A fine balancing act: freedom and accountability

The recent Funding Options Review identified a minimum additional funding requirement of 900 million per annum for higher education by 2004/05 and also considered more specific needs, such as correcting for past under-investment in infrastructure. At the same time, it contributed to the debate about the‘key choice’of funding by government or by the‘beneficiaries of higher education.’Government will need to match its aspirations for higher education with adequate funding and the universities will have to be‘even more sensitive and responsive to the needs of students.’     

Cost control: a personal balancing act

Rid yourself of the word "spend." Substitute "invest." Spending never has been an acceptable component of effective cost control. Investing always has been and always will be.     

大学生的感性自由与学校管理的理性自由——当代大学生的自由观解析

自由是证明人的存在的重要概念。大学管理中的深层问题表现在如何建构学生自主性与学校管理的平衡性。本文从自由主义研究的概念、必要性等方面分析学生自由相关理论。最后通过分析高校管理中理性因素,实现学习与生活方式的理性回归。     

Signal and political accountability: environmental petitions in China

Vertical accountability in China has long been considered as essentially indirect or informal. This paper provides evidence that direct local accountability may exist to a greater or lesser degree in China under current political institutions. By using provincial environmental petition data, this paper finds that the number of environmental petitions is positively associated with provincial governments’ investments in pollution mitigation. The increased petitions serve as a signal to provincial leaders of the possibility of potential social instability. However, since “local” provincial party secretaries are better informed, the signaling effect of the petitions is lessened in these cases.     

The equal pay act: Responsibilities and rights

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA) requires that men and women receive equal pay for equal work. Plaintiffs who claim discrimination on the basis of the EPA may settle out of court, or may bring legal action in the courts. Employers possess specific rights under the law, and can defend themselves against charges of discrimination through a number of “employer defenses.” These defenses involve providing that pay differences are based on seniority systems, merit systems, production systems, or “any other factor other than sex.” This article will also discuss the impact of court decisions that have further honed the responsibilities and rights of both employees and employers under the EPA.     

A cost evaluation method for dynamic line balancing

A procedure is presented for calculating stochastic costs, which include operator (labor) and inventory costs, associated with dynamic line balancing. Dynamic line balancing, unlike the traditional methods of assembly and production line balancing, assigns operators to one or more operations, where each operation has a predetermined processing time and is defined as a group of identical parallel stations. Operator costs and inventory costs are stochastic because they are functions of the assignment process employed in balancing the line, which may vary throughout the balancing period, and the required flow rate. Earlier studies focused on the calculation of the required number of stations and demonstrated why the initial and final inventories at the different operations are balanced.The cost minimization method developed in the article can be used to evaluate and compare the assignment of operators to stations for various assignment heuristics. Operator costs and inventory costs are the components of the cost function. The operator costs are based on the operations to which operators are assigned and are calculated for the entire work week regardless of whether an operator is given only a partial assignment which results in idle time. It is assumed that there is no variation in station speeds, no learning curve effect for operators' performance times, and no limit on the number of operators available for assignment. The costs associated with work-in-process inventories are computed on a “value added” basis. There is no charge for finished goods inventory after the last operation or raw material before the first operation.The conditions which must be examined before using the cost evaluation method are yield, input requirements, operator requirements, scheduling requirements and output requirements. Yield reflects the output of good units at any operation. The input requirement accounts for units discarded or in need of reworking. The operator requirements define the calculation of operator-hours per hour, set the minimum number of operators at an operation, and require that the work is completed. The scheduling requirements ensure that operators are either working or idle at all times, and that no operator is assigned to more than one operation at any time. The calculation of the output reflects the yield, station speed, and work assignments at the last operation on the line.An application of the cost evaluation method is discussed in the final section of the article. Using a simple heuristic to assign operators, the conditions for yield, inputs, operators, scheduling, and output are satisfied. The costs are then calculated for operators and inventories.In conclusion, the cost evaluation method for dynamic balancing enables a manager to compare the costs of assigning operators to work stations. Using this method to calculate the operator and inventory costs, a number of different heuristics for assigning operators in dynamic balancing can be evaluated and compared for various configurations of the production line. The least cost solution procedure then can be applied to a real manufacturing situation with similar characteristics.     

