Pluralism in the mass media: Can management participation help?

Concentration and lack of plurality of media control is significant and appears to be increasing. The potential danger to a democracy of a lack of plurality of media control is serious. There are opportunities for greater plurality and freedom of expression through professional employee decision making partcipation. There are practical precedents for professional employee management participation in the media. Therefore, professional media employee management participation deserves to be seriously considered. Limitations of the principle are also considered.Richard P. Nielsen is Associate Professor at the School of Management, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. Professor Nielsen publishes frequently in the areas of philosophical and social issues in management as well as strategy and consensus building.The author would like to thank Professor William Torbert of Boston College for his helpful criticism of this article.     

A measure of ceo social power in strategic decision-making

For the strategic management field to advance its understanding of the interpersonal dimensions of strategic decision-making, valid and reliable measures of power and influence need to be developed. Research in the discipline would also be subsequently likely to enjoy enhanced viability and greater cross-discipline confidence if it was based on proven measures. For these reasons, field research was undertaken to determine if a modified version of an existing instrument (Spekman, 1979), designed to gauge social power at low organizational levels, could be used to measure the exercise of CEO power in strategic decision-making.     

Business and national priorities for industrial development: Intersectoral consensus in Israel

This study describes a survey of experts chosen from Industry, Labour, and Government in Israel, who ranked and scored three business and four national goals in the context of industrial development. The business goals represented profitability, capital use and growth potential. The national goals involved human resource utilization, added value, foreign exchange conservation, and export of technologically advanced products. The findings support a hypothesis of consensus on goals and goal priorities between different sectors of the Israel economy, despite what might appear to be their divergent special interests. The findings also indicate overall consensus with respect to a balance between business and national goals. The study concludes that this consensus is the result of the need to respond to environmental threats and uncertainties which has created a sense of mutual interdependence among the sectors.     

An econometric study on the dynamics of urban spatial structure

Using data on 43 randomly selected census tracts for each of 39 U.S. cities in 1970, we present a comprehensive econometric analysis of a varying parameter density gradient (VCM) model in which the functional form, together with the variance components of an implied error structure, is freely estimated. We generalize a recent model of Johnson and Kau in which certain city- and tract-specific socioeconomic variables are introduced to depict the dynamic process of urban growth. Since these variables can be either controlled by policy actions or projected on the basis of time, we reexamine the usefulness of VCM framework for both forecasting and policy simulation purposes.     

Testing rational expectations by the use of overidentifying restrictions

A simple econometric test for rational expectations in the case in which unobservable, rationally expected variables appear in a structural equation is presented. Using McCallum's instrumental variable estimator as a base, a test for rational expectations per se and a joint test of rational expectations and hypotheses about the structural equation are presented. The new test is shown to be a new interpretation of Basmann's test of overidentifying restrictions. As an illustration, the hypothesis that the forward exchange rate is the rationally expected future spot exchange rate is tested and rejected.     

Theory in consumer behavior: A status report

This article examines the attitudes of 40 opinion leaders in marketing toward theory in consumer behavior. These individuals exhibited favorable attitudes toward theory in marketing in general. More favorable perceptions of the value of the contributions of theory to consumer behavior existed than for promotion and channels of distribution. In comparison to eight other areas of marketing, the consumer behavior area was perceived as having made the greatest past contribution to marketing thought and the one most likely to make worthwhile future contributions. The sample believed that much future effort was needed in progressing toward a general theory of consumer behavior and that such effort would indeed be forthcoming.     

Proposition 4, Tax Reduction Mirage: An Exploratory Note on Its Potential Spending and Tax Impacts

Abstract . What would the true government expenditure and tax-burden impacts of California's Proposition 4 likely be if it (or its equivalent) were enacted in all states? What happened to actual state plus local government expenditures per capita over the period FY 1970 - FY 1976 is examined. Next, we examine what would have happened to such expenditures (per capita) if Proposition 4 had been in effect over the same period. Comparing the results reveals that Proposition 4 would have exercised no significant impact over per capita state plus local spending levels. This implies that such legislation would not have resulted in significant tax reductions.