Death of a Salesman and the Disillusionment of American Dream

The play is centered on one man trying to reach the American dream and taking his family along for the ride.The Loman’s lives from beginning to end are a troubling story based on trying to become successful,or at least happy.Throughout their lives they encounter many problems and the result is a tragic death caused by stupidity and the need to success.This play takes issue with those in America who place too much stress upon material gain,at the expense of other,more admirable human values.In this play,there is also a more general criticism of American values.In addition,this undue concern over material success breaks down the bonds between men that form the basis for a smooth-functioning society.The play addresses the painful conflicts within one family,but it also tackles larger issues regarding American national values,also examines the cost of blind faith in American Dream.The process of the character’s defeat was actually the course disillusionment of their American Dreams,aiming to reveal the American people’s dilemma of existence and the root causes of the tragedy.     

The Worldwide Movement in Private Universities: Revolutionary Growth in Post-Secondary Higher Education

The end of the Cold War, which resulted from the collapse of communism and the spread of free market ideas in the former Soviet Union, China, and nations in Eastern Europe, has brought about many dramatic and momentous changes on the world scene. One remarkable development not widely recognized outside specialized academic circles is the emergence of new institutions of higher learning in the private sector of previously command economies and also in many developing countries that had been wedded to a culture of socialism for decades. The “privatization” of higher education is by all accounts a global phenomenon. Very few systematic studies of these new trends in private post‐secondary education exist to date, although the impact of this development could be far‐reaching not only for higher education but also for the social and economic development of many societies in the world. In this paper we attempt to analyze the phenomenon of new private universities in non‐Western nations, focusing on the developing world in general, and Asia in particular. What missions have these institutions chosen? Which models are these institutions following? What challenges do they face? How are they coping with their relationship to existing public universities? How are they dealing with tuition and budgetary issues? What sources of funding are they tapping into? How are they dealing with issues of equity, excellence, and access? In the composition of their faculty, student body, and curriculum, are these institutions sufficiently international? How are the funding institutions and universities in the West helping these fledgling universities? Are these trends expected to accelerate in the future? We attempt to answer these questions within the context of a few case studies that reflect the breadth and diversity of this revolutionary growth in post‐secondary higher education.     

The benefits and costs of training: A comparison of formal company training,vendor training,outside seminars,and school-based training

This paper presents estimates of the amount of training received by a large sample of United States adults aged 23–35 and uses a more sophisticated model than many previous studies to analyze training's impact on earnings. While workers reap substantial benefits from training, only a small minority actually receive it. Workers generally do not work fewer hours or accept lower wages during training, so they apparently bear few training costs. The low incidence of training may be due to Federal regulations that prevent employers from sharing training costs with their employees. Implications for managers, employees, and society are discussed. & copy; 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Managing Human Resources in East Asia

This article reports on the management of international assignments (IAs) in fifteen UK companies who have expanded their operations into the international arena over the last three to twelve years.¹The results show that very few of these companies currently follow examples of ‘good practice’ as espoused by most management theorists and other commentators on the management of expatriate assignments. However, at this moment in time, they do not have any significant problems with either high expatriate failure rates (HEFRs) or with staff performing under par on IAs. However, many are experiencing considerable problems with returning expatriate staff. The implications of these findings for expatriate management are discussed in detail.     

College students and HR professionals: conflicting views on information available on Facebook

Increasingly employers are using social media as a mechanism to screen potential job candidates. This study examined college students' perceptions of the amount and degree of information available to potential employers who use social media. The study employed a survey of college students to determine how much information they felt someone could learn about them through their Facebook page. Results indicated that participants did not perceive much information about key job categories could be derived from their pages and they planned very few changes even though many believed it highly likely an employer would review their page. A subgroup also had their pages reviewed by HR professionals. A comparison analysis revealed that in several key job‐related areas, such as potential unethical behaviours and communication skills, HR personnel felt that they were able to learn significantly more about the participants than the participants believed themselves.     

Estimation of the order restricted scale parameters for two populations from the Lomax distribution

The usual methods of estimating the unknown parameters of a distribution, use only the information given from the sample data. In many cases, there is, also, another important information for estimating the unknown parameters of our model, such as the order of these parameters, and this last information improves the quality of estimation. In this paper, we deal with the problem of estimating the ordered scale parameters from two populations of the multivariate Lomax distribution, with unknown location parameters. It is proved that the best equivariant estimators of the scale parameters (in the unrestricted case) are not admissible and we construct estimators that improve upon the usual ones (when these parameters are known to be ordered).     