Enhancing NDPB accountability: improving relationships with upward and downward stakeholders

This paper examines the relationship between Northern Ireland Non-departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs) and two key stakeholders, sponsoring government departments and service users, and outlines how this relationship can impact on a NDPB discharging its accountability responsibilities effectively. After discussing the concept of accountability, the paper presents the findings of a survey of, and interviews with, NDPB board members. Whilst the consensus was that NDPBs were effective in discharging accountability, there was frustration with an apparent absence of an arms’ length relationship with certain sponsoring departments and limited engagement with service users.     

The model employment termination act: Provisions and discussion

Recently, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws completed a drafting of the Model Employment Termination Act (META). The goal of this suggested state legislation is to end the patchwork of state-defined protections offered to employees who are terminated in at-will work environments. If META provisions are adopted there will be a substantial change in both the protection offered employees and the litigation of wrongful discharge claims within the adopting state. This article presents the changes proposed by META and discusses these changes and their potential implications for employers and employees.     

Corporate accountability and the physical environment: Social responsibility and accounting beyond profit

The social responsibility debates of the last thirty years have resolved little and have had only peripheral effects on traditional business behaviour. Social responsibility issues are re-emerging in the light of the environmental crisis and are far too important to be once again marginalised by traditional business thinking. Economic and environmental criteria will, increasingly, be in conflict and accountants - like all business professionals - are implicated in this, not least because it is accounting that defines the rules, keeps the score, announces the results and determines who shall see them. The paper attempts to re-examine social responsibility and accountability in the light of the re-emerging environmental concern and suggests some ways in which accounting might contribute towards an organisation's attempts to become less unsustainable.     

A note on the balancing factors of gravity models

Application of the production constrained gravity-type spatial interaction model generally incorporates a “balancing of attractions” procedure to yield the fully constrained condition. Two techniques for balancing a singly constrained gravity model are compared in this note. These are the Federal Highways Administration adjusted attraction factor method and the Furness column and row balancing procedure. This comparison shows firstly that the two techniques are identical, and secondly that the balancing procedure results in an arbitrary distortion of the calibrated distribution function. Furthermore, some empirical results show that the balancing procedure does not necessarily improve the model's predictions on a cell by cell basis. These results indicate that balancing may be an unnecessary as well as undesirable step in the application of the singly constrained gravity model.     

Forecasting and mediation: Colorado and the clean air act

This paper presents an analysis of discussions designed to resolve technical differences, a process known as data mediation, between originators of divergent forecasts. Differing forecasts of future urban air quality by several agencies led to debate over revisions to the 1977 Clean Air Act proposed during the 97th Congress. Researchers for General Motors, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the State of Colorado disagreed over the ability of Denver, Colorado ever to attain the health standards for carbon monoxide if automobile emission for high altitude were relaxed. Data mediation led to resolution of some differences. The search for disconfirming evidence was a key element of the successful data mediation. In examining the process of that mediation, it was found that the search for disconfirming evidence requires: (1) balance of scientific expertise and credibility; (2) explicitness of assumptions; and (3) segmenting and bounding of the problem.     

Freedom of Association, Freedom of Contract, and the Right-to-Work Debate

The debate over union security arrangements is often presented as involving irreconcilable goals and values. Supporters of union security typically stress their importance to the union’s organizational strength and workers’ welfare. Right-to-work supporters, who favor banning such arrangements, typically emphasize employee freedom and choice. Our approach involves a unique comparison of both perspectives, which shows that neither perspective is completely compatible with safeguarding freedom. We therefore advocate reconciliation based on compulsory worker representation, which preserves the best freedom-enhancing properties of each perspective.     

The greening of the press: A case study of stakeholder accountability and the corporate management of environmentalist publics

The concept of stakeholder accountability and management is increasingly an integral facet of business strategy. This is particularly evident for companies which have a significant environmental impact, be it real or perceived, where public scrutiny of environmental performance is facilitated through heightened press coverage. Effective stakeholder management therefore necessitates an active response to the media's attention in order to manage the public perception of business activities. This article presents data on the exponential growth in both the total number and the proportion of news articles over the past fifteen years which have associated a large forestry company in Western Canada with environmentalist issues. More detailed analyses of these articles illustrate how environmentalist sub-issues can be identified and whether the voice is either that of the corporation or the environmentalist movement. Implications of these findings for the management of environmentalist publics is discussed.     

