CONCEPTUALIZING THE GOAL AND SYSTEM MODELS OF ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS —IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPARATIVE EVALUATION RESEARCH

The lack of comparative evaluation research on organizational-effectiveness models is the primary focus of this discussion. Problems in conceptually and operationally defining evaluation models, such as those in the goal and system model classes, are the proposed reason for this lack of comparative research. In this paper, goal and system models are formally defined in terms of their historical origins, underlying criteria and differing methods of application. A goal and system model classification continuum is also presented. Five comparative evaluation research questions are proposed and their implications for research are discussed. From a theoretical perspective this paper attempts to go beyond the sound foundation laid by Campbell (1977) in his discussion of these two schools of thought on organizational effectiveness.     

Three differential variables and their relation to retail strategy and profitability

The primary objective of this study is to evaluate three variables utilized frequently within the retail grocery industry to gain a differential advantage within a target market. These variables are Trading Stamps, Credit, and Delivery. Essentially, the study seeks to determine whether these differential variables are related to retail strategy and retail store profitability for a selected group of retail grocery stores belonging to a retailer cooperative. The study also seeks to determine if the utilization of the differential variables creates any profitability changes within the basic retailing strategy variables of the researched respondents.     

Measuring Fair Employment Practices: The Search for a "Figure of Merit"

Quantitative measures of equal employment opportunity in the bureaucracy are of quite recent vintage, even though data have been collected on minority employment since the early 1960s. Such measures as have been developed are useful in the sense that they are simple and easy to comprehend. Concentrating as they do on integration alone, however, they do not capture a sufficiently wide variety of personnel practices to truly assess equal employment opportunity. This paper presents a new measure which retains the basic simplicity required of a figure of merit but expands the dimensions of former measures to include an index of the occupational distribution of minorities within an organization. The measure presented implies a policy goal of income parity for minority groups within the bureaucracy and assesses progress toward that goal. It is argued that a worthy figure of merit can promote cost-effective implementation of public policy with regard to fair employment within the civil service.     

Licensing and technology dependence in the Andean group

This paper explores the extent to which licensing promotes technology transfer and future technological self-reliance in 47 metalworking and 43 chemical firms located in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, a set of factors which, it has been suggested, influence the choice of licensing as opposed to other means of acquiring technology were examined. Second, the relationship between licensing and future ‘technology dependency’ was explored statistically. Finally, an effort was made to explain these findings in terms of a ‘technological dependence syndrome’ in which opportunities for ‘learning by doing’ are consistently missed.     

Abnormal Returns from Predicting Earnings Thresholds

This study examines the performance of a trading strategy based on the prediction of firms concurrently reporting a positive earnings change and meeting analysts’ earnings forecasts. The evidence indicates that a model predicting both earnings thresholds concurrently can yield excess returns that are incremental to predicting only one earnings threshold. Further, I find that the prediction of forecast errors is relatively more important than predicting earnings changes as the incremental benefit from predicting earnings changes concurrently with forecast errors is small relative to a model that predicts only forecast errors. The results hold while controlling for various risk factors and known anomalies.     

Are Investors the Bad Guys? Tenure and Neighborhood Stability in Chelsea,Massachusetts

In this article, we examine the role of investors and occupant‐owners in an urban context during the recent housing crisis. We focus on Chelsea, Massachusetts, because it is a dense city, dominated by multifamily housing structures with high rates of foreclosure for which we have particularly good data. We distinguish between occupant‐owners and investors using local data, and we find that many investors are misclassified as occupant‐owners in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Then, employing a competing risks framework to study ownerships during the period 1998 through mid‐2010, we find that local investors, who tend to invest more in relation to purchase prices and sell more quickly, experienced approximately 1.8 times the mortgage foreclosure risk of occupant‐owners, conditional on financing. Nonlocal investors have no statistically significant difference in foreclosure risk from occupant‐owners. Nonetheless, those owners with subprime purchase mortgages (most of whom are occupant‐owners) faced the highest foreclosure risk when house prices fell.