Gaining competitive advantage through human resource management practices

Critical to a corporation's growth and prosperity is gaining and retaining competitive advantage. Although corporations may pursue many paths to this end, one that is frequently not recognized is capitalizing on superior human resource management. Currently, many companies recognize the growing importance of their human resources, but few are conceptualizing them in strategic terms—in ways to gain a competitive advantage. As a result, many companies forego the opportunity to seize competitive advantage through human resource practice initiatives. However, there are a few companies that do not forego the opportunity. We use them as examples to show how to systematically develop such advantages via a “target/thrust matrix.” The end results of this matrix have significant implications for both corporate strategy and personnel and human resource management.     

Computer‐Aided Statistical Instruction—Multi‐Mediocre Techno‐Trash?

The very soul of statistics are data, but few students actually collect data as part of their statistical journey. The impediments to real data collection exercises are very real—they are logistically difficult to set up, expensive, and may not work because of extraneous events outside the control of the instructor. Computer‐aided laboratories are a way to bring many of the benefits of actual data collection to students at a fraction of the cost and can be easily controlled by the instructor. There are many computer‐aided modules available—indeed a search on Google gave over 1 million hits. Some modules are good but many are mediocre. What separates the gems from the trash?     

Interpersonal team leadership skills

To say that a team leader's job is a tough one is certainly not saying enough. It is up to the team leader to manage a group of people to be individuals but yet work as a team. The team leader must keep the peace and yet create a revolution with this group all at the same time. The good leader will require a lot of education, training, and tons of practical application to be a success. The good news, however, is that the team leader's job is a rewarding one, one that they'll always feel good about if they do it right. How many of us get the opportunity to take a group of wonderful, thinking individual minds and pull from them ideas that a whole team can take to success? Yes, the job is indeed tough, but the paybacks are many.     

How to use the Internet

The Internet is the fastest growing new information service, but it is still an unknown territory to many production and inventory control (PIC) managers. It should not be, and by reading this article they can get a rough idea what it is, how to use it, why it should be used, and where to start.     

Group Status and Entrepreneurship

Do unfettered markets produce too many or too few entrepreneurs? Two seminal papers [ Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) and de Meza and Webb (1987) ] obtained ambiguous answers to this question based on different assumptions about the character of information asymmetries in credit markets. The present paper approaches the same question but using a labor market model in which income is determined by ability and individuals derive utility from income and occupational group status. Occupational group status for entrepreneurs depends on the average entrepreneurial income (due to ex post screening by banks), whereas status for wage employees depends on their own income and ability (due to ex ante screening by employers). Thus, individuals create externalities through their occupational choice. It is shown that there can be too many or too few entrepreneurs in equilibrium depending on the marginal returns to ability in entrepreneurship relative to paid employment; this enables the researcher to use independent evidence about occupational marginal returns to identify the relevant equilibrium likely to arise in practice, together with the likely appropriate policy responses. Based on this approach, we suggest that there may be too many (low ability) entrepreneurs in the USA.     

Multi-source Statistics: Basic Situations and Methods

Many National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), especially in Europe, are moving from single-source statistics to multi-source statistics. By combining data sources, NSIs can produce more detailed and more timely statistics and respond more quickly to events in society. By combining survey data with already available administrative data and Big Data, NSIs can save data collection and processing costs and reduce the burden on respondents. However, multi-source statistics come with new problems that need to be overcome before the resulting output quality is sufficiently high and before those statistics can be produced efficiently. What complicates the production of multi-source statistics is that they come in many different varieties as data sets can be combined in many different ways. Given the rapidly increasing importance of producing multi-source statistics in Official Statistics, there has been considerable research activity in this area over the last few years, and some frameworks have been developed for multi-source statistics. Useful as these frameworks are, they generally do not give guidelines to which method could be applied in a certain situation arising in practice. In this paper, we aim to fill that gap, structure the world of multi-source statistics and its problems and provide some guidance to suitable methods for these problems.     

The Consumption of Music and the Expression of VALUES

A bstract By consuming pop music, people want to express who they are, to which group they belong, what their identity is, People's identity, however and contrary to what many believe, is not strictly individual. Instead, people's identity is highly social and draws on the socio-cultural values (what I here propose to call VALUES) in society - VALUES that become'objectified'or institutionalized and may thus be communicated to others. If such institutionalized socio-cultural values are not conceptualized, and if one is not able to understand how institutions work in signaling people's identity, one is not able to explain a phenomenon such as the advent of pop music. In this paper, I apply and develop ideas taken from institutional and social economics, to understand the consumption of a symbolic good such as pop music.     

