Striking a balance between ‘Sir’ and ‘Dude’

This postcard reflects on an issue common to many academics, whether they teach accounting, politics or—as in my case—commercial law to business and economics students. Creating an open and effective relationship with students is a balancing act undertaken by educators across the board—and no less by my accounting colleagues down the hall. In teaching commercial law to accounting students, I was recently reminded of the importance and occasional difficulty in maintaining a healthy ‘two-way’ relationship. I trust the following may connect with accounting educators and others who are also trying to achieve the right balance.     

Factors Affecting the Design of Short-Term Study-Abroad Programs: An Exploratory Study of Two Business Schools

Study-abroad programs have played a significant role in globalization of business curricula over the years. Short-term study-abroad programs (STSAPs) are proliferating in business schools and provide a viable alternative of studying abroad to students who are unable to participate in programs of longer durations due to disruption in family, work, and education schedules. This exploratory study attempts to understand factors that are critical to students’ participation in STSAPs offered by business schools. This research focuses on a combination of factors that include STSAP components and attributes as well student specific characterisitics. Initial analysis indicates that STSAP cost, STSAP content, and organizational and personal issues, in that order, are considered important by business school students. Significant differences exist in the perceived importance of different factors used by students to choose to participate in STSAPs based on gender, age group, family income, program level (undergraduate versus graduate), and program type. Results of this research have implications for the design of STSAPs in business schools that are offering or considering offering such courses or programs.     

Assessing response styles across modes of data collection

Cross-mode surveys are on the rise. The current study compares levels of response styles across three modes of data collection: paper-and-pencil questionnaires, telephone interviews, and online questionnaires. The authors make the comparison in terms of acquiescence, disacquiescence, and extreme and midpoint response styles. To do this, they propose a new method, namely, the representative indicators response style means and covariance structure (RIRSMACS) method. This method contributes to the literature in important ways. First, it offers a simultaneous operationalization of multiple response styles. The model accounts for dependencies among response style indicators due to their reliance on common item sets. Second, it accounts for random error in the response style measures. As a consequence, random error in response style measures is not passed on to corrected measures. The method can detect and correct cross-mode response style differences in cases where measurement invariance testing and multitrait multimethod designs are inadequate. The authors demonstrate and discuss the practical and theoretical advantages of the RIRSMACS approach over traditional methods. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

中国生态城建设的现状特征与发展态势——中国百个生态城调查分析

我国近些年生态城建设呈现出数量多、规模大、发展速度快的特征,目前全国已出现一百多个大小不等的新建生态城项目。但这些生态城是否都是真正意义上的生态城受到学者和公众的质疑,因此迫切需要全面了解当前我国生态城建设的基本情况和特点,总结其发展态势。本研究针对我国生态城市建设实践,分析其类型、分布特征、产业特征和存在的问题,以期为制定生态城市发展政策提供依据。     

黑龙江地域文化的社会认同情况研究

黑龙江地域文化是构成中国文化不可或缺的一部分,中国文化的传承与保护离不开各地域文化的传承与保护。了解黑龙江地域文化在社会大众中的社会认同情况,是开展黑龙江地域文化保护与传承工作的基础。本文采用问卷调查法,针对当前社会大众对于黑龙江地域文化的社会认同情况展开调研。通过此次调研可以把握社会对于黑龙江地域文化的认同情况,进而寻求未来开展黑龙江地域文化有效传承与保护工作的方向和路径。     

An Investigation of Justice in supply chain relationships and their performance impact

Justice is important in improving performance of supply chain relationships. However, the role of justice in improving performance in supply chain relationships is an under-investigated subject in the literature. In studying the joint impact of justice dimensions, the traditional assumption is that the three forms of justice interact with each other in a multiplicative manner. However, this assumption creates a managerial problem as discussed in this paper. We outline a different view of how the justice dimensions interact with one another utilizing the constraining factor model (CFM). We show that the CFM resolves some of the problems arising from the choice of multiplicative interaction of justice measures on performance. Specifically, we demonstrate that an increase in procedural, distributive or interactional justice results in a significant and positive improvement in performance only if the specific justice dimension is the constraining factor in the relationship. Overall, our analysis suggests that all three dimensions are important and a high level of one of the justice elements will not compensate for a low level of another, a view that is put forward by a number of past research studies in justice. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.     

