Business restructuring,management control,and corporate organization

Conclusions After half a century of growing dominance of the large corporation by non-owning managers, the 1980s were marked by a slowing or even reversing of their quiet revolution. Professional managers had come to control the corporation on the premise that they could more efficiently produce shareholder value than the original founder-owners. They turned shareholding into a passive investment on the same premise. As companies faced increasingly competitive pressures during the 1980s, however, the legitimacy of the rule of incumbent management came under challenge. No longer could government interference be blamed for many of the problems facing business; fingers pointed at management itself. As the criticism of corporate leadership gathered momentum, a leading diagnosis focused on one of managerial capitalism's crowning achievements: the autonomous power of professional management.The critique viewed the managerial autonomy as excessively permissive, the agency system as no longer effective. Professional managers had come to show too much concern for the social welfare of various stakeholder groups, including themselves, and too little concern for the financial welfare of the only stakeholder group that should really count — the shareholders. Many of the restructuring efforts were thus undertaken in the name of returning companies to the single-minded pursuit of ownership interests. What had stood in the way of such a pursuit was less a matter of government constraint and more a matter of inadequate stockholder vigilance by their appointed agents.Mindful of the critique, incumbent managements moved during the mid- to late-1980s to improve stockholder returns by paring the workforce and cutting other costs. Corporate acquisitions and leveraged buyouts brought new management teams to the fore where others had seemingly fallen short. The resulting restructuring reached a large proportion of the nation's major companies. Half or more of the largest companies had undergone a significant reduction in their workforce. And the dollar value of company resources changing ownership hands expanded considerably. The aggregate purchase price of mergers and acquisitions of publicly-traded firms in 1988 was nearly three times greater than in 1981. Even more striking was the sharp increase in the number of publicly-traded companies and divisions that were taken private. The aggregate dollar value of such buyouts in 1988 had increased almost 25 times over that in 1981. This opening of the market for corporate control among major U.S. firms brought a significant fraction of the nation's large corporations more directly under the immediate oversight of ownership interests.The reassertion of ownership control over large corporations was usually taken in the name of improving corporate earnings. Would be takeover groups generally promised more internal discipline and stronger financial performance. Whatever the actual financial impact of the intensification of ownership interests, available research suggests that it has had organizational impact. General company strategies may come to be more centrally guided while specific operating actions are devolved further down the organization.Ownership change and other restructuring steps have also ramified into corporate social and political action. That outreach is likely to be less vigorous and more divided. It is also being redirected. During the 1970s and early 1980s, corporate energies focused on reducing government regulation and improving community opinion. Those energies are now increasingly focused on facilitating or resisting restructuring. Companies have fought legislation that would limit the process of plant closings, but they have also sought legislation to protect themselves against hostile takeovers.The evidence also suggests that considerable managerial discretion remains in shaping company response to the restructuring pressures. Although market and organizational factors are sure to act as constraints, top management, whether a relatively autonomous non-owning management group or an owner-dominated management, retains an important independent capacity to exercise strategic choice. That choice is likely to receive special shaping by the long-term ascendance of financial managers and the decline of manufacturing personnel at the executive level.Yet corporate change must not be viewed as isolated managerial responses to changing market conditions. Companies and managements frequently look to one another for guidance in coping with ambiguous circumstances. DiMaggio and Powell's analysis of organizational isomorphism, for example, suggests that firms frequently adopt organizational practices not because they are dictated by the firm's market strategies, but rather because they are already used by other companies. Similarly, Granovetter's analysis of the social embeddedness of economic action indicates that company decisions are partially shaped by top management's contacts with their counterparts in other firms. Understanding company responses to restructuring pressures therefore requires a focus on inter-company flows of ideas and doctrines as well as purely internally generated responses specific to the company. Reactions to the restructuring pressures that are collectively developed and defined in the broader business community may prove to be as critical as individually fashioned solutions in guiding management approaches to restructuring during the years to come.

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Mortality among three Puerto Rican populations: residents of Puerto Rico and migrants in New York City and in the balance of the United States, 1979-81

"This study attempts to explain similarities and differences in the mortality experience of three population groups: Puerto Ricans on the island commonwealth, Puerto Rican born persons in New York City and Puerto Rican born persons in the rest of mainland United States. Mortality is much higher among Puerto Ricans in New York City than among those residing elsewhere. Much of the difference is due to excess mortality caused by cirrhosis of the liver and homicide. Puerto Rican born persons living on the mainland but outside New York City generally have low mortality, even when compared with U.S. whites."     

Bringing baby home: a comprehensive case management program for obstetrical services

Originally presented to the Society of Home Health Care Management of the American College of Physician Executives at its November 16, 1993, meeting in Tucson, Ariz., the program described in this article was the winner of the College's 1994 Innovations Award in Medical Quality Management, sponsored by Merck Sharp & Dohme. The program shows the potential of case management for both improvement in the quality of care and containment of costs for a managed care population with a substantial Medicaid segment. This article is part of a continuing series on innovative programs in home health care.     

Origins and destinies: Immigration to the United States since World War II

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Today's immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an hourglass economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversity. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in—and consequences for—American society are considered.     

Application of Stein-type estimation in combining regression estimates from replicated experiments

This paper considers the application of Stein-type estimation procedure for the coefficients in a linear regression model when data are available from replicated experiment. Two families of estimators characterized by a single scalar are proposed and their large sample asymptotic properties are derived. These are utilized for comparing the performances of the two estimators along with the conventional estimator and conditions for the superiority of one estimator over the other are deduced.     

The new illegal immigration in Japan, 1980-1992

"This article presents some of the latest available figures on illegal immigration in Japan, a process that did not assume significant proportions until the mid-1980s. It also discusses briefly the latest developments around 'immigration' policy--more precisely, the law on the entry and exit of aliens."     

Age at marriage,sex-ratios,and ethnic heterogamy

"This paper focuses on the effects of age at marriage and the sex-ratio on patterns of ethnic homogamy among Israeli women. We hypothesize that later marriages are more likely than early marriages to be heterogamous as the 'marriage market' shifts from school to the work-place. By the same token, when facing severe marriage squeezes women will be forced to out-marry. Employing data from the 1983 census, we model mate selection of women from Afro-Asian and Euro-American origin in various birth-cohorts. The results do not fully support our hypotheses: we find that in and of itself, age at marriage does not enhance ethnic heterogamy."