Objectivity and Narrative in Contemporary Reporting: A Formal Analysis

Traditionally, Americans have held the ideal that newspapers should transmit knowledge to readers by giving “objective” accounts of official events. This article argues that many news stories have extended objectivity through the use of narrative. Stories attempt to evoke feelings in the reader by drawing on a shared stock of knowledge held by members of society through the use of narrative storytelling techniques rather than attempting to transmit neutral information through the form of objectivity.     

For Bayesian Wannabes,Are Disagreements Not About Information?

Consider two agents who want to be Bayesians with a common prior, but who cannot due to computational limitations. If these agents agree that their estimates are consistent with certain easy-to-compute consistency constraints, then they can agree to disagree about any random variable only if they also agree to disagree, to a similar degree and in a stronger sense, about an average error. Yet average error is a state-independent random variable, and one agent's estimate of it is also agreed to be state-independent. Thus suggests that disagreements are not fundamentally due to differing information about the state of the world.     

Constructing simple theories from propositional inventories

For better or worse, vast amounts of the research in the social sciences is done by researchers working independently of each other. Moreover, until quite recently, most of the data gathered has been of the correlational variety, relating two variables at a time. Consequently, those who try to make theoretical sense out of the vast amount of data often give up this task as hopeless.One way of alleviating this situation is through a propositional inventory: by bringing into one volume a large number of propositions that cover similar grounds. The late 1950s and the 1960s saw an upsurge in such inventories and this trend has continued into the 1970s.¹ Yet even these inventories do not condense and organize the data sufficiently to permit one to develop theories from them. In this paper we shall describe and illustrate a procedure which permits one to construct simple theories from propositional inventories.     

Deadbeat dads or inept states? A comparison of child support enforcement systems.

This article provides information on the effectiveness of state child support enforcement systems. We use individual level data from the Child Support Supplements of the Current Population Surveys (1978-1992) to create an index of state effectiveness that captures success at securing child support awards, setting award levels, and collecting obligations. We identify states that were performing above or below the national average in the late 1980s to early 1990s and states that showed substantial improvement or decline in child support effectiveness during the 1980s. Identifying successful states will help researchers to determine what policies and practices are associated with successful enforcement. These variations in state effectiveness also suggest that low levels of child support are not due to deadbeat dads alone but also to inept states.     

Is bounded-vision an adequate explanation of strategic decision-making failures

One important area in which Management Science should be involved must surely be in the prevention of corporate failure. In this paper we therefore use a scientific methodology to try to identify the major causes of such failure. Two widely differing systems are examined and a large number of hypotheses considered as explanations of failure. In each case the only hypothesis which we are unable to reject, is that prior to the failure the dominant decision-makers in the system were not prepared to accept facts which were plainly available and which, if acted upon, could have prevented disaster. This allows us to suggest some ways of helping to prevent failure. Nevertheless, we feel that research into the mechanisms generating this phenomenon, which we have called bounded-vision, is required before adequate technologies can be designed.