Are top human resource specialists 'strategic partners'? Self-perceptions of a corporate elite

Despite the existence of various large-scale surveys of human resource specialists, there has been little research focusing specifically on the top cohort of HR practitioners. In addition, the surveys offer little insight into the ambiguous, but important questions associated with the strategic management process in large, complex corporations. This article reports a study of the qualifications, work histories, role orientations and strategic contributions of the most senior HR specialists in the New Zealand business sector. These elite practitioners typically demonstrate a 'dual background' in specialist HR activities and line management, and strongly subscribe to Legge's notion of 'conformist innovation'. As in the United Kingdom, they tend to focus primarily on the management of managers and, to a lesser extent, the management of industrial relations. Their work is increasingly integrated with other spheres of the business such as quality management. Whether their contribution is regarded as 'strategic' depends on the model of strategic management that informs the question. This paper argues that the survey-based studies have inappropriately adopted 'outside-in' models of strategic management which privilege marketing notions and assume that 'formulation' is more strategic than 'implementation'. The work of these senior HR specialists is more fairly assessed under a conception of the strategic problem which balances external and internal concerns. Given the present realignment of strategy theory, the challenge facing these HR specialists is that of developing frameworks for corporate planning and performance analysis which attribute a more central role to the critical elements of HRM.     

THE EFFECTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL FORM IN THE MIXED MARKET FOR FOSTER CARE

ABSTRACT ** : This paper uses proprietary quality of care data to examine the consequences of organizational form in privatized US foster care services. The contract failure hypothesis generically proposes that nonprofits should provide higher quality services, relative to for‐profits, when output is costly to observe. Advocates argue that the nonprofits offer important consumer protections when public services are contracted to private agencies. Contrary to expectations, we find that nonprofit firms do not offer higher quality services. We explore the possibility that monitoring efforts by state regulators or competition among foster care agencies effectively mitigate the influence of organizational form in this particular mixed market.     

The Brand and Its Image Re-visited

The beginning of advertising wisdom is the ability to distinguish between products and brands.     

The link between the management of employees and patient mortality in acute hospitals

The relationship between human resource management practices and organizational performance (including quality of care in health-care organizations) is an important topic in the organizational sciences but little research has been conducted examining this relationship in hospital settings. Human resource (HR) directors from sixty-one acute hospitals in England (Hospital Trusts) completed questionnaires or interviews exploring HR practices and procedures. The interviews probed for information about the extensiveness and sophistication of appraisal for employees, the extent and sophistication of training for employees and the percentage of staff working in teams. Data on patient mortality were also gathered. The findings revealed strong associations between HR practices and patient mortality generally. The extent and sophistication of appraisal in the hospitals was particularly strongly related, but there were links too with the sophistication of training for staff, and also with the percentages of staff working in teams.     

On Quality

M. J. Stewart failed to critique the correct data set we sent him. He had two data sets of ours in his possession, and has written a critique (Stewart, 1992) of the earlier data set, data already rejected by us. Stewart's ‘Critique of Laugesen and Meads 1991’, wrongly titled, critiques our 1991 paper using a 1990 data set. We discarded the 1990 data set and revised and replaced it in 1991 prior to publication (Laugesen and Meads, 1991). The 1991 data set used for our 1991 paper differs from the 1990 version with regard to tobacco price in most countries; in addition the advertising restriction score for Sweden has been updated.

What Stewart wrote and asked for, and what we sent him, which he received but did not use, was a copy of the data we used in our 1991 paper (Laugesen and Meads, 1991). If he had any doubts as to which data set he should critique, he was entitled to ask us. As he did not use our 1991 data set, Stewart failed to note the very high correlation between our 1991 data and his UK price series.

We did not send Stewart the 1990 data set. Stewart evidently obtained it after the 1990 Quebec tobacco advertising trial. We made it available to the Canadian government, but with some reluctance to the Quebec Superior Court and hence to tobacco manufacturer plaintiffs, as we intended to revise and publish.

In response to the parts of Stewart's critique, applicable despite his using an earlier data set: 1. Stewart says we should calculate price independent of consumption, but the necessary data were only fully available for nine out of 22 countries; the method we used was the only feasible method, and gave a very high degree of correlation with Stewart's method.

2. Stewart misquotes us on income: as a comparator of incomes, we use gross domestic product per capita, in preference to private consumption which does not allow for the value of free public sector services.

3. After allowing for data errors in some values for tobacco consumption for the United Kingdom, and for Portugal's female work-force data, we recalculated our equations and confirm our published findings that adbans tend to be significantly associated with falls in consumption.

4. We preferred Generalized Least Squares for regression. The pre-conditions for using Ordinary Least Squares could not be met.

5. We confirm the general pattern of coefficients, and the tendency of advertising bans to be followed by falls in tobacco consumption, if we use country dummies and Ordinary Least Squares as Stewart suggests. The large residuals noted in our 1991 analysis disappear; between-country differences are significant, consistent with historical differences in intrinsic tobacco consumption.

6. We find significant correlations between adbans and later tobacco consumption. The converse was not true; earlier consumption did not correlate with later ban levels.

     

Winning methods for forecasting tourism time series

We constituted Team “Lee C. Baker”, which won the online tourism forecasting competition. Our forecasts had the smallest MASE for the first part of the competition involving 518 annual time series, and the second smallest MASE for the second part of the competition involving 427 quarterly time series and 366 monthly time series. In this article, we briefly describe the methods we used.     

跨越鸿沟的五大应对之策

那些对社会政治问题于企业之重要性始终心存疑问的管理者在看过《麦肯锡季刊》对这一问题所做的引人注目的民意调查后，一定会疑云顿消。     

"Management as the Spirit of the Modern Age"

This paper uses Collingwood's methodology to attempt to understand those formative influences influencing Drucker within the Weimar Republic. It is intent on using this methodology to advance an historical thesis about both the origins and sources of Drucker's thought. By illuminating these formative influences on Drucker, the paper hopes to portray the implications of such influences for his theory of business management.