Mission,money, and merit: Strategic decision making by nonprofit managers

Public and nonprofit organizations need to make strategic choices about where to invest their resources. They also need to expose hidden managerial assumptions and lack of adequate knowledge that prevent the attainment of consensus in strategic decision making. The approach we developed and tested in the field used a dynamic, three‐dimensional model that tracks individual programs in an organization's portfolio on their contribution to mission, money, and merit. The first dimension measures whether the organization is doing the right things; the second, whether it is doing things right financially; and the third, whether it doing things right in terms of quality. Senior managers provide their own evaluations of the organization's programs. Both the consensus view and the variation in individual assessments contribute to an improved managerial understanding of the organization's current situation and to richer discussions in strategic decision making. In field tests, this visual model proved to be a useful and powerful tool for illuminating underlying assumptions and variations in knowledge among managers facing the complex, multidimensional tradeoffs needed in strategic decision making.     

The availability of personal and external coping resources: Thier impact on job stress and employee attitudes during organizational restructuring

This study examines the relationships among personal coping resources, social support, external coping resources, job stressors and job strains in a sample of 110 American Telephone and Telegraph employees undergoing a major organizational restructuring. The study expanded on a model suggested by Ashford (1988) by defining another category of coping resources that employees may draw upon to deal with the stressors and strains which occur during major organizational changes. External coping resources were defined as those which provided employees with a sense of 'vicarious control' in stressful situations. Results indicated that personal coping resources, social support and external coping resources had a direct effect upon job stressor and strain levels. No 'buffering' effect of these coplng resources was found. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that external coping resources added to the prediction of job stressors and strains even when pertonal coping resources and social support were entered first into the prediction questions.     

Making ends meet: perceptions of poverty in Sweden

During the era after the Second World War, Sweden has built a welfare system based on labor market participation and income maintenance. Low unemployment and decent wages are supposed to guarantee people a labor market income or income maintenance, which in turn should provide a proper standard for everyone. However, a rapid increase in unemployment and economic problems have made the future of the Swedish welfare state more uncertain than ever. These circumstances have, among other things, led to the suggestion that Sweden should abandon the income maintenance policy and create a social policy system with the more limited ambition of guaranteeing everyone a minimum income. In that case, one central question must be answered: what constitutes a decent minimum income in today's Sweden? Where should we draw the poverty line under which people will not be forced to live? These questions are central in the current debate. The consensual poverty line method is used in this article to derive a poverty line relevant for today's Sweden. The results shows that more than every fifth household has an income below the consensual poverty line. That is, they have an income that most Swedes would argue is too low to make ends meet. The level of the consensual poverty line was compared with the National Board of Health and Welfare's guidelines for social assistance. The consensual poverty line was shown to be more generous to small households and the norm for social assistance was more generous to larger households. Finally, the expenditure for guaranteeing all Swedish household a minimum income equal to the consensual poverty line was estimated: more than SEK 25 billion per year. The results in the article casts serious doubt on the ability of the Swedish welfare state to secure a decent income to all citizens.     

Exposure Reconstruction for the TCDD-Exposed NIOSH Cohort Using a Concentration- and Age-Dependent Model of Elimination

Recent studies demonstrating a concentration dependence of elimination of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) suggest that previous estimates of exposure for occupationally exposed cohorts may have underestimated actual exposure, resulting in a potential overestimate of the carcinogenic potency of TCDD in humans based on the mortality data for these cohorts. Using a database on U.S. chemical manufacturing workers potentially exposed to TCDD compiled by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), we evaluated the impact of using a concentration- and age-dependent elimination model (CADM) (Aylward et al., 2005) on estimates of serum lipid area under the curve (AUC) for the NIOSH cohort. These data were used previously by Steenland et al. (2001) in combination with a first-order elimination model with an 8.7-year half-life to estimate cumulative serum lipid concentration (equivalent to AUC) for these workers for use in cancer dose-response assessment. Serum lipid TCDD measurements taken in 1988 for a subset of the cohort were combined with the NIOSH job exposure matrix and work histories to estimate dose rates per unit of exposure score. We evaluated the effect of choices in regression model (regression on untransformed vs. ln-transformed data and inclusion of a nonzero regression intercept) as well as the impact of choices of elimination models and parameters on estimated AUCs for the cohort. Central estimates for dose rate parameters derived from the serum-sampled subcohort were applied with the elimination models to time-specific exposure scores for the entire cohort to generate AUC estimates for all cohort members. Use of the CADM resulted in improved model fits to the serum sampling data compared to the first-order models. Dose rates varied by a factor of 50 among different combinations of elimination model, parameter sets, and regression models. Use of a CADM results in increases of up to five-fold in AUC estimates for the more highly exposed members of the cohort compared to estimates obtained using the first-order model with 8.7-year half-life. This degree of variation in the AUC estimates for this cohort would affect substantially the cancer potency estimates derived from the mortality data from this cohort. Such variability and uncertainty in the reconstructed serum lipid AUC estimates for this cohort, depending on elimination model, parameter set, and regression model, have not been described previously and are critical components in evaluating the dose-response data from the occupationally exposed populations.     

A Numerical Solution to the Nonhomogeneous Two-Stage MVK Model of Cancer

In this article, we describe a straightforward method for solving the probability of at least one malignant cell by time t, and the associated hazard function, in the general (i.e., nonhomogeneous) two-stage Moolgavkar-Venzon-Knudson (MVK) model of cancer. The method consists of solving four coupled ordinary differential equations derived from the Kolmogorov backward equations for this process. The relationship of this method to previously proposed solutions is discussed.