A Person-Environment Fit Model for Virtual Organizations

While the increasing sophistication of information technology has led to the spread of virtual organizations, there has been very little research on what factors contribute to individuals’ effectiveness in such organizations. This paper argues that organizations possess different degrees of virtuality based on four dimensions of temporal, spatial, cultural, and organizational dispersion. Using a person-environment fit framework, a theoretical model that identifies individual qualities required to fit into virtual organizations, virtual teams, and virtual jobs is developed, taking into account dimensions and degrees of virtuality. Mechanisms for enhancing fit in virtual organizations as well as theoretical and practical implications of the model are addressed.     

蒙古萨满的活动

本文摘译了赤松智城所著《满蒙的民族与宗教》一书,本书记录了作者在东蒙北部的所见所闻,重点介绍了蒙古族萨满的仪式与活动,有助于我们了解草原民族的宗教信仰与文化。     

经济全球化与中国经济的发展

经济全球化已成为当今世界经济发展的一个不可逆转的大趋势。中国只有正确认识和把握经济全球化的规律 ,抓住机遇 ,趋利避害 ,才能获得发展的主动权     

How Co-operative is Co-operative Purchasing in Smaller Firms?: Evidence from UK Engineering SMEs

Most SMEs do not try to engage in co-operative purchasing arrangements, and even those that do don’t handle them very well. Examining a sample of SME engineering firms from the UK Midlands for signs of more advanced practice, the authors identify three types of behaviour: firms with deliberate strategies (where co-operative purchasing is a consciously-designed and long-term part of management policy); firms with close ties with their suppliers but which still operate fundamentally adversarial policies (where, despite some development of practice, defensive, short-term and ‘low-trust’ attitudes still predominate) and those whose strategies, maybe of long standing, ‘just happened’ and are described as still emergent. The article analyses these positions to yield lessons for managers, recognising that, as firms grow, emergent strategies will need replacing with something more codified.     

Turning Three Sides into a Delta at General Motors: Enhancing Partnership Integration on Corporate Ventures

General Motors had enjoyed global operations that were based on exports, acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic alliances throughout the 20th century. Its global-programme strategy appeared assured. However, the carmaker came unstuck when it came to creating a large-scale collaborative effort involving its own internal units. The Delta Small Car Program, involving three fully internal GM units, was terminated after its goals failed to materialise. The carmaker’s long-standing cultural tradition of autonomy for its units was what made collaboration between them difficult. We examine this GM global programme, placing it in its historical context. Our primary database consists of the perceptions and experiences offered to us by a cross-section of programme participants. By examining partner integration at the working level, we identify insights and offer recommendations pertaining to venture structure and dynamics and their role in venture success.     

Collective violence as social control

Collective violence is often social control: self-help by a group. It typically defines and responds to conduct as deviant. When unilateral and nongovernmental, it appears in four major forms—lynching, rioting, vigilantism, and terrorism—each distinguished by its system of liability (individual or collective) and degree of organization (higher or lower). Following Donald Black's paradigm of pure sociology, the central assumption is that collective violence varies with its location and direction in social space—the conflict structure. I offer ten propositions that predict and explain the likelihood and severity of collective violence in general and the four forms of collective violence in particular. Conflict structures with a high degree of relational distance, cultural distance, functional independence, and inequality between the adversaries are associated with collective violence in general. Each of the four forms depends on the degree of social polarization between the parties as well as the continuity of the deviant behavior to which the violence responds. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1992, and the Centennial Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, University of Paris (Sorbonne), Paris, June 1993.     

The ‘Extended’ Atkinson family: The class of multiplicatively decomposable inequality measures,and some new graphical procedures for analysts

This paper introduces and characterises a class of inequality measures which extends the Atkinson family. This class contains canonical forms of all aggregative inequality measures, each bounded above by one, provides a new dominance criterion for ordering distributions in terms of inequality and offers some new graphical procedures for analysts. The crucial axiom for the characterisation is an alternative to the standard additive decomposition property that we call ‘multiplicative decomposability,’ where the within-group component is a generalised weighted mean with weights summing exactly to one. An erratum to this article can be found at     

The Diverse Experiences of Hispanic Students in the American Educational System

Hispanic students have long been considered at risk in the American educational system. A better understanding of the diverse experiences of Hispanics can help to counteract this risk—in what ways, and where, do they do well or poorly or some mixture of both? To further this understanding, this study applies developmental and demographic perspectives to a representative sample of Hispanic high school students. First, analyses of the sample identified four student profiles based on various indicators of academic achievement and school orientation: (1) low-achieving and weakly oriented, (2) low-achieving and strongly oriented, (3) high-achieving and moderately oriented, (4) high achieving and strongly oriented. Second, compositional analyses mapped these profiles onto different segments of the Hispanic population and different sectors of the American educational system.     

Book reviews

Ginevra Conti Odorisio (ed.) Salvatore Morelli (1824–1880): Emancipazionismo e Democrazia nell'Ottocento Europeo ESI, Napoli, pp. 476, £. 60.000.