PSM system upgrade in response to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration NEP inspection

This article presents a brief analysis of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Petroleum Refinery Process Safety Management National Emphasis Program (NEP) citation results as of early 2009. It includes trends distilled from the OSHA inspections performed to date. Recommendations for preparing for PSM NEP level inspections are provided. A proven approach to designing and implementing an upgrade project for OSHA process safety management systems and EPA risk management program is described. The model presented can be targeted to a facility's NEP specific citations or used for a general PