Invoking Satan or the Ethics of the Employment Contract*

ABSTRACT Studies of mergers of organizations focus upon the financial and economic outcomes, with little attention paid to the effect on the people working in the merging organizations. This paper reports the findings of a study of the impact on managers of an organizational merger. Rather than the cool calculations of accountants and economists and the rational application of a managerial logic, we found the impact on these managers was upon their emotions, which seemed sometimes too buffeted to allow them to continue in their work. A narrative analysis of the stories told by these managers suggested they experienced their involvement with the merging organizations as akin to a Faustian contract, whereby they had sold their souls to the organizational devil and were now reaping the costs. When we came to write this paper we found that using the usual rubrics of academic writing suppressed the sheer emotionality of their experiences. We have therefore followed the imperative of our conclusions, and written our analysis in the form of a play, based upon Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, which allows us to use our interviewees’ own words to illustrate the impact of the merger. The play is, of course, in the format of a tragedy: it has four main characters – the narrator, the manager, Faustus and Mephistopheles – and five acts. We use the Prologue to insert our own words, where we argue for a turn away from the ‘hard’ school of human resource management towards one that is ethically informed. Programme notes contain the technical details which justify our research methods. We remain totally unapologetic for intruding emotions into the rational world of academia.     

Forecasting Using Long-Order Autoregressive Processes: An Example Using Housing Starts

A long autoregressive (AR) modeling procedure for monthly U.S. housing starts data is considered. Neither differencing to remove the trend, nor differencing to remove the seasonal component is required in this method. The model is fitted by a Householder transformation-Akaike AIC criterion algorithm. Forecast performance is compared to that obtained by the Box-Jenkins ARIMA method. The prediction error variance of the long AR model method tends to be smaller than the prediction error variance of the Box-Jenkins model method. The long AR method is well suited for housing market time-series which are characterized by both strong seasonal and slowly changing trend components.     

Abstracts

Quality & Quantity -     

Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.