AFFECTIVE RESPONSES WITHIN A COMPLEX DECISION-MAKING TASK: THE INFLUENCE OF “PERCEPTUALLY” ILL-STRUCTURED PROBLEMS

The perceptual effects of varying levels of expert advice for potentially improving on strategic decisions were examined in conjunction with goals. The amounts of advice about decision alternatives, as well as assigned goals ranging from “nearly impossible” to “easy,” were manipulated. The task used was complex and functioned perceptually as an “ill-structured” problem. Mixed results indicated that more advice significantly affected satisfaction but advice in general had little influence on effort. On the other hand, as goal difficulty decreased, satisfaction and effort significantly increased. Easy goals were superior to more difficult ones within this perceptually ill-structured decision-making situation.     

中国上市公司环境信息披露现状研究

本文通过对我国沪深两市的1000余家上市公司2002、2003年度会计报告中有关环境信息的统计调查,分析了目前我国上市公司环境信息披露的现状及存在的问题,并对提高我国上市公司的环境信息披露的质量作了简要的展望。     

农村合作经济组织的组织形式、问题及对策

中国农村合作经济组织良好的发展势头,已经开始把农业产业中的一部分弱势群体带动起来,使长期困扰中国农业和农村经济发展中的一些困难和问题有了新的解决思路。文章在大量的调查研究和项目实践的基础上,对我国当前农村合作经济的组织形式以及各类组织建设中存在的共性问题和个性问题进行分析,以探讨解决这些问题的对策。     

Employee perceptions of reputation: An ethnographic study

The ability of organizational members to identify and analyse stakeholder opinion is critical to the management of corporate reputation. In spite of the significance of these abilities to corporate reputation management, there has been little effort to document and describe internal organizational influences on such capacities. This ethnographic study conducted in Red Cross Queensland explores how cultural knowledge structures derived from shared values and assumptions among organizational members influence their conceptualisations of organizational reputation. Specifically, this study explores how a central attribute of organizational culture – the property of cultural selection – influences perceptions of organizational reputation held by organizational members. We argue that these perceptions are the result of collective processes that synthesise (with varying degrees of consensus) member conceptualisations, interpretations, and representations of environmental realities in which their organization operates. Findings and implications for organizational action suggest that while external indicators of organizational reputation are acknowledged by members as significant, the internal influence of organizational culture is a far stronger influence on organizational action.     

高校本科生特别培养学院组织文化研究

本科生特别培养学院是中国高等教育大众化背景下,以培养拔尖创新的卓越人才为目标的荣誉学院,而优秀的组织文化是其顺利实施英才教育的基础.本文在对英才教育、大学组织文化和培育组织文化的意义进行理论思考的基础上,从特别培养学院是学习型、责任型、混合型和宽容型组织四个角度提炼并阐述了其组织文化的特质,并提出了特别培养学院的组织文化理念和实践载体.     

(Mis)understanding Safety Culture and Its Relationship to Safety Management

Although the concept of safety culture was coined in relation to major accidents like Chernobyl and Piper Alpha, it has been embraced by the safety community at large as a cause for unsafe practice. In this article, three approaches to safety culture are discussed in terms of their underlying concepts of culture and organizational culture. Culture is an intangible, fuzzy concept encompassing acquired assumptions that is shared among the members of a group and that provides meaning to their perceptions and actions and those of others. The basic assumptions that form the essence of a culture are shared, yet tacit, convictions, which manifest themselves subtly in the visible world. As applied by safety researchers, the culture concept is deprived of much of its depth and subtlety, and is morphed into a grab bag of behavioral and other visible characteristics, without reference to the meaning these characteristics might actually have, and often infused with normative overtones. By combining the three approaches, we can resurrect the notion of safety culture and strengthen its analytical potential in understanding the development and implementation of safety management systems.     

Selective Guide to Current Reference Sources on Marriage,Obesity, and Dieting

No abstract available for this article.     

Manufacturing management strategies for environmental protection: Toward the environmental upgrading of management and manufacturing systems to cope with environmental laws

Recent environmental problems have been caused by business activities and a lifestyle based on mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal. These problems have also become global in scale. Increasingly, global efforts are being applied to preserve and improve the environment. NEC, a worldwide electronics manufacturer, created its own environment action plan called Eco-Action 21. This is a continuously evolving plan applied throughout the NEC group and subsidiaries. Globally, 34 NEC manufacturing sites have received ISO 14001 certification. NEC Tohoku in Japan and NEC Ireland obtained BS 7750 certification even before this. NEC improves subcontractors' environmental behaviour with our accumulated expertize and technology derived from our ISO experience and our own development. Input for this paper was not only from NEC Tohoku and the NEC group, but also from outside NEC.     

Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture

In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory of organizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress we argue that future research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizational culture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system to shape members’ attitudes and behaviors. We further argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can be parsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important (e.g., teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms are held across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm (e.g., are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how future research might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion that characterize the current state of the field.