A cost-effective approach to stochastic line balancing with off-line repairs

The layout of production facilities is an important determinant of the productivity potential of a manufacturing enterprise. It is particularly important in the design of assembly lines where the objective is to assign tasks to work stations in such a way as to minimize total variable production costs.Early approaches to the line balancing problem assumed known constant task times and sought a line layout which would produce the desired output with the fewest number of work stations, which is equivalent to minimizing idle time. Studies have shown that task times are random variables, therefore the cost of task incompletion must be considered a part of total production cost. Incompletion cost will be the cost of repairing or completing tasks which cannot be completed within the cycle time after the item has reached the end of the assembly line.This paper describes a methodology for designing approximately minimum cost paced assembly lines under conditions of random task times and off-line repair of incompleted tasks. Task times are assumed to be normally distributed random variables with known means and variances. The methodology consists of heuristically identifying a large number of feasible balances for each of which total costs are computed. The line design with the lowest total is retained as the “best.”In order to evaluate candidate line layouts, a total cost model is developed. Total cost is the sum of normal operating cost—which is simply a function of the number of work stations—and the cost of repairing products containing incompleted tasks. Because this latter cost is a random variable for a given balance, the expected value is used to evaluate a candidate layout. The cost associated with one or more workers exceeding the cycle time is the product of the probability of this happening and the expected cost of off-line repair.The heuristic method for generating feasible balances builds work stations from continually updated lists of precedence satisfying tasks. Qualifying tasks are added to the station as long as the probability of the station exceeding the cycle time remains below a pre-specified threshold. The methodology requires systematically varying this threshold to permit a lowest total cost solution to emerge. The process of generating a large number of balances for a particular threshold is efficient. Evaluating the total costs of the resulting balances takes the majority of the computational time.An experiment was conducted in order to compare the above cost-effective methodology with a purely deterministic approach and a commonly used industrial approximation method for dealing with task time variability. The experiment applied the three methods to four problems from the literature under a variety of repair cost and time variance conditions. In 21 of the 24 cases studied, the stochastic method produced a lower cost balance than the two alternatives. In the remaining 3 cases, the deterministic method also found the lowest cost balance. The stochastic method saved an average of 22.5 percent in total operating cost over the deterministic method and 8.4 percent over the industrial method.The experiment clearly showed the need to explicitly consider task time variability in arriving at a line balance. The stochastic approach of this paper offers large potential savings with no risk of obtaining a less desirable balance and so should be considered for implementation whenever there is a variation in task times. Even for large-scale problems, the computational cost is infinitesimal in the context of assembly line balancing, where very small improvements in productivity can mean substantial increments to profitability.     

Sustainable evaluation and verification in supply chains: Aligning and leveraging accountability to stakeholders

Managers are being challenged by multiple (and diverse) stakeholders, which have variety of expectations and informational needs about their firm’s supply chains. Collectively, these expectations and needs form a multi-faceted view of stakeholder accountability, namely the extent to which a firm justifies behaviors and actions across its extended supply chain to stakeholders. To date, sustainable supply chain management research has largely focused on monitoring as a self-managed set of narrowly defined evaluative activities employed by firms to provide stakeholder accountability. Nevertheless, evidence is emerging that firms have developed a wide variety of monitoring systems in order to align with stakeholders’ expectations and leverage accountability to stakeholders. Drawing from the accounting literature, we synthesize a model that proposes how firms might address accountability for sustainability issues in their supply chain. At its core, the construct of sustainable evaluation and verification (SEV) captures three interrelated dimensions: inclusivity, scope, and disclosure. These dimensions characterize how supply chain processes might identify key measures, collect and process data, and finally, verify materiality, reliability and accuracy of any data and resulting information. As a result, the concept of monitoring is significantly extended, while also considering how different stakeholders can play diverse, active roles as metrics are established, audits are conducted, and information is validated. Also, several antecedents of SEV systems are explored. Finally, the means by which an SEV system can create a competitive advantage are investigated.