Law without justice: The dilemmas of formalization and fairness in the legalistic organization

There is growing evidence of a litigation mentality rampant in organizations, which has created a legalistic mindset in many managers. Increasingly, managerial decisions are becoming dominated by a concern for what is legally defensible at the expense of broader social considerations such as justice and fairness. The papers in this special issue explore how this legalistic mindset has created new organizational and social dilemmas, and situations of law whithout justice.     

On the unimodality of passage time densities in birth-death processes

It has been shown [2] that for any ergodic birth-death process the p.d.f. of T_on , the passage time from the reflecting state 0 to any level n is log-concave and hence strongly unimodal. It is also known (cf [2]) that the p.d.f. of T_{n, n+1} or T_{n+1, n} for such a process is completely monotone and hence unimodal. It has been conjectured that the p.d.f. for the passage time T_mn between any two states is unimodal. An analytical proof of the result is presented herein, based on underlying renewal structure and methods in the complex plane. It is further shown that the p.d.f. of T_mn can always be written as the convolution of two p.d.f.s, one completely monotone and the second PF and hence log-concave.     

Equipment replacement policy: a survey

Over the past ten years there has been a considerable increase in application of theoretically correct measurement methods in determining the economic life of equipment. Approximately 89% of the firms surveyed have equipment replacement policies. The discounted rate of return method is the most widely used in determining the service life of equipment; the MAPI formula is not widely used. Difficulties in applying a replacement policy can be classified into three groups: operational, organizational, and economic. The problems mentioned most often are operational. In organizational difficulties there is usually a lack of coordination between staff and line managers. Economic problems are generally the limited funds available for equipment replacement. Formal educational programs are lacking for the development of equipment replacement managers. For the firms having replacement policies, individuals with engineering degrees are preferred over those in other disciplines for the management of the equipment replacement policy.     

On UMV-EStimators in survey sampling

Summary The existence of uniformly minimal variance estimators in the class of all linear unbiased estimators of the population total is discussed. Some remarks are given on the concept of necessary bestness.

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Zusammenfassung Es wird die Existenz von Schätzungen mit gleichmäßig minimaler Varianz in der Klasse aller linearen erwartungstreuen Schätzungen des Populationstotales besprochen. Einige Bemerkungen werden zum Begriffi necessary bestness gemacht.

     

Levensduur en sloop van personenauto's in Nederland, 1950–1964*

Summary The life distribution of motorcars is examined over the period from 1950 to 1964. Age-specific survival rates, derived from Dutch registrations, are averaged and lead to the life table shown in table 4. The deviations from average age-specific survival rates show no significant variation over time nor over successive car generations. Since the registrations include an increasing number of used cars imported from Germany this apparent stability hides compensating changes in car scrap page. Since before the war the life expectancy of motorcars has increased from 8 to 11 years, and it is argued that this is due to the widening of the used car market. In the next stage, which is already well under way in Germany, new cars replace used cars, and rising apparent scrappage rates reflect the disposal of the latter by export.     

The effects of group decision-making process and problem-situation complexity on implementation attempts

The effects of group problem-solving method and problem-situation complexity on attempts at implementing group solutions were investigated in a laboratory-field setting. Group members were supervisory nurses from various organizations, who were randomly assigned to three groups in a balanced research design which included three group decision-making processes and three levels of problem-situation complexity in implementation. The dependent variable was the number of attempts at implementing group-derived solutions in home organizations. The results showed that structure in group decision-making processes led to increased rates of implementation attempts at all levels of problem-situation complexity. There was a significant complexity-by-process interaction effect among the decision-making processes, which supports the conclusion that the type of group decision-making process and the problem-situation complexity should be considered in order to optimize the number of implementation attempts.g