (2003 and 2006) to examine participation in volunteering for different types of organizations. The focus is on the type of organizations for which people volunteer and how that differs in young, middle and older adulthood. There are three dominant types of organizations that people volunteer for: welfare and community, sport and recreation, and education and training, and volunteering with each of these groups varies with a person??s life course stage. Younger adults tend to be more likely to volunteer for religious groups. People in middle adulthood, and particularly those with school-aged children, tend to volunteer in sport and recreation groups and education and training organizations, and volunteering with welfare, community and health organizations is dominant in older adulthood.     

Veblen in Reverse: Evidence from the Multinational Time-Use Archive

This paper explores the historical change in the work-leisure balance using time-diary evidence. Much of the recent discussion of this balance in the developed world has focused on paid work alone. What follows takes a different approach, considering the balance of all work time (paid plus unpaid) against leisure time and observes a tendency over recent decades for leisure to decline relative to work in this broad sense. Much is changing, in employment, family and consumption terms over this period. One possibility is that the relative increase in work time reflects the reversal of the status/leisure gradient: the financially privileged classes, which once had more leisure than others, now have less. But the paper closes with the speculation that this increase in work time for both men and women may be indirectly connected with the phenomenon of the women’s “dual burden”, via an unconsidered but nevertheless important principle of fairness in the distribution of work within households.     

A generalised Box–Cox transformation for the parametric estimation of clinical reference intervals

Parametric methods for the calculation of reference intervals in clinical studies often rely on the identification of a suitable transformation so that the transformed data can be assumed to be drawn from a Gaussian distribution. In this paper, the two-stage transformation recommended by the International Federation for Clinical Chemistry is compared with a novel generalised Box–Cox family of transformations. Investigation is also made of sample sizes needed to achieve certain criteria of reliability in the calculated reference interval. Simulations are used to show that the generalised Box–Cox family achieves a lower bias than the two-stage transformation. It was found that there is a possibility that the two-stage transformation will result in percentile estimates that cannot be back-transformed to obtain the required reference intervals, a difficulty not observed when using the generalised Box–Cox family introduced in this paper.