Transnational business feminism: Exporting feminism in the global economy

Business feminism is a brand of feminism that privileges women's advancement in the corporate hierarchy and centres corporations as the ultimate purveyors of gender equity. While scholars have critiqued this formulation, little empirical research has analysed the processes that guide the dissemination and translation of business feminism in organizational settings within global corporate networks. This article advances scholarship on the global processes that drive the export of business feminism logics. We analyse the process of dissemination of business feminism from the headquarters of multinational corporations to corporate hubs located in Hungary. This process relies on women executives who are charged with translating policies and practices originating in the headquarters of western corporations. In‐depth interviews with women executives charged with implementing corporate policies reveal the ways in which business feminism is interpreted, modified and/or resisted by actors within organizational settings.     

Listening Is… Five Personal Worlds of Listening: An Auto-Ethnographic Approach

What is effective listening? This question intrigues both scholars and the general public. Theoretical explorations provide insight into the listening process as well as pragmatic guidelines for how to be a good listener. But even the most learned listening scholar will often fall back on the observation that they know effective listening best when they experience it.

Five renowned listening experts were asked to respond to the question, “What is listening from the perspective of your lived experience?” Each was asked to work from an auto-ethnographic methodology. The five lifeworlds described in this study represent their responses to this question and offer unique, individual ethnographic contexts describing the listening experience of each of the participants.     

Die Evaluation von betrieblichen Weiterbildungsma?nahmen

Although there is a sharp increase of job training measures in firms we have scarce knowledge if and how the management check the quality of those programs by assigning evaluation instruments. This is especially crucial for training measures which are provided by firm-external trainers. In this paper we focus on the assignment of evaluation procedures which can be analyzed as a result of rational decision making as well as a process driven by institutional determinants. Based on the Swiss Organization Survey on Job Training we test some hypotheses derived from both theoretical frameworks. The results show that the assignment of evaluation instruments varies in respect to the type of job training or the characteristics of the department??s managers. We conclude that the decisions on evaluation measures are driven by cost-benefit analysis as well as imitation of other firms.     

Simplest strategies method for manufacturing workcell restoration

We consider the production process of a manufacturing workcell. Production items obtained from an outside supplier are not processed adequately as far as their quality is concerned. Production items meeting the required quality depend on the workcell state, which degrades according to the number of produced items. The workcell is completely restored by some restoring operations leading to its as-new condition. The method of deriving the restoration period, which leads to the maximum probability that produced items meet the required quality, is introduced. It is based on the nontraditional approach, i.e. on the simplest strategies method for the formulation of the problem presented here. The implementation of this optimization approach is illustrated with an example.     

A kalman filter in the presence of outliers

A Kalman Filtering algorithm which is robust to observational outliers is developed by assuming that the measurement error may come from either one of two Normal distributions, and that the transition between these distributions is governed by a Markov Chain. The resulting algorithm is very simple, and consists of two parallel Kalman Filters having different gains. The state estimate is obtained as a weighted average of the estimates from the two parallel filters, where the weights are the posterior probabilities that the current observation comes from either of the two distributions. The large improvements obtained by this Robust Kalman Filter in the presence of outliers is demonstrated with examples.     

Enter at your own risk: HMO participation and enrollment in the Medicare risk market

We examine HMO participation and enrollment in the Medicare risk market for the years 1990 to 1995. We develop a profit-maximization model of HMO behavior, which explicitly considers potential linkages between an HMO's production decision in the commercial enrollee market and its participation and production decisions in the Medicare risk market. Our results suggest that the payment rate is a primary determinant of HMO participation, while the price of a supplemental Medicare insurance policy positively affects HMO Medicare enrollment. We also find empirical support for the existence of complementarities in the joint production of an HMO's commercial and Medicare products.     

Type I error and power in trials with one interim futility analysis

Futility analysis reduces the opportunity to commit Type I error. For a superiority study testing a two‐sided hypothesis, an interim futility analysis can substantially reduce the overall Type I error while keeping the overall power relatively intact. In this paper, we quantify the extent of the reduction for both one‐sided and two‐sided futility analysis. We argue that, because of the reduction, we should be allowed to set the significance level for the final analysis at a level higher than the allowable Type I error rate for the study. We propose a method to find the significance level for the final analysis. We illustrate the proposed methodology and show that a design employing a futility analysis can reduce the sample size, and therefore reduce the exposure of patients to unnecessary risk and lower the cost of a clinical trial. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.