Search results

It was not until the late 1960s that housing attracted much attention from academic social scientists. Since that time the literature has expanded widely and diversified, establishing housing with a specialised status in economics, sociology, politics, and in related subjects. As we would expect, the new literature covers a technical, statistical, theoretical, ideological, and historical range. Housing studies have not been conceived and interpreted in a monolithic way, with generally accepted concepts and principles, or with uniformly fixed and precise methodological approaches. Instead, some studies have been derived selectively from diverse bases in conventional theories in economics or sociology, or politics. Others have their origins in less conventional social theory, including neo‐Marxist theory which has had a wider intellectual following in the modern democracies since the mid‐1970s. With all this diversity, and in a context where ideological positions compete, housing studies have consequently left in their wake some significant controversies and some gaps in evaluative perspective. In short, the new housing intellectuals have written from personal commitments to particular cognitive, theoretical, ideological, and national positions and experiences. This present piece of writing takes up the two main themes which have emerged in the recent literature. These themes are first, questions relating to building and developing housing theory, and, second, the issue of how we are to conceptualise housing and relate it to policy studies. We shall be arguing that the two themes are closely related: in order to create a useful housing theory we must have awareness and understanding of housing practice and the nature of housing.

The purpose of this paper is to critique the existing decision-making models of organizational theory and the ability of strategic managers to address unconventional problems using these models. Strategic management models presume reasonable stability in the task environment and the organizational design features. However, complex problems, or wicked problems, are prolific in a global world. They change profoundly the nature of strategic management, where management faces a deep paradox – an environment of unprecedented interdependence, yet unpredictable forces of chaos and volatility, a landscape of wicked problems. In this paper, the authors address wicked problems within the context of strategic management.

The authors review and critique the organizational theory literature, namely, microeconomics, bounded rationality, organizational failure and the theory of creative destruction within the context of wicked problems.

The authors find that the contemporary models of strategic management are incapable of assisting managers in addressing the reality of wicked problems. They argue that organizational pathologies rest in executive action: pursuit of goals and objectives with a false sense of causation, feedback filters that exaggerate good news and restrict bad news and actions that give only token measures to correct faulty design decisions and faulty decision processes, including more emphasis on vertical channels than horizontal task interdependencies.

The authors conclude that wicked problem-solving is by temperament and time horizon, a multilayered, multitasked, organizational challenge, and requires fundamentally different mindsets for design and performance systems for senior executives. The study of wicked problems requires a new corporate mindset, new collaborative models to address them and new corporate processes and executive training tools who increasingly have to address them. This research is a first step toward extending our understanding of how to address the world of wicked problems.

The purpose of the current study is to assess the efforts to control fraud in the home health care industry in the USA by examining the problems that criminal justice officials confronted in their attempts to control home health care fraud and abuse.

Attention is given to the history of the home health care industry in the USA, the types of fraud found in the health care field in general, and the officials who are given the duty of controlling health care fraud.

The results of this study suggest that the problems fraud control officials face in their response to home health care offenders are similar to those confronted in the response to white‐collar offending, but also similar to those confronted in the response to many conventional offenses.

Highlights the problems in controlling fraud and abuse in the US home care health field.

Nominal Group Technique (NGT) minimises many problems associated with conventional interactive group problem solving; however, its verbal inputting feature is unnecessarily limiting. By utilising cards, the Improved Nominal Group Technique (INGT) assures contributor anonymity, adds productive pre‐meeting activity and removes NGT′s inputting‐transcribing bottleneck. INGT is appropriate for identifying and evaluating options, positions or problems, solving a problem, and for reviewing and refining written proposals or other documents.

This paper describes an efficient reduced‐order method for the analysis of cylindrical dielectric resonators with an inhomogeneous dielectric medium. The field equations are formulated using the Laplace‐domain finite element method and are reduced to lower‐order models using the complex frequency hopping (CFH) technique. CFH is a moment matching technique which has been used successfully in the circuit simulation area for the solution of a large set of ordinary differential equations. The proposed technique is faster than the conventional approach by one to three orders of magnitude. The results are compared with those of other numerical methods available in the literature.

