Assimilating social values in computer-based technologies

This paper describes the key elements of social impact assessments for computer-based technologies. It recommends that analysts examine the infrastructural demands of new computing developments and social outcomes on 12 different criteria. Social impact analysis can be used to evaluate and select among different system alternatives and to monitor a selected system as it evolves. This paper recommends a ten stage political process which requires a project to be tracked from the early stages of design, through its implementation, and during the period it is used. The concepts developed draw upon the literatures of social impact analysis and urban planning.     

What's Different About Public and Non-Profit 'Turnaround'?

This article reconstructs the literature on corporate turnaround in terms of its recurring features. It then tests these against the experience of four very different cases of the turnaround or attempted turnaround of public and non-profit organizations. It concludes that while some concepts from the corporate literature usefully highlight important aspects, other critical complicating features of what is needed to achieve a turnaround in public and non-profit contexts would be overlooked or poorly treated if the situation were considered simply in these terms. These complicating features deserve the attention both of practitioners and researchers.     

Information systems in policy making: Computer technology and organizational arrangements

Automated information systems as a tool in public policy making sometimes prove inappropriate in view of the use made of them by policy makers. The author suggests a coupling of selected organizational rearrangements and automated information systems, using competitive analyses to ensure that political decisions are sensitive to the values of different interests.     

Do Mandatory Pensions decrease Household Savings? Evidence for the Netherlands

The Dutch mandatory pension system consists of two parts: a public pay-as-you-go part that provides a minimum income to all Dutch inhabitants over age 64 and an occupation-specific capital-funded part that provides supplementary retirement income. The goal of this paper is to test for the effect of mandatory pensions on discretionary household savings. The data are drawn from the CentER Savings Survey. A result of the empirical analysis is that the impact of the public part of the Dutch pension system is not well identified. The occupational pensions have a significant negative impact on savings motives with respect to old age. The evidence on the effect on household wealth is mixed.     

Determinants of UK Box Office Success: The Impact of Quality Signals

This paper analyses the roles of various quality signals in the demand for cinema attendance in the United Kingdom. Estimation of a three-stage least squares model with data for 527 films released in the United Kingdom shows that the impacts of advertising and critical reviews on box office revenues vary both in channels and magnitudes of impact. Our model treats total advertising as endogenous, alongside the number of opening screens and total box office revenues, while critical reviews are considered exogenous. Our results show that total advertising affects total box office revenue while responding endogenously to critical reviews.     

Forecast reconciliation: A geometric view with new insights on bias correction

A geometric interpretation is developed for so-called reconciliation methodologies used to forecast time series that adhere to known linear constraints. In particular, a general framework is established that nests many existing popular reconciliation methods within the class of projections. This interpretation facilitates the derivation of novel theoretical results. First, reconciliation via projection is guaranteed to improve forecast accuracy with respect to a class of loss functions based on a generalised distance metric. Second, the Minimum Trace (MinT) method minimises expected loss for this same class of loss functions. Third, the geometric interpretation provides a new proof that forecast reconciliation using projections results in unbiased forecasts, provided that the initial base forecasts are also unbiased. Approaches for dealing with biased base forecasts are proposed. An extensive empirical study of Australian tourism flows demonstrates the theoretical results of the paper and shows that bias correction prior to reconciliation outperforms alternatives that only bias-correct or only reconcile forecasts.     

Metering motorbike mobility: informal transport in transition?

Vast numbers of people in rapidly growing cities throughout the developing world depend on informal transport services for their mobility needs. Thus far the field of transition studies has addressed the dynamics of socio-technical change in situations where regimes of automobility and sanctioned public transport constitute the dominant order, but not in contexts of cities in the developing world, where informal transit thrives. In this paper we enquire about stability and prospects for change in these kinds of socio-technical systems. To this end, we trace the evolution of Bangkok's motorcycle taxi industry including recent efforts to introduce a potentially radical innovation: an information and communications technology (ICT) platform used as a taximeter. The paper concludes that innovations in informal urban transport are opening up alternative mobility pathways for the developing world, which might even spread far beyond their original confines into the West; and that the persistence of informal transport systems and the proliferation of innovations within those systems in developing countries prove to be relevant phenomena for defining prominent topics on the agenda of (sustainability) transitions research.     

Preferred human resource development activities and their functions: differences in perspective between managers and employees

This exploratory study uses the learning‐network theory as a framework to investigate how managers and employees differ in their preference for the human resource development (HRD) activities of employees and in the functions they attribute to HRD. The research design was quantitative and cross‐sectional. Data collection took place in six countries in Europe, Asia and North America. A new instrument was used, which views work improvement (WI), career development (CD) and personal development (PD) as three main functions of HRD that can serve managers and employees. Results show that managers and employees prefer different HRD activities for employees to undertake; respectively, formal courses and programs over job experiences, and vice versa. The two groups also differ in the scores they give to WI and PD as relevant functions that employee participation in HRD can provide. It is concluded, therefore, that differences between managers and employees in their views of the relevance of HRD activities should be taken into account in theory and practice when organizing employees’ HRD activities.