The teaching of business policy—A fresh approach

The artificiality of the circumstances in which much of management education takes place is exemplified in the teaching of business policy where the missing ingredient of responsibility is most crucial. The use of ready made cases compounds this problem by presenting the student with a partly identified problem and the information he must use in tackling it. A different approach in which students prepare their own studies of named companies and discuss their analysis and proposals with senior executives from those companies reduces to a worthwhile degree the artificiality of much business policy teaching. This paper discusses the problems of teaching in this field and describes an approach using the method described above.     

EXPOSING ADOPTION MYTHS: ACCESS TO INFORMATION ABOUT ORIGINS IN VICTORIA

Victoria was the first State to allow adopted persons unqualified access to their original identity and to provide natural parents and others with conditional access to identifying information. This article examines findings from 1985 to 1988 to examine four assumptions. These are that: few adoptees would want to know about or meet their natural parents and so few would register with the Adoption Information Service; few adoptees would welcome an approach from or on behalf of their natural parents and most would reject such an approach; few relinquishing parents would wish to meet or know about their relinquished child and consequently most would reject an approach by or on behalf of their child; and adoptive parents would not wish to acknowledge the adoptive status of their children by providing information to the natural parent facilitating a meeting between the natural parent and the child. The data suggest that the above assumptions do not reflect the experience or behaviour of adopted persons, natural parents or adoptive parents.     

An Evaluation of Flexible Workday Policies in Job Shops*

Job shops have long faced pressures for improvement in a challenging and volatile environment. Today's trends of global competition and shortening of product life cycles suggest that both the challenges and the intensity of market volatility will only increase. Consequently, the study of tactics for maximizing the flexibility and responsiveness of a job shop is important. Indeed, there is a significant body of literature that has produced guidelines on when and how to deploy tactics such as alternate routings for jobs and transfers of cross‐trained workers between machines. In this paper we consider a different tactic by adjusting the length of workdays. Hours in excess of a 40‐hour week are exchanged for compensatory time off at time and a half, and the total amount of accrued compensatory time is limited to no more than 160 hours in accordance with pending legislation. We propose several simple flexible workday policies that are based on an input/output control approach and investigate their performance in a simulated job shop. We find significant gains in performance over a fixed schedule of eight hours per day. Our results also provide insights into the selection of policy parameters.     

Interventions for an Artemisinin‐based Malaria Medicine Supply Chain

Artemisinin combination therapy, the most effective malaria treatment today, is manufactured from an agriculturally derived starting material Artemisia annua. Artemisinin, the main ingredient in malaria medicines, is extracted from Artemisia leaves and used in the production of medicine for treating malaria. The artemisinin market has witnessed high volatility in the supply and price of artemisinin extract. A large fraction of malaria medicines for endemic countries in sub‐Saharan Africa is financed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria and the US President's Malaria Initiative. These agencies together with the World Health Organization, UNITAID, the United Kingdom Department for International Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are exploring ways to increase the level of artemisinin production, reduce volatility of artemisinin prices, and improve overall access to malaria medicines for the population. We develop a model of the supply chain, calibrate the model using field data, and investigate the impact of various interventions. Our model shows that initiatives aimed at improving average yield, creating a support‐price for agricultural artemisinin, and a larger and carefully managed supply of semi‐synthetic artemisinin have the greatest potential for improving supply and reducing price volatility of artemisinin‐based malaria medicine.