A method for assessing highway qualities to integrate values in highway planning

Highway infrastructure planning is most often oriented toward assessing and maintaining physical inventories but it is often the lack of social knowledge about how people perceive, value and use a transportation system that generates the greatest user conflict and mistrust of public agency behavior. Using results from a 2001 statewide survey of Alaska residents, this paper presents a methodology for examining highway systems as a collection of intrinsic highway qualities and special places that provide a spectrum of highway experience opportunities. The concept of a highway experience opportunity spectrum is described and a number of potential dimensions for creating experience opportunity classes are suggested. With knowledge of spatial locations of intrinsic highway qualities, transportation planners can make informed choices to maintain or alter the set of highway experience opportunities associated with a highway system.     

Differences in large and small firm responses to environmental context: strategic implications from a comparative analysis of business formations

Despite growing recognition of some strategic advantages held by small firms, little comparative research has been performed on the advantages and disadvantages accruing to firm size. In order to delineate the differential responses of small and large businesses to their environmental context, we perform a comparative analysis of the impact of industry structural characteristics on the formation of large and small businesses in a large sample of U.S. manufacturing industries from 1977 to 1987. The results suggest that small businesses possess certain resources that allow them to overcome some barriers which create greater difficulties for their larger counterparts, as well as allow small businesses to exploit certain industry opportunities more readily than larger ones. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.