Managing Change at Novotel: Back to the Future

Novotel is one of the world's major hotel chains, occupying a leading place in Europe and with locations globally. We interpret Novotel's change management programme in the 1990s in three parts. First, we summarise the actions that managers took in terms of strategy and organisation. Second, we consider the sequence and timing of events, and how this resulted in rapid transformation in an organisation employing more than 30,000 people. Third, we emphasise the dialectical nature of the change processes: an element often ignored in the literature that likes to see things as an either–or rather than a both. We observed both deliberation and experimentation; both integration and differentiation. We also observed both preservation and transformation, as noted in our sub-title ‘Back to the Future’. Finally, we wrap up with a discussion explaining how our story can add to better thinking about change. We suggest that we can shed new light on some old debates and provide tangible guides for action.     

Lorenz Dominance and Non-welfaristic Redistribution

Our concern is for income inequalities that may result from non-welfaristic redistribution schemes. We show that for large classes of income functions Lorenz dominance results can be found in the comparison of two egalitarian equivalent mechanisms. Comparisons of different conditionally egalitarian mechanisms only yield poverty dominance results. In general, no egalitarian equivalent mechanism can be Lorenz dominated by a conditionally egalitarian mechanism. Our analysis stresses the need for accurate empirical estimates of the pre-tax income function and of the distributions of responsibility and compensation characteristics. We thank the Editor, Marc Fleurbaey and two anonymous referees, Geert Dhaene and seminar/conference participants at UAP-workshop (Namur, 2003), ‘Welfarist and non-welfarist approaches to public economics’ (Ghent, 2004), SED (Palma, 2004), SSC&W (Osaka, 2004) and IIPF (Milan, 2004) for helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Federal Public Planning Service Science Policy, Interuniversity Attraction Poles Program – Belgian Science Policy [Contract No. P5/21] is gratefully acknowledged.     

Social indicators of racial parity

Using the U.S. Census' Social Indicators III (73 indicators) and the OECD List of Social Indicators (33 indicators), a modified Delphi panel was surveyed in two rounds to rank 106 items and 19 “areas of major social concerns” as to how “essential” or “unnecessary” each indicator was in measuring racial parity in the U.S. A hypothesis about how much consensus was reached overall between the first- and second-round responses and hypotheses about comparative views among Academics, minority Advocates and Government researchers-administrators were tested (See Table I). From the second-round returns, the top 15 indicators (selected by the panel) and the 19 major areas of social concerns were analyzed. Secondary data were gathered and built into a Dissimilarity Index. Comparisons were analyzed statistically in increments of 5 indicators (quintiles), and overall to determine how much parity, or equality, between Afro-Americans and Whites had been obtained between the “early 1980s” and the “early 1990s”.     

Kernel-based semiparametric multinomial logit modelling of political party preferences

Conventional, parametric multinomial logit models are in general not sufficient for capturing the complex structures of electorates. In this paper, we use a semiparametric multinomial logit model to give an analysis of party preferences along individuals’ characteristics using a sample of the German electorate in 2006. Germany is a particularly strong case for more flexible nonparametric approaches in this context, since due to the reunification and the preceding different political histories the composition of the electorate is very complex and nuanced. Our analysis reveals strong interactions of the covariates age and income, and highly nonlinear shapes of the factor impacts for each party’s likelihood to be supported. Notably, we develop and provide a smoothed likelihood estimator for semiparametric multinomial logit models, which can be applied also in other application fields, such as, e.g., marketing.     

On the convergence of some adaptive estimation procedures

In the paper we consider some adaptive procedures for estimating the unknown parameters of autoregressive and moving average processes. In case of AK(p) and MA(1) processes sequences of estimators converging with probability one and In mean square are given     

Lobbying bei der Rechnungslegungsstandardsetzung. Ein Literaturüberblick

Research into the impact of lobbying on accounting standard setting has a decades-old tradition in international accounting research. Due to the changes brought about by the European Union’s IAS regulation as well as the application of new research methods this research topic has recently gained renewed relevance. The present article surveys the empirical literature on lobbying the accounting standard setter in Anglo-Saxon countries, discusses the transferability of this literature’s results to the new situation in the European Union and offers a perspective on current research topics.     

Long-Run Identification in a Fractionally Integrated System

We propose an extension of structural fractionally integrated vector autoregressive models that avoids certain undesirable effects on the impulse responses that occur if long-run identification restrictions are imposed. We derive the model’s Granger representation and investigate the effects of long-run restrictions. Simulations illustrate that enforcing integer integration orders can have severe consequences for impulse responses. In a system of U.S. real output and aggregate prices, the effects of structural shocks strongly depend on the specification of the integration orders. In the statistically preferred fractional model, shocks that are typically interpreted as demand disturbances have a very brief influence on GDP. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Flexible Latent‐State Modelling of Old Faithful's Eruption Inter‐Arrival Times in 2009

This paper is concerned with the analysis of a time series comprising the eruption inter‐arrival times of the Old Faithful geyser in 2009. The series is much longer than other well‐documented ones and thus gives a more comprehensive insight into the dynamics of the geyser. Basic hidden Markov models with gamma state‐dependent distributions and several extensions are implemented. In order to better capture the stochastic dynamics exhibited by Old Faithful, the different non‐standard models under consideration seek to increase the flexibility of the basic models in various ways: (i) by allowing non‐geometric distributions for the times spent in the different states; (ii) by increasing the memory of the underlying Markov chain, with or without assuming additional structure implied by mixture transition distribution models; and (iii) by incorporating feedback from the observation process on the latent process. In each case it is shown how the likelihood can be formulated as a matrix product which can be conveniently maximized numerically.