Defining hospital clusters and associated service communities in metropolitan areas.

According to traditional concepts of hospital governance, each institution is considered responsible for the care of a defined community. Evaluation of hospital performance and effective service planning both require that hospitals' service communities be identified. However, in metropolitan regions it is difficult to associate a geographic population with any one hospital because of the wide choice of facilities available to area residents. The service community concept becomes more meaningful in these regions if several hospitals with overlapping geographic communities are defined as a cluster.This paper describes a two-step method for identifying hospital clusters and their associated service communities. The first step involves analysis of patient origin data to identify logical clusters of hospitals. Three algorithms for performing this analysis are presented. In the second step, analytical findings are reviewed by a panel of area planners and hospital experts who, considering additional qualitative factors, determine how the hospitals may be most appropriately grouped. Experience in using this method for hospitals in the seven-county region around Detroit, Michigan suggests that reasonable clusters can be identified, although clusters of central city hospitals are less well-defined than those in the suburban areas.     

A note on measuring political participation in comparative research

This article presents an application of Prezeworski and Teune's so-called “identity-equivalence method” to a large set of indicators of political participation. By relaxing commonly held assumptions about necessary distinctions among types of participation, it is found that the distinction between “conventional” and “unconventional” modes of participation is unnecessary, while the distinction between “government” and “nongovernment” has some merit. The findings also lend further support to the claims of Prezeworski and Teune that the identity-equivalence method is preferable to the identical indicator method.     

DIVISIONALIZATION,DECENTRALIZATION AND PERFORMANCE OF LARGE UNITED KINGDOM COMPANIES 1

Questionnaire survey data from 144 large U.K. firms are used to describe and discuss the nature of organization design in major companies. It was found that the majority of firms were multidivisional. However a considerable variation in internal operating procedures was found which emphasized that many multidivisional companies do not behave in the way that the strategy/structure literature predicts. Empirical testing of the relation between structure and financial performance also emphasizes that divisionalization is not necessarily the key to a superior profit performance. Rather it would appear that organizational procedures need to be reconsidered in the light of recent divisional structures established in many companies. It is argued that a powerful divisional head office may weaken overall performance and that instead greater attention should be paid to the opportunity to decentralize operating decisions to the individual business units within each division.     

THE LEARNING STYLES QUESTIONNAIRE: AN ALTERNATIVE TO KOLB'S INVENTORY?

An important consideration in the design of educational programmes is the learning style of students. In the field of management education, Kolb's theory of learning styles has received particular attention. Research has shown, however, that his associated measure, the Learning Style Inventory (LSI), may be of doubtful utility. the present study of British and overseas managers examines the measurement properties of one alternative, Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ). the results, calling into question Kolb's theory itself, suggest that the LSQ may be preferred to the LSI on account of the distribution of its scores, its temporal stability and its construct and face validity. Its predictive validity, however, remains in doubt.     

Planning a mature economy in the USSR

Conclusion Few of the techniques of planning we have now been considering were available to the Soviet economist during the period of intensive industrialisation; those which were available were worked out only in elementary form. In any case, the gap between the goals of the politicians and the assumptions of the economists was so great that little dialogue was possible. The politicians, and the politically-minded economists, undertook the elaboration of their own system of planning and their own ruleof-thumb methods of quantifying their goals to make them operational. In doing this, they acquired a rich fund of valuable experience about the problems of development through central planning; the lessons from this experience, both successful and unsuccessful, could save resources in other economies where central planning is being used for development. Unfortunately, it is information about formal mechanisms for planning and financial control which has until now tended to be communicated from the Eastern bloc to the developing countries, rather than a realistic account of problems and achievements. For the developing countries, the further question exists: now that the new techniques for planning are available, can they be coupled with planning for a high rate of growth in conditions of rapid social change? If so, some of the successes of Soviet-type central planning may be achieved at less cost.For previous articles in this series, see Economics of Planning, Vol. 5, 1965, No. 1–2, pp. 74–86, Vol. 6, 1966, No. 1, pp. 53–67.     

Bias in estimation from type I censored samples

Summary
Let be a family of probability distributions on R¹. This paper raises the question whether a parameter θ=θ (P), Pt, is estimable on the basis of a type I censored sample (i.e. censored on a fixed set C). Two theorems are given that state conditions on θ and C that ensure that θ is not estimable. The results are applied to estimation problems for the normal and POISSON distributions; it turns out that unbiased estimation is impossible in the majority of practical cases.