Discourses of control, managing the boundaries

This paper, which was presented as the Distinguished Academic Plenary Lecture at the British Accounting Association Annual Conference in 2010, considers the role of the manager-academic or hybrid manager in the context of higher education (HE) in England. It pays particular attention to ‘achieving the organisation’ in the context of the need to balance economic and academic demands in times of resource constraint. Accepting the importance of discourse, it argues we also need to accept the importance of structure in understanding organisational change. It uses a model of steering and a middle range approach to argue that the manager-academic has to manage the boundaries of a variety of stakeholders, including steering media with positional power. It also argues for the importance of expertise, in this case that of the academic, in engaging with the management of universities.     

Fair process: managing in the knowledge economy

Unlike the traditional factors of production--land, labor, and capital--knowledge is a resource that can't be forced out of people. But creating and sharing knowledge is essential to fostering innovation, the key challenge of the knowledge-based economy. To create a climate in which employees volunteer their creativity and expertise, managers need to look beyond the traditional tools at their disposal. They need to build trust. The authors have studied the links between trust, idea sharing, and corporate performance for more than a decade. They have explored the question of why managers of local subsidiaries so often fail to share information with executives at headquarters. They have studied the dynamics of idea sharing in product development teams, joint ventures, supplier partnerships, and corporate transformations. They offer an explanation for why people resist change even when it would benefit them directly. In every case, the decisive factor was what the authors call fair process--fairness in the way a company makes and executes decisions. The elements of fair process are simple: Engage people's input in decisions that directly affect them. Explain why decisions are made the way they are. Make clear what will be expected of employees after the changes are made. Fair process may sound like a soft issue, but it is crucial to building trust and unlocking ideas. Without it, people are apt to withhold their full cooperation and their creativity. The results are costly: ideas that never see daylight and initiatives that are never seized.     

Surviving progress: managing the collective risks of civilization

As optimism is becoming ever more apparent, progress carries with it both promise and pitfalls. Though it is quite natural for humans to take an optimistic view of life, this optimism must at the same time be tempered with realism. We cannot therefore let a focus on average, or expected, outcomes cause us to ignore possible high-stakes (existential) risks associated with what is becoming an increasingly complex world. In this paper, we argue that a more complete view is necessary for a proper assessment of not only the technical aspects of high-stakes risk management, but also the social, political, and economic framework within which it is carried out. Unfortunately, attention to such crucial details is not often the case.     

With friends like these: the art of managing complementors

Intel and Microsoft neither buy from nor sell to each other directly, but they are undeniably in business together. They are probably the world's most widely known pair of complementors--companies that independently provide complementary products or services to mutual customers. Complementors increase the value of each other's offerings and the size of the total market. So it's not surprising that so many just assume that their interests are aligned. Nothing could be further from the truth. Discord can develop in many areas, such as pricing, technology, standards, and control of the market--both in terms of which company has the most influence over customers and which one gets the biggest slice of the pie. The issue of pricing perfectly captures this tension. Ideally, you'd like to price your goods high while your complementors price theirs low. Airlines, for instance, would be happy to see vacation lodgings go for a song, while destination resorts could raise rates and still fill their rooms if customers could fly there for free. The first step in managing relationships with complementors is to develop a deep understanding of their economics, their strategies and goals, their existing capabilities, their incentives for cooperation, and any potential areas of conflict. Then, to gain the upper hand, companies can use a variety of tools that fall into two main categories: hard power (inducements or coercion to get what you want) and soft power (persuasion through indirect means to get others to want what you want). The authors explain how to build both hard power and soft, illustrate the strengths and limits of each, and offer guidelines for choosing one over the other. Conflict among complementors is inevitable, but together, hard and soft power can help companies manage the dark side of complementor relationships and take full advantage of the opportunities that cooperation should create.     

