An innovative approach to selecting an executive director

As a guide for how to select a new executive director, a family agency adopted the search committee process from higher education. The approach included clarifying agency goals and the director's qualifications, a board-staff screening, and interviews held jointly with public representatives before final board selection.     

Social and demographic determinants of abortion in Poland

Summary Most abortions in Polish hospitals and clinics are performed on social indications. In the 22 administrative areas of Poland, the high rates of divorce and large proportions of total population employed in non-agricultural pursuits reflect the individualistic approach to family planning which is characteristic of present-day urban society. Industrialization is disruptive to the normal functioning of the country's traditionally large families. In addition, the gross reproduction rate increases directly with the proportion of the peasant population in 17 voivodships and five large cities of Poland, whereas in the urban sector the gross reproduction rate has fallen below replacement level in the past few years. Rural birth rates will continue to decline. In view of increasing needs for future manpower, population policy aimed at increasing births through incentives to prospective mothers may achieve a limited degree of success in cities only among the educated segments of the female population.     

Public Enterprise Reform in Fiji Islands

Reforming the public sector has been on the agenda of nations throughout the world since the late 1970s. Fiji is no exception. It has embarked on reforming its commercial and industrial enterprises since the late 1980s. The government of Fiji has reformed most of its enterprises with an avowed objective of enhancing profitability, productivity, efficiency and accountability. This paper makes an attempt to share some of the experiences of public enterprise reform process in Fiji. It aims to analyze the background, process, contents and impact of the reform and examine the factors impeding the reform program. It highlights that (a) both internal and external factors were responsible for introducing reforms; (b) the reform efforts have not been able to produce desired results; (c) the structural inadequacies in institutions and organizations have created bottlenecks in the reform process; and (d) uncertainty in the political sphere has contributed further to policy shifts.     

Bridging Scholarship in Management: Epistemological Reflections

If the relevance gap in management research is to be narrowed, management scholars must identify and adopt processes of inquiry that simultaneously achieve high rigour and high relevance. Research approaches that strive for relevance emphasize the particular at the expense of the general and approaches that strive for rigour emphasize the general over the particular. Inquiry that attains both rigour and relevance can be found in approaches to knowledge that involve a reasoned relationship between the particular and the general. Prominent among these are the works of Ikujiro Nonaka and John Dewey. Their epistemological foundations indicate the potential for a philosophy of science and a process of inquiry that crosses epistemological lines by synthesizing the particular and the general and by utilizing experience and theory, the implicit and the explicit, and induction and deduction. These epistemologies point to characteristics of a bridging scholarship that is problem-initiated and rests on expanded standards of validity. The present epistemological reflections are in search of new communities of knowing toward the production of relevant and rigorous management knowledge.     

Performance measurement with classification information: an enhanced additive DEA model

This paper presents an improved measurement tool for evaluating performance of branches within a major Canadian bank. While there have been numerous previous studies of performance in the banking industry, particularly at the branch level, this study is different in a very significant way: specifically two kinds of data are used to develop the model. The first type of data is that related to standard transactions, available from any bank; such have formed the basis of numerous previous studies. The second type of data, obtained from the site studied, is classification information, based on branch consultant/expert judgment as to good and poor performance of branches. The purpose herein is to present a modified version of an existing benchmarking model, data envelopment analysis (DEA), and to show how this tool is applied in the banking industry. The mechanism used herein to incorporate expert knowledge within the DEA framework is to first apply a discriminant or classification tool, to quantify the functional relation that best captures the expert's mental model for performance. The outcome of this first phase is an orientation of variables to aid in the definition of inputs and outputs. The resulting orientation then defines the DEA model that makes up the second phase of the model.     

人力资本异质性、代际差异与农民工市民化

基于微观调查数据, 以受限截尾模型为基础, 采用集束化估计方法, 深入刻画不同类型人力资本对农民工市民化程度的影响格局。研究结果表明:相对于正规教育, 技能培训对农民工市民化的影响效应占据明显的优势地位。与个体行为、资源可及性及民生保障等层面市民化相比, 心理情感受到正规教育的作用强度更大。在代际差异上, 技能培训的作用均高于正规教育, 但对第一代农民工市民化的作用效应更明显。据此, 提出有策略分类型提升农民工人力资本、构建文化课堂工程等政策建议。     

An empirical Bayes' procedure for ranking players in Ryder Cup golf

We describe a model to obtain strengths and rankings of players appearing in golf's Ryder Cup. Obtaining rankings is complicated because of two reasons. First, competitors do not compete on an equal number of occasions, with some competitors appearing too infrequently for their ranking to be estimated with any degree of certainty, and second, different competitors experience different levels of volatility in results. Our approach is to assume the competitor strengths are drawn from some common distribution. For small numbers of competitors, as is the case here, we fit the model using Monte-Carlo integration. Results suggest there is very little difference between the top performing players, though Scotland's Colin Montgomerie is estimated as the strongest Ryder Cup player.