RESISTANCE TO CHANGE: A PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITIQUE OF ARGYRIS AND SCHON'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO ORGANIZATION THEORY AND INTERVENTION

The purpose of this essay is to examine psychoanalytically Argyris and Schon's contributions to organization theory and intervention. The author focuses his attention on the problem of individual and organizational resistance to change in the light of Argyris and Schon's cognitive psychological assumptions about learning, reasoning, and effectiveness.     

Maximizing purchase decision factors other than price

Assessing and acquiring technology does not have to be chaotic, driven solely by price, clinical preference, and emotion. With the tools available, it can be distilled to a process of organized common sense, which results in maximum flexibility for the user and allows materiel managers to procure the best, most cost-effective equipment for the hospital.     

Why Are Themed Brandstores So Powerful? Retail Brand Ideology at American Girl Place

Although there is growing interest in themed brandstores, we still know very little about the source of these retail environments’ power to affect consumers profoundly. Utilizing an ethnographic study of American Girl Place, a culturally rich and highly successful retail environment, we find that effective retailing in these contexts is an intensely ideological affair. In our participant-observation of, and on-site interviews with, consumers at American Girl Place we find that the ideology of the brand manifests powerfully through a variety of different and distinct areas within the store: the Museum, the Library, the Café, the Salon, the Theater, and the Photo Studio. Ideological expression is central to each of these places. Tracking the influence of brand ideology through consumers’ retail experiences, we theorize about the centrality of retail place in ideological branding. Although the confluence of ideology and retailing has been referenced in prior research, this paper focuses on and systematically develops the theoretical interconnection between the two. The physical immediacy of themed brandstore experience acts as a quilting point that links together related cultural concepts into a strong retail brand ideology. The implications of this theory draw our attention to ideological and morally-bound retail brand expressions, emphasize the importance of a variety of retail formats within a single store, and provide practical guidelines for retailers eager to build successful brands of their own.     

Taxes and Pensions

Pension benefit rules depend on individual history far more than taxes do, and age plays a much larger role in pension determination than in tax determination. Apart from some simulation studies, theoretical studies of optimal tax design typically contain neither a mandatory pension system nor the behavioral dimensions that lie behind justifications commonly offered for mandatory pensions. Conversely, optimizing models of pension design typically do not include annual taxation of labor and capital incomes. After spelling out this contrast and reviewing (and rejecting) zero taxation of capital income based on the Atkinson‐Stiglitz and Chamley‐Judd results, this article raises the issue of tax‐favored retirement savings, a topic where the two subjects come together.     

Towards a change in the economic paradigm through the experience of developing countries

Outside the conventional economic paradigm, chronic and recurrent bottlenecks are treated as pathological disorders instead of inherent problems in the growth of developing nations. Bottlenecks are either an insufficiency of foreign exchange to purchase an item needed to carry out production, or a shortage of a raw material. A new kind of recessive inflation occurs when markets provoke a regressive distribution of income to reduce bottlenecks and clashes with social pressure for higher wages. The trend toward bottlenecks in primarily exporting countries results in chronic and cumulative foreign indebtedness, recurrent stop and go cycles, and conflicts about income distribution which are solved through recessive inflation. Any balancing action on bottlenecks implies changes in relative prices entailing transfers of income to suppliers of scarce items. Investments should be stimulated by governments at the international level according to a global plan. A network of the largest world banks should be stabilized for most important raw materials and foodstuffs. This would encourage investment and discourage excessive price changes. If a rule were adopted whereby each country would have to live with its own oil deficit, the individualist/opportunism would disappear.     

Simultaneity in the market for housing characteristics

The nature of simultaneity in the markets for housing characteristics is examined. Simultaneity is found to arise in the implicit markets for individual characteristics because of the presence of nonlinearity in the market (hedonic) price function for housing. However, this simultaneity is not the kind discussed by S. Rosen [J. Political Econ. 82, 34–55 (1974)] between firm supplies and household demands. As a result, the Rosen suggestion of identifying demand with firm supply shifters is inappropriate. Among the alternative approaches to identification, the most desirable involve use of data over two or more markets in which residence for a given household is exogenous to the choice of housing.     

Schemas determining the incentive value of sales promotions

There are three types of schemas for evaluating sales promotions: schemas using cognitive algebra, schemas analogous to perceptual processes, and simple nonalgebraic heuristics. Each type of schema requires different information to evaluate a promotion. The schema a consumer uses to evaluate a promotion may therefore determine whether or not the promotion is seen as valuable. The effects of salespeople, product type, and the consumer's situation on the schemas used to evauate promotions are discussed.