Reserve stockpiling and managing its monetary consequences: the Indian experience

India's foreign exchange reserves have risen rapidly since the balance-of-payment crisis in 1991 to over US$155 billion by mid-2006. India is now the fifth largest Asian reserve holder. Despite this, scant attention has been paid to the rationale for and impact of reserves accumulation in India. This paper estimates the extent of de facto sterilization and capital mobility concurrently for the period 1990:q1–2004:q4. While India appears to have sterilized capital inflows quite aggressively, as the extent of de facto capital mobility continues to rise, it might become increasingly difficult to continue to sterilize going forward.     

Politics and the Fed

In the standard policy model, a policymaker optimizes the welfare of a representative agent. In practice, policies are chosen in a political process by agents elected by voters. Drawing on evidence from my two-volume history of the Federal Reserve, the paper reports many examples of decisions influenced by political pressures. The history shows that the meaning of the independence of the Federal Reserve changed over time reflecting political influences.     

大国货币财富管理之路——兼论日本应对本币升值的教训

中国经济持续稳定快速增长,目前已经成为世界第一出口大国（今年前7个月份出口额已超过德国）,外汇储备突破两万亿,人民币正加快走向国际化。在这样背景下,借鉴日本在本币管理上的经验和教训是十分必要的     

The integration substitute: the role of controls in managing human asset specificity

As the integration solution to the problem of specific assets cannot be replicated on human asset specificity because slavery is illegal, economic theory states that control systems substitute for integration through a balanced structure to help align diverse interests. To understand the intricate design features of the balance, we examine a case‐study firm. For low human asset specificity, the restriction and segregation of usable decision rights link with standards. However, incentives are traced to individuals only to the extent task deviations do not create relevant future costs that are difficult to be self‐corrected. For high specificity, incentives are related to outputs rather than outcomes, because outcome variations reduce the attractiveness of maintaining the balance. Subjective assessment is used as an efficient alternate ‘balancing’ solution and decision control is shared when available subjective data are inadequate.     

Big hat, no cattle: managing human resources

When faced with business problems, managers naturally make identifying the trouble their priority. Once that is done, at least half the job is over; finding solutions is just a matter of time. This hasn't been so, however, with the human resources problem: how to motivate employees. Sixty years ago, the Hawthorne experiments revealed the issue, and ever since, managers, researchers, and consultants have been searching for the answer to the human resources problem. Why aren't employees as productive, loyal, and dedicated to their companies as their managers know they can be? The author of this article proposes four reasons why actuality has fallen so far below expectation in personnel management, namely, that managers' expectations have been too high in the first place, that the concepts staff professionals offer managers are frequently contradictory, that the corporate role of personnel has always been problematic, and finally, that managers hold assumptions concerning their employees that undermine efforts to motivate them.     

Planning and managing primary care services: lessons from the NHS in England

High-quality primary care services are an essential part of a successful health service. However, the planning and management of such services is complex. Using evidence from a study of recent extensive changes in the English NHS, the authors highlight the need for local service oversight by managers who understand local conditions and needs. The recent English experience supports an incremental policy adjustment approach, rather than wholesale organizational change.     

Precautionary principle and discursive strategies: classifying and managing risks

The paper covers an integral risk concept consisting of a criteria-based risk evaluation, a novel proposal for risk classification and corresponding risk management strategies aimed at an analytic-deliberative approach in risk regulation. For this purpose, technical and scientific as well as social scientific concepts were integrated into a single conceptual framework. Eight criteria were selected for evaluating risks: probability of occurrence, extent of damage, incertitude, ubiquity, persistency, reversibility, delay effect and potential of mobilization. With respect to these criteria, six risk classes were formed in which risks may exceed thresholds determined by deliberative action. Effective and practicable management strategies were deduced for each risk class. The characterization and classification of risks provide a knowledge base for designing risk policies and class-specific management strategies. Three major management categories were identified: risk-based, precautionary and discursive strategies. In deliberative processes actors need to agree on norms and procedures to manage risks. If the results reflect the agreement of previous discourse procedures, political decisions become more legitimate. Because the risk evaluation, risk classification and management strategies are based on the concept of analytic-deliberative processes, the essential requirements for an effective and democratic risk policy are met.     

