Taking Stock of Temporary Organizational Forms: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

This paper brings together the research on temporary organizational forms. Despite a recent surge in publications on this topic, there have been few attempts to integrate knowledge on what we know of such temporary forms of organization. In order to correct this, an integrative framework is proposed around four central themes: time, team, task and context. Within each of these themes, the paper offers an overview of the literature, the gaps in what we know, and what future directions might be taken by scholars hoping to contribute to this important and rapidly growing field.     

Die deutschen Gewerkschaften: Ein Review der aktuellen Forschungsliteratur

Unions, particularly in Germany, are the subject matter of intense public debates as well as discussions in academic research, which corroborate the former. The last systematically conducted analysis of the status quo in academic research was done in spring 2001. In view of the rather dramatic symptoms of the crisis German unions are facing, it is time to incorporate the latest results of scientific research. This paper addresses this task against the background of a systematic literature review. Three application areas are distilled out of a total of 79 pieces of research that are considered relevant and intensively discussed: (1) the membership in German unions, (2) the unions in the German system of industrial relations and (3) the reformation of the German unions. The detected symptoms of the unions' crisis are impressively documented and explained by the studies. However, shortcomings regarding the respective research questions and the development of recommendations for future courses of action for the unions can also be identified.     

Asymptotic robustness of least median of squares for autoregressions with additive outliers

This paper considers the robustness properties in the time series context of the least median of squares (LMS) estimator. The influence function of the LMS estimator is derived under additive outlier contamination. This influence function is redescending and bounded for fixed values of the AR parameters. The gross-error sensitivity, however, is an unbounded function of the AR parameters. In order to asses the global robustness behavior of the LMS estimator, we consider several notions of breakdown. The breakdown points of the LMS estimator depend on the value of the underlying AR parameter. Generally, the breakdown point is below one half for high values of the AR parameter. The bias curves of the LMS estimator reveal, however, that the magnitude of outliers has to be considerable in order to cause breakdown.     

Open Borders to a Revolution: Culture,Politics and Migration

Susan Migden Socolow, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: Amor al Real Servicio (1987), xxi + 356 (Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., $45.00).

W. Hamish Fraser, Conflict and Class. Scottish Workers 1700–1838 (1988), 202 (John Donald, £20.00).

Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City (1987), xii + 259 (The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, £24.00).

Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives. Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939 (1988), xii + 187 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £22.50).

Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth‐Century Britain (1988), xv + 298 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, £30.00).

F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (1988), 271 (Croom Helm, £25.00).     

A Corporate Culture Pattern to Manage Business Ethics

Within the general frame of proposals for an adequate management of business ethics, this paper is based on the vision of corporate culture as a pattern to achieve such purpose. If we consider ethics as a specific value of corporate culture, we may resort to the mechanism of cultural change and implementation in order to manage ethics. Despite the difficulties it entails in terms of time and money investment, this procedure is one of the safest ways to reach ethical values which are known, shared and then practiced by all the members of a corporation, whatever the category. From this central standpoint, and basing ourselves on our own proposal for the management of culture, we shall describe which specific steps must be taken in order to achieve a set of ethical values which are both realistic and furthermore shared by all collaborators of an organization. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Risk Perception in a Developing Country: The Case of Chile

In this work we characterize risk perception in Chile, based on the psychometric paradigm, exploring the difference between perceived social and personal risk. For this purpose, we conducted a survey including 54 hazards, 16 risk attributes, and 3 risk constructs. The survey, divided into four parts, was administered to 508 residents of Santiago, Chile. Using factor analysis, three main factors, which accounted for 80% of the sample's variance, were identified: factor 1, commonly called "Dread Risk" in the literature, explained 37% of variance; factor 2, "Unknown Risk," explained 28%; and factor 3, which we called "Personal Effect," explained 15% of the variance. On average, individuals perceived themselves as less exposed to risk and with more control and knowledge about them than the general population. OLS regression models were used to test the association of perceived risk with the three main factors. For social risk, factor 1 had the greatest explanatory power, while factor 2 had a negative sign. For personal risk, only factors 2 and 3 were significant, with factor 3 having the greatest explanatory power. Risk denial (defined as the difference between perceived personal and social risk) was associated with factors 1 and 2 only, with factor 2 having a negative sign. The difference between desired and actual regulation levels proved positive for all hazards, thus indicating that Chileans are dissatisfied with the current regulation level for all the hazards analyzed. The comparison of data at the aggregate and at the individual subject's level suggests that while the aggregate analysis overestimates the magnitude of the correlations it still reflects the tendency of the individual responses.     

Institutional Shifts In Inter-Municipal Service Delivery

Comparative research on inter-municipal cooperation in eight European countries shows that there is a great variety of institutional arrangements for cooperation across the different countries. Also, these arrangements tend to change over time in terms of the scope of cooperation among partners, their composition and the degree of organizational integration. This article describes and analyzes the variety of and shifts in institutional arrangements for a specific class of inter-municipal cooperation arrangements: those that are set up to provide for the joint delivery of public services. It is argued that specific arrangements are typically the outcomes of interaction between national institutional contexts, environmental factors and local preferences.     

Population and Deforestation in Costa Rica

This paper addresses a central debate in research and policy on population and environment, namely the extent to which rapid population growth is associated with the massive deforestation currently underway in the tropics. We utilize the experience of Costa Rica during the last forty years to illustrate what the main issues are, discuss the history of deforestation in that country, and present results from conventional regression methods and from the application of spatial analyses. These analyses enable us to estimate the magnitude of the relation between population and deforestation and to identify the factors that are responsible for the linkage between them.