Integrating Group Dynamics Training and the Education and Development of Social Work Students

Summary This paper explores experience of the development of a groupdynamics workshop in a post-graduate course for student socialworkers. The background to the workshops is outlined with referenceto students, course staff and consultant staff. A brief summaryof different conceptual approaches to group dynamics trainingis offered in order to clarify terminology and methods. Importantconclusions concerning the design and operation of the workshopsare drawn and emphasis is placed on an analysis of the multiplerole situation of student social workers, choosing appropriatelearning designs, and making these explicit     

Career Planning Connections: Using the Computer to Match Students With Professionals in the Field

This article describes a computerized career resource network designed to assist in matching students, efficiently and cost-effectively, with professionals in their career fields of interest.     

DO DRAGONS HAVE BETTER FATE?

Traditionally, belief in the Chinese zodiac promotes the superstition that the timing of one's birth determines one's fate. Adherence to this belief has resulted in increased birth rates during Dragon years and, hence, problems in the logistics of providing certain public goods and services (such as schools and medical services) by governments. Despite the possible economic impacts of this superstition on society, no previous study has attempted to test its validity. Using the 1991 and 1996 Hong Kong census data sets, as well as the standard return-to-education methodology, we do not find any evidence for this pervasive superstition. (JEL J13 , J18 , Z12 )     

The development of Canadian Indian communities: a two-dimensional typology reflecting strategies of adaptation to the modern world*

Les réserves indiennes du Canada sont habituellement considérées comme des îlots de pauvreté rurale; de façon générale, on ignore les différences entre elles quant au degré et au mode d'adaptation aux conditions modernes. Les rnesures de complétude institutionnelle et de développement des ressources personnelles suggérées ici révèlent une variation importante dans le développement des bandes indiennes et fournissent la base pour une typologie bi-dimensionnelle des réserves. Les bandes inertes, pluralistes, intégrantes et municipales varient de façon marquée selon un éventail considérable de caractéristiques communautaires et se regroupent géographiquement. Une analyse comparative de plus de cinq cent bandes suggèrent que l'on peut s' induire en erreur si l'on ignore les différences entre les communautés indiennes. Canada's Indian reserves are usually considered to be pockets of rural poverty; existing differences, in degree and type of adaptation to modern conditions are generally ignored. Measures of institutional completeness and personal resource development suggested here reveal substantial developmental variation among Indian bands and provide the basis for a two-dimensional typology of reserve communities. Inert, pluralistic, integrative, and municipal bands are shown to vary significantly on a wide range of community characteristics and to cluster geographically. Comparative analysis of more than five hundred bands suggests that it is highly misleading to stereotype Indian communities.     

COMPARING THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND QUALITY INITIATIVES OF BALDRIGE AWARD WINNERS

Can best‐practice quality firms leverage their quality programs for environmental management? This paper explores this question by comparing the implementation of successful and unsuccessful quality and environmental initiatives in five manufacturing‐ and five service‐sector Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (mbnqa) winners. The results lead to a series of propositions to guide future research. While the literature suggests that quality and environmental programs are closely related, this study finds that drivers of successful environmental initiatives are not the same as those for successful quality initiatives.     

AN IMPROVED HEURISTIC FOR STAFFING TELEPHONE CALL CENTERS WITH LIMITED OPERATING HOURS

Many telephone call centers that experience cyclic and random customer demand adjust their staffing over the day in an attempt to provide a consistent target level of customer service. The standard and widely used staffing method, which we call the stationary independent period by period (SIPP) approach, divides the workday into planning periods and uses a series of stationary independent Erlang‐c queuing models—one for each planning period—to estimate minimum staffing needs. Our research evaluates and improves upon this commonly used heuristic for those telephone call centers with limited hours of operation during the workday. We show that the SIPP approach often suggests staffing that is substantially too low to achieve the targeted customer service levels (probability of customer delay) during critical periods. The major reasons for SIPP‘ s shortfall are as follows: (1) SIPP's failure to account for the time lag between the peak in customer demand and when system congestion actually peaks; and (2) SIPP’ s use of the planning period average arrival rate, thereby assuming that the arrival rate is constant during the period. We identify specific domains for which SIPP tends to suggest inadequate staffing. Based on an analysis of the factors that influence the magnitude of the lag in infinite server systems that start empty and idle, we propose and test two simple “lagged” SIPP modifications that, in most situations, consistently achieve the service target with only modest increases in staffing.     

INSIGHTS ON SERVICE SYSTEM DESIGN FROM A NORMAL APPROXIMATION TO ERLANG'S DELAY FORMULA

We show how a simple normal approximation to Erlang's delay formula can be used to analyze capacity and staffing problems in service systems that can be modeled as M/M/s queues. The numbers of servers, s, needed in an M/M/s queueing system to assure a probability of delay of, at most, p can be well approximated by s ≅ p + z_***I-p+, where z_1-p, is the (1 - p)th percentile of the standard normal distribution and ρ, the presented load on the system, is the ratio of Λ, the customer arrival rate, to μ, the service rate. We examine the accuracy of this approximation over a set of parameters typical of service operations ranging from police patrol, through telemarketing to automatic teller machines, and we demonstrate that it tends to slightly underestimate the number of servers actually needed to hit the delay probability target—adding one server to the number suggested by the above formula typically gives the exact result. More importantly, the structure of the approximation promotes operational insight by explicitly linking the number of servers with server utilization and the customer service level. Using a scenario based on an actual teleservicing operation, we show how operations managers and designers can quickly obtain insights about the trade-offs between system size, system utilization and customer service. We argue that this little used approach deserves a prominent role in the operations analyst's and operations manager's toolbags.