A classification system for understanding individual differences in temporal orientation among processual researchers and organizational informants

This paper develops a classification system of temporal orientations in an effort to provide processual researchers with a framework for understanding the potential impact of temporal orientations on processual research methods and findings. In developing the classification system four general conceptions of time are reviewed, including physiological, objective, psychological, and socially constructed relative time. Specific dimensions of temporal orientation previously studied are identified, and additional dimensions are offered. It is suggested that temporal concerns are endemic to management and organizational processes, and that differences in temporal orientations among researchers and organizational informants should be considered when conducting processual research.     

Incentive schemes and racial wage discrimination

We use a major micro data set to investigate the influence of incentive schemes on wage discrimination against blacks. Incentive schemes which directly link earnings and productivity appear to generally raise earnings, but they increase wages of blacks proportionately more than those of whites. This reduces the residual attributable to discrimination and suggests it is easier to discriminate when earnings are based on perceptions of input (evaluations of effort) rather than on measures of output.     

Trade preferences and exports of manufactures: A case study of Bolivia and Brazil

Trade Preferences and Exports of Manufactures: A Case Study of Bolivia and Brazil. — This paper analyzes the impact of the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) on the exports of Bolivia and Brazil, whose levels of economic development differ substantially. While Brazil’s exports under GSP were larger than Bolivia’s, the preferences had a significant impact only on Bolivian exports. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that certain low-income countries have benefitted from trade preferences. Since the GSP is not costly to the U.S. economy, continuation of the program with some modifications to benefit the least developed countries is recommended.     

A Cost Function Analysis of the Australian Transportation Equipment Industry

This article investigates the existence of economies of scale and input cross and direct price elasticities of demand in the Australian motor vehicle industry. Our estimated cost elasticities were less than one (consistent with economies of scale), but not significantly less than one at the 10 per cent level for two versions of the model. However, the estimated cost elasticity was significantly less than one at approximately the 2.5 per cent level for a third. Thus, these results give some credibility to the infant industry argument for continued assistance to the Australian transportation equipment industry. A four-input model separating domestic and foreign intermediate goods inputs suggests that while restrictions on imported components may have given some short-run relief to the domestic components industry and increased the demand for labour domestically, they decreased the demand for domestic capital. Although the infant industry argument could support short-run protectionist policies for the industry, it appears that such policies regarding the Australian motor vehicle industry must be designed carefully with a specified phase-out period if long-term adverse results are to be avoided.     

ENVIRONMENTAL STRUCTURE AND THEORIES OF STRATEGIC CHOICE

This article argues that the prevailing dichotomization of organizational studies into voluntarist and deterministic orientations is too simple, and that this simplicity has dangerous consequences for accounts of strategic choice. Determinism has been equated exclusively with the operation of environmental constraint, with the implication that the agency necessary for strategic choice can be secured simply by the removal of this constraint. This focus on external constraint has obscured the continuing influence of ‘action determinist’ positions, in which action is determined by mechanisms internal to the actor him/herself. This article argues that many recent theorists of strategic choice have relied too much on the interpretive voluntarist dissolution of environmental structure and neglected to safeguard themselves from the action determinism latent in the Carnegie tradition. the article proposes an alternative Realist account that, by contrast with interpretive voluntarism, incorporates environmental structure as an essential precondition to actors’ internal and external capacities for strategic choice.     

Financial capital movements and central bank behavior in a two-country,short-run portfolio balance model

This paper analyzes financial capital movements in a two-country, short-run, portfolio balance model which includes two securities that are imperfect substitutes. Following a disturbance, equilibrium is, in general, reattained, but the effects on interest rates, money supplies, and international reserve holdings depend on the monetary and reserve asset management policies of the two central banks. Special attention is focused on the case in which one central bank holds its international reserves in the form of ‘key currency’ securities, thereby sterilizing for the ‘key currency’ country. There are several applications of the central result that, for any disturbance, the less changes in international reserves are allowed to affect money supplies, the larger the change in reserves required to reestablish equilibrium.