This chapter introduces evolutionary neuroscience and its organizational applications, especially its usefulness for motivation analysis in macrolevel disciplines such as strategic management. Macrolevel organizational disciplines have mostly lacked a theory of motivation beyond self-interest assumptions, which fail to explain many important macrolevel organizational phenomena. Evolutionary neuroscience provides an empirically grounded, parsimonious perspective on the human brain and brain evolution which helps clarify the profound complexities of motivation. Evolutionary neuroscience’s theory of the physiological causes of self- and other-interested motivation can support better macrolevel motivation analysis and unify disparate, potentially conflicting motivation theories. Examples are offered of how neuroscience-based motivation theory can support more comprehensive strategic management analysis of competences and competitive advantage.

In our previous paper we developed a taxonomy of managerial skills and qualities; reported a modest research study giving some evidence for the validity of the taxonomy; and presented some further empirical evidence about the sources from which the managers we have investigated acquired these skills and qualities.

In the current exploration, the machining of a Nimonic 90 superalloy material was carried out in a die-sinking electric discharge machine. Experimentation was performed to investigate the impact of three input machining factors – current (I), pulse on time (T_on) and pulse off time (T_off) – on various response characteristics such as material removal rate (MRR), surface roughness (R_a) and electrode wear rate (EWR).

A Taguchi L9 design and ANOVA were used to assess machine response characteristics. The study also involved a grey relational analysis (GRA) multi-objective technique of optimization.

For single-objective performance, the most appropriate machining factors for achieving the best performance were attained as: MRR (I = 20 A, T_on = 200 µs and T_off = 45 µs), R_a (I = 14 A, T_on = 100 µs and T_off = 25 µs) and EWR (I = 17 A, T_on = 150 µs and T_off = 45 µs). The proposed grey relational approach provided the optimal settings (i.e. 14 A I, 100 µs T_on and 25 µs T_off) for the variables used to calculate the predicted and experimental results. Also, a confirmation test indicated that the final experimental grey relational grade value was enhanced when the experimentation was performed at optimal setting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present work is the first to examine the proposed machining variables (i.e. current, pulse on time and pulse off time) in relation to the optimization technique of GRA for a Nimonic 90 alloy using a die-sinking electric discharge machining method.

This paper will discuss two problems that have plagued the literature on the Ward-Domar-Vanek labor-managed firm (LMF) model, the perverse supply response problem and the horizon problem. The paper also discusses the solution to the horizon problem and the alleged “solution” of a membership market.

This is a conceptual paper so it analyzes the two problems and shows how they can be resolved. It also shows how one alleged “solution” (membership market) is based on several conceptual mistakes about the structure of rights in a democratic firm.

The perverse supply response is based on the assumption that the members of a democratic firm can expel for no cause some members when it would benefit the remaining members. It is shown that the same perverse behavior happens conceptually and historically in a conventional firm under the same assumptions. The horizon problem is resolved by the system of internal capital accounts (ICAs) that has been independently invented at least four times.

The idea of a democratic firm is quite often dismissed by conventional economists: “At first it seems like a good idea but unfortunately it is plagued by structural problems such as the perverse supply response and the horizon problem.” Hence it is important to see that the first is not a problem under ordinary assumptions and that the second is a solved problem.

The perverse supply response problem can be reproduced in a conventional firm under similar assumptions, and the horizon problem is real problem for social or common ownership firms but is solved in the Mondragon-type worker cooperatives by the system of ICAs. This has been known and published since the early 1980s, but conventional economists ignore the solution and still cite it as an inherent structure problem of a democratic firm.

It has not been previously shown in the LMF literature that the perverse supply response can be reproduced in a conventional corporation under similar assumptions since the maximand for the conventional firm is not total market value but that value per current shareholder. The solution to the horizon problem using ICAs has long been “known” but never acknowledged in the conventional literature as if it was a necessary feature of workplace democracy. The idea of a membership market is analyzed and criticized.