亚洲协会：亚太区影响最大的政经组织

1956年由洛克菲勒家族的约翰·洛克菲勒三世(John D. Rockefeller 3rd)创办的美国亚洲协会(Asia Society)是当前亚太地区最具影响力的非营利、非政府、政经民间组织,总部位于纽约,在休斯顿、洛杉矶、华盛顿特区、墨尔本和香港等地设有分会,在旧金山、西雅图、上海和马尼拉设有代表机构。 洛克菲勒成立亚洲协会的初衷是促进美国与亚洲     

Guidelines for managing low back pain: a policy checklist

Back injuries devour one-third of health care benefits and workers' compensation, yet corporate strategies vary widely in their approach to back pain prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. These recommendations provide a benchmark for evaluation policies on low back pain. They emphasize a sports medicine approach, focused on returning workers to activity as soon as possible.     

The Decision to Privatize: Finance and Politics

We investigate the influence of political and financial factors on the decision to privatize government‐owned firms. The results show that profitable firms and firms with a lower wage bill are likely to be privatized early. We find that the government delays privatization in regions where the governing party faces more competition from opposition parties. The results also suggest that political patronage is important as no firm located in the home state of the minister in charge is ever privatized. Using political variables as an instrument for the privatization decision, we find that privatization has a positive impact on firm performance.     

The Politics of Financial Development: Evidence from Trade Liberalization

Incumbents in various industries have different incentives to promote or oppose financial development. Changes in the relative strength of promoter and opponent industries thus result in changes in the political equilibrium level of financial development. We conduct an event study using a sample of 41 countries that liberalized trade during 1970 to 2000, and show that the strengthening of promoter relative to opponent industries resulting from liberalization is a good predictor of subsequent financial development. The benefits of developing the financial system are insufficient for financial development, and rents in particular hands appear to be necessary to achieve it.     

The Politics of Accountability: Institutionalising Internal Auditing in Israel

Israel's attempt at strengthening public sector internal audit is found to have limited success, conforming with experiences of other countries. The adopted internal audit policy had little more than symbolic value, being devoid of stipulations to affect significant change. This is confirmed by implementation data that reveal low scores for most organizations across dimensions of structure, process and outcome. Politics of accountability and policy change models help to explain the causes of ineffectual internal audit legislation and of weak implementation. Findings suggest that top–down approaches to strengthening public sector internal audit are misplaced.     

The morality of managing risk: paternalism,prevention and precaution,and the limits of proceduralism

A widespread trend in risk management recently might be described as proceduralismthe search for procedures by which parties can be brought together, in the hope of bypassing substantive moral and political disagreements. This article argues that there are severe limits to what can be expected of proceduralism, distinguishing four basic types. It goes on to argue that a central area of substantive disagreement that must be addressed in risk management theory concerns the scope of justifiable paternalism and the scope of justifications for measures that place obligations on the ground that people have limited rights to impose costs, harms or risks upon others. The article sets out an argument about how far paternalistic arguments can be taken, and under what kind of constraints paternalism is acceptable, before setting out for comparison similar considerations in respect of arguments about harms to others. The implications of these arguments for the idea of autonomy are explored. Finally, various formulations of the precautionary principle are considered in the light of these consideration, and consequently doubt is cast upon the merits of these formulations of precaution. The article concludes by drawing together the consequences for a post-proceduralist conception of risk management that recognizes the importance of addressing substantive moral and political arguments in the course of conflict resolution.     

The Politics of Needs Assessment: The Treasury Select Committee and the Barnett Formula

Parliamentarians' interest in Scottish public expenditure has been rising since 1987, when the electoral results left the Conservatives vulnerable in Scotland. Southern English MPs described the Scottish Office budget as a 'slush fund', and argued that Scots were being 'force-fed' with public expenditure. This interest has deepened as a direct result of the public debate over devolution (Midwinter, 1989). Although the author focuses here on developments in Scotland, many of the issues are relevant to devolution proposals in Wales, Northern Ireland and perhaps the English regions also.