Culture and the management of time: A comparison of Japanese and American top management practice

Data was collected from CEO's and upper-level managers in Japan and the United States by survey and by structured observation in order to investigate patterns of time utilization as functions of culture. The results showed similar patterns between the Japanese and the Americans with regard to the percentage of time spent working alone as opposed to working with others. Different patterns were found for the two cultures with regard to the length of activities.     

The components of risk in new product development: Project New Prod

Although new product development is one of the riskiest activities of a modern corporation, relatively little account is taken of risk measurement in the R & D project selection literature. The existing consensus is that risk is measured by some combination of the total amounts at stake and the uncertainties of the situation. The paper describes a project aimed at more exactly identifying and defining the components of risk as perceived by a decision-maker within a firm undertaking new product ventures. The project is based on data from a study of the behaviour of 103 firms and 197 ventures.
The results show broadly that managers perceive risk to be highest when the product shows least synergy with the firm's current business. In contrast, the possibility of reducing uncertainty components of risk through information-seeking seems to be of little account in risk perception. The author concludes from this that decision-makers are much more influenced by factors that control the amounts at stake (in general, the less the synergy the greater the resources needed to back a new product entry) than by uncertainty as to the outcome. The latter must constitute an important element of risk in reality. Its neglect may be because managers find they can deal conceptually more easily with concrete matters like the amount at stake than with the intangibles of uncertainty reduction. This may explain why many firms fail to integrate information into their new product development process.     

Mortgage Pricing: Some Provisional Empirical Results

We test some of the qualitative properties of mortgage pricing models. The models use option pricing techniques, focusing on prepayment as a call option. They imply a quite nonlinear relationship between mortgage price and coupon, interest rates and volatility. We test for both the first and second derivatives of the effects of these variables using data on Ginnie Mae mortgage backed securities. We find that the model is largely supported by the data.     

PROPRIETORIAL CONTROL IN FAMILY FIRMS: SOME FUNCTIONS OF 'QUASI-ORGANIC' MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategies of managerial control which are used by the proprietors of family-owned business enterprises. Interviews with the proprietors and senior managers of businesses in the building industry illustrate the ‘quasi-organic’ nature of management structures. These grant some autonomy to senior managers without threatening proprietorial decision-making prerogatives. Although the family firm has certain distinctive features, similar control strategies designed to ensure that delegated decisions are ‘reliable’ and ‘responsible’ are evident in various types of business enterprise. There is, then, scope for further comparative research within a conceptual framework which does not entirely divorce the family firm from other business organizations.     

Working While the World Sleeps: A Consideration of Sleep and Shift Work Design

The evolution of society and economic pressure has provided the impetus for operating on a 24-hr basis in many industries. This has occurred with relatively little attention toward sleep deprivation and related problems facing shift workers and the organizations employing them. This paper first documents the move toward shift work and some sleep problems associated with it. We then describe sleep disorders that impact job performance. Next, we describe alternative schedules and give suggestions for shift work implementation. Finally, we offer some normative advice regarding the treatment of shift employees.     

Chronic eosinophilic pneumonia

Chronic eosinophilic pneumonia is one form of eosinophilic lung disease that includes both idiopathic and known etiological cases. Chronic eosinophilic pneumonia has a characteristic clinical picture, along with a characteristic pattern on CT imaging. It is readily treatable with oral steroids, and although response is prompt with excellent resolution of the symptoms, chronic steroids are often necessary. The mortality from this disease is negligible.