Classification of countries for international development planning using cluster analysis

This research study proposes an objective, systematic and multidimensional approach, which makes use of cluster analysis algorithms and complementary statistical techniques, to determine distinct classification or grouping of countries based on as many development indicators as thought relevant. The choice of development indicators to be included as variables is dictated by the interests of the development agency, which in this study is the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).The results of the analysis suggest that there are five distinct groups of countries in the ESCAP region, rather than just three, known as developed, developing and least developed countries in ESCAP and other U.N. agencies. In both classifications, the developed countries and the least developed countries form distinct groups. However, the classification derived by cluster analysis refines the broad middle group of developing countries further into three; one group already closely similar to the developed group in many aspects, another group relatively nearer to the least developed group, and one group lying right in the middle of the middle layer. The analysis also directs attentions to possible misconceptions that could result from an assessment of developing countries based on just a few development indicators.     

Tour Operators and Sustainable Development–A Contribution to the Environment

ABSTRACT

In recent years the attitude of tour operators towards the environment in tourism destinations has been slowly changing, as consumers have put greater pressure towards sustainable tourism. Although there are just a few tour operators in Europe that take responsibility for sustainability and the environment, these are among the biggest ones, and they have the power and are willing to change their practice and the practice of many others in this business. Moreover, their central position in the tourism system gives them great potential to influence the decisions and behaviour of both sides: tourists and service providers.     

The absent, the hidden and the obscured: reflections on “dark matter” in qualitative research

Qualitative research literature generally ignores the voids that are created and the materials that are suppressed during data analysis and the writing phase. Qualitative studies are usually based on observations and interviews that hold an immense amount of data. These are transformed to a few condensed papers at the final stage. During this process, many of the findings and insights are omitted. This study focuses on the important but neglected topic of data omitted from final research reports by examining two specific aspects of research: (1) reflexivity, its pretensions notwithstanding, that may often suppress and conceal more than it presents and reveals and (2) relevant findings omitted from final reports despite their marked effect on research. We maintain that these suppressed and obscured materials, the “dark matter” of qualitative research, have a marked effect on the research and significantly affect the findings and their structure even if they are not included in the final report.     

“三校生”困境及对策研究

"三校生"作为一个特殊的群体,虽然人数众多,但并没有引起社会过多的关注.由于受到更为严峻的升学、就业、心理和社会化压力,"三校生"面临着更多的尴尬和困境."三校生"现在所面临的问题是由自身、家庭、社会、学校等多方面的因素造成的,要解决"三校生"的困境,必须依靠多方面的通力合作.     

Implementation of Pareto efficient allocations

This paper considers Nash implementation and double implementation of Pareto efficient allocations for production economies. We allow production sets and preferences are unknown to the planner. We present a well-behaved mechanism that fully implements Pareto efficient allocations in Nash equilibrium. The mechanism then is modified to fully doubly implement Pareto efficient allocations in Nash and strong Nash equilibria. The mechanisms constructed in the paper have many nice properties such as feasibility and continuity. In addition, they use finite-dimensional message spaces. Furthermore, the mechanism works not only for three or more agents, but also for two-agent economies.     

Minimum Wage Myths

This paper casts doubt on the positive effects so often claimed for the recently-introduced national minimum wage by its many supporters. It attacks the notion of the minimum wage as a 'free lunch', arguing that its effects are often either negative or simply unknown. Those worst affected by its introduction are those the Minimum Wage most aims to help – the lowest income group.     

Cyber supply chain security practices DNA – Filling in the puzzle using a diverse set of disciplines

This paper describes the journey of the evolving cyber supply chain community towards creating practical and useful standards and best practices. It is based on the author?s experience working on the topic since 2006 and contains observations and lessons learned, refined over the years. Cyber supply chain security requires members of several different professional communities to come together including information security, system and software engineering, supply chain and logistics, and process improvement, to name a few. These professional communities have not worked or interacted before and had divergent experiences, vocabularies, frameworks, standards, ways of demonstrating that the practices were performed, and many other things. Over the years these people have learned that many practices that they thought were missing already existed in another discipline and that reinventing them was not necessary. The paper will summarize this journey with the goal of helping those new to this subject matter learn from those who have been working on it for some time.