China's outward foreign direct investment

China's outward foreign direct investment (FDI) is steadily increasing. The United States is now a key target for China's outward FDI, and the response by the American public tends to fall at opposite ends of the spectrum: fever or fear. Chinese FDI in the United States faces challenges posed by its liability of foreignness in political, cultural, marketing, and technological aspects. Utilizing mini case studies, we herein examine the polarized responses to Chinese outward direct investment, its history, and the challenges faced by Chinese multinational corporations operating in or attempting to enter the U.S. market. Finally, strategy suggestions are proposed.     

Making compassion count: equal recognition and authentic involvement in mental health care

Compassionate care within mental health services is often taken for granted as something that can be made visible and authentic. However, recent government reports and policy suggest that we are far from providing compassionate care and may be more focused upon risk and surveillance. This paper will discuss the visibility of compassionate care and explore outcomes that consumers and practitioners could measure in practice. Separating the fact from fiction within compassionate care will make authentic involvement practices more visible and open to discussion around consumer collaboration. In a qualitative analysis of a small study with mental health consumers, compassion was found to be a major factor in whether consumers became more involved in their own health care. Demonstrating compassionate care may therefore also demonstrate consumer participation and engagement. This paper will argue that compassionate care can be observed in the relationships between practitioners and consumers that are collaborative and use presence and persistence as methods of practice. Emancipatory practices can be made more visible in mental health care in order to make compassion measurable and to encourage consumer participation and engagement.     

Violations of Service Fairness and Legal Ramifications: The Case of the Managed Care Industry

Adapted from Chan's (2000) model depicting success of litigation, this paper argues that with the application of various legislation, health maintenance organizations' (HMOs') violations of service fairness to each group: enrollees, physicians, and hospitals give rise to each group's lawsuits against the HMOs. Various authors (Bowen et al., 1999; Seiders and Berry, 1998) indicate that justice concepts such as distributive, procedural, and interactional justice can be applied to the area of service fairness. The violation of these underlying justice principles with HMOs' service unfairness to enrollees, physicians, and hospitals is examined. A general synopsis of the ethical issues in the managed care industry is provided. The various lawsuits launched by each group: enrollees, physicians, and hospitals together with the key statutes used are discussed. This paper also highlights the provisions and ramifications of the 11 April 2000 landmark agreement that Aetna made with Texas Attorney General John Cornyn to settle the 1998 lawsuit brought against the company. Lastly, the current ethical issues in the managed care industry are further discussed. The value of this paper can be adapted to the study of organizations' service fairness violations in other industries or in the educational, governmental, and not-for-profit sectors both nationally and internationally.     

The spa experience at Radium Hot Springs

This paper examines the spa experience at Radium Hot Springs from the earliest days to the present in an attempt to indicate similarities and differences between Canadian spas and those in the United States and Western Europe. Radium is examined for five time periods under the headings of environment, strategies and institutions, perceptions and attitudes, and technology. Western Canadian spas share many traits with those of the United States, especially the western states, but the emphasis on natural attractions and federal government involvement have caused them to differ from those in Western Europe.     

Taking a positive approach to organizational downsizing

We drew from the literature on positive organizational behaviour (Luthans & Youssef, 2007) to test a process model relating generalized optimism (Carver & Scheier, 1999) to the cognitions, affect, and behaviour of 237 Canadian federal government managers during and following a major organizational downsizing. Our data supported a model in which generalized optimism measured 18 months prior to the downsizing (T1) associated positively with managers' cognitions, attitudes, job performance, and self‐reported coping effectiveness measured 12 months postdownsizing (T3). Analyses suggested that some of these associations were partially mediated by a positive thinking coping strategy and expectations for future career and job success reported during the downsizing (T2). We advocate for more research that draws from the positive organizational behaviour literature to study the effects of downsizing on survivors. Copyright © 2008 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The economic performance of cities: A Markov-switching approach

This paper examines the determinants of employment growth in metro areas. To obtain growth rates, we use a Markov-switching model that separates a city's growth path into two distinct phases (high and low), each with its own growth rate. The simple average growth rate over some period is, therefore, the weighted average of the high-phase and low-phase growth rates, with the weight being the frequency of the two phases. We estimate the effects of a variety of factors separately for the high-phase and low-phase growth rates. Growth in the high phase is related to both human capital and industry mix, while growth in the low phase is related to industry mix only, specifically, the relative importance of manufacturing. Overall, our results strongly reject the notion that city-level characteristics influence employment growth equally across the phases of the business cycle.     

Has bank holding companies' diversification affected their risk of failure?

The effect of nonbank activities on the riskiness of banking organizations is an important issue in capital regulation and deciding whether banking firms should be allowed to perform additional activities. This paper explores the potential effect of deregulation by examining the effect of existing nonbank subsidiaries on the riskiness of bank holding companies. The results provide no evidence to suggest that deregulation would increase banking organizations' risk and weak evidence that deregulation might decrease risk.     

Goodness of fit for seemingly unrelated regressions: Glahn's R2y.x and Hooper's r̄2

This paper presents a measure of goodness of fit for Zellner's seemingly unrelated regressions. The measure is a monotonic transform of the appropriate (asymptotic) F-statistic, is bounded on [0, 1] and is maximized by Zellner's estimation technique. Glahn's composite correlation coefficient is shown to be a special case of this measure. It is also compared to Hooper's squared trace correlation coefficient. All three measures as well as some additional asymptotic summary test statistics are calculated for the two-equation example of Zellner. The applicability of the latter test statistics seems not to be recognized in applied work.