Agent-system co-development in supply chain research: Propositions and demonstrative findings

In this study, we develop an agent-system co-development (ASC) theoretical framework for behavioral research in supply chains. The ASC framework aims at explaining the dynamic agent-system relationships in supply chains whereby both action-influencing properties of human agents (e.g., beliefs, personalities, attitudes) and governance-influencing properties of supply chain systems (e.g., social norms, power-dependence, partnerial/adversarial relationship forms) mutually influence each other over time. Two empirical studies are conducted to illustrate how ASC can be a useful theoretical framework in supply chain research and to partially validate the central thesis of ASC in the contexts of partnerial/adversarial supply chain relationships and cooperative/competitive attitudes of human agents in supply chains. The results of both studies support the central thesis of ASC regarding the dynamic agent-system relationships. From two replicated experiments in Study 1, the results suggest that agents’ cooperative and competitive attitudes in business relationships are altered as they are exposed to different supply chain conditions of partnerial and adversarial relationships. In addition, from the multi-method research efforts in Study 2, the results from two survey studies and an experiment are largely consistent with one another, suggesting that personnel turnovers in existing supply chain systems can eventually lead to changes in supply-chain-system properties including the degrees of long-term commitment, information sharing, and joint problem-solving between supply chain partners, as well as the frequency of opportunism occurrences in the supply chains. Finally, we propound that the dynamic agent-system relationships proposed in the ASC framework can be a useful analytical lens in viewing various supply chain issues, such as supply chain evolutions and changes, supply chain designs and personnel decisions, and self-reinforcing feedback loops and decision tendencies in supply chains.     

太原市育龄人口生育意愿调查研究

随着经济不断发展,人们的生育意愿不可避免地会随之变化。本文在问卷调查数据分析的基础上,对太原市的总体生育现状以及不同群体的生育意愿做出回答,并对影响当前育龄人口生育意愿的因素进行了分析研究,提出相应的政策建议。     

Mean square error estimation in multi-stage sampling

Summary: Suppose for a homogeneous linear unbiased function of the sampled first stage unit (fsu)-values taken as an estimator of a survey population total, the sampling variance is expressed as a homogeneous quadratic function of the fsu-values. When the fsu-values are not ascertainable but unbiased estimators for them are separately available through sampling in later stages and substituted into the estimator, Raj (1968) gave a simple variance estimator formula for this multi-stage estimator of the population total. He requires that the variances of the estimated fsu-values in sampling at later stages and their unbiased estimators are available in certain `simple forms'. For the same set-up Rao (1975) derived an alternative variance estimator when the later stage sampling variances have more ‘complex forms’. Here we pursue with Raj's (1968) simple forms to derive a few alternative variance and mean square error estimators when the condition of homogeneity or unbiasedness in the original estimator of the total is relaxed and the variance of the original estimator is not expressed as a quadratic form.  We illustrate a particular three-stage sampling strategy and present a simulation-based numerical exercise showing the relative efficacies of two alternative variance estimators. Received: 19 February 1999     

Risk perceptions across the current political spectrum in Finland: a study of party members

Political party member perceptions of risk continue to attract a great deal of attention in current public discourse and media coverage, yet little research exists in terms of a comparative analysis of Finnish political parties’ views on the issue. Party members are in many ways a highly significant social group, one that exercises a great deal of decision-making power in modern civil societies. This article provides a novel and up-to-date look into the key areas of perceived risk held by the members of Finland’s political parties, in addition to a comparison of inter-party differences and similarities. The analysis is based on a unique survey data-set of the members of Finland’s six major political parties (N = 12,427). Included are the Finns Party, Centre Party, Left Alliance, Social Democratic Party, Green League and National Coalition Party. Together, these represent the political spectrum in Finland. Risk factors included primary categories dealing with various national, institutional, cultural and economic issues. Also included in the analysis was a look into whether length of party membership affects risk concern for the included issues. Findings showed that national and external risks were more of a concern for the Finns Party, while the Left and the Social Democrats considered economic issues a greater risk than did others. Furthermore, economic risk was most concerning to the left while external risks were generally viewed in line with the current centre-right administration. Some notable differences between old and new party members were also found. Findings emphasize the importance of understanding how political party members differ in their views of various societal risks while providing new points of comparison between those parties toward improved clarity of the national political landscape.