Managerial value and belief systems in a cross-national context: The case of thetrivial significance

This article discusses potential theoretical and methodological flaws in value-based research in a cross-national context. Using data from a comparative study of American and Indian CEOs, it is shown that some managerial beliefs and value systems do vary as a function of national background. While this is neither surprising nor exciting, whether this significantheterogeneity offers nontrivial predictive utilityin explaining the observed variance in a large number of structural, strategic, and other critical variables at the organizational level is the more important question. This study offers preliminary evidence to the contrary.In this era of multinational corporations and an emerging global market for executive and managerial talent, the question of whether some managerial beliefs and value systems persist in spite of extensive acculturation and socialization has been an issue of concern — especially in the United States because of a large and continuing flow of immigrants. Our results show in essence that this question, though important and interesting from a sociological angle, is perhaps not as crucial as one might suppose in influencing the strategic thrust, structural configurations, or certain aspects of performance of an organization.     

Suppressing Asset Price Inflation: The Confederate Experience, 1861–1865

Confederate asset price stabilization policies appear to have increased the velocity of circulation and counterproductively channeled inflationary pressures into other areas of the economy. Three successive monetary reforms encouraged holders of Treasury notes to exchange these notes for bonds by imposing deadlines on their convertibility. We show that Confederate funding acts aimed at precipitating the conversion of currency into bonds did temporarily suppress currency depreciation. These acts also triggered upsurges in commodity prices, however, because note holders rushed to spend the currency before their exchange rights were reduced.     

Relative Spousal Earnings and Marital Happiness Among African American and White Women

The distinctive economic histories of African American and White wives suggest that involvement in household income production holds contextually situated unique meanings for these groups. Yet research has not addressed racial differences in the effects of relative earnings on marital well‐being. Surveying 431 employed wives in 21 U.S. cities, we found that wife‐to‐husband income ratio and marital happiness were negatively associated when women held traditional values, but in racially distinct ways. Among White women only, a negative association between income ratio and marital happiness was reversed when financial need was reported. Findings are discussed in terms of variability in the meaning of wives’ earnings as a function of situational, historical, and sociocultural dynamics.     

Family,marital, and occupational satisfaction for recovering pathological gamblers

This paper describes the efforts of a private gambling treatment program to conduct a retrospective study of pathological gamblers treated in a publicly supported residential program. The Johns Hopkins Center for Pathological Gambling treated approximately 100 pathological gamblers nationwide from 1979 to 1983 in its residential component. Twenty-six gamblers were assessed regarding their recovery status with specific focus on family, marital status and occupational satisfaction. It was hypothesized that the more satisfied patients would display lower frequencies of gambling and that gambling frequency was dependent upon the level of satisfaction. Thirty-one percent of these gamblers reported abstinence. Regression analyses indicated that the recovery of pathological gamblers as measured by frequency of gambling is significantly influenced by job satisfaction, and moderately influenced by marital status and family life satisfaction. Consequently, these factors should be addressed by mental health professionals in research and treatment of pathological gambling.     

College students' definitions of social and problem drinking

College students (N = 276) completed surveys describing two common drinking situations. One scenario described a student alone in an apartment after a weekday class; the other, the same student at a weekend party. Sex of the drinker in the scenario was systematically varied. Students estimated the number of drinks a social drinker and a problem drinker would have in each situation. Results indicated that: 1) definitions of social and problem drinking are strongly influenced by drinking context, and 2) male and female subjects estimated that problem drinkers of the opposite sex drank more than problem drinkers of their own sex. Problem drinkers were regularly estimated to consume three to four more drinks than the subject would in the same situation. Implications for education and prevention are discussed.     

Unilever as a global force: An historical re-examination

An analysis of the activities of the Unilever Corporation, based on case studies in India, Indonesia, prewar Germany, Sene-Gambia, and South Africa, which seeks to demonstrate that multinational corporations prosper under regimes which are neither mature nor developed democracies.     

Moments of Inertia and Graph Separators

Graphs that arise from the finite element or finite difference methods often include geometric information such as the coordinates of the nodes of the graph. The geometric separator algorithm of Miller, Teng, Thurston, and Vavasis uses some of the available geometric information to find small node separators of graphs. The algorithm utilizes a random sampling technique based on the uniform distribution to find a good separator. We show that sampling from an elliptic distribution based on the inertia matrix of the graph can significantly improve the quality of the separator. More generally, given a cost function f on the unit d-sphere Ud, we can define an elliptic distribution based on the second moments of f. The expectation of f with respect to the elliptic distribution is less than or equal to the expectation with respect to the uniform distribution, with equality only in degenerate cases. We also demonstrate experimentally that the benefit gained by the use of the additional geometric information is significant. Some previous algorithms have used the moments of inertia heuristically, and suffer from extremely poor worst case performance. This is the first result, to our knowledge, that incorporates the moments of inertia into a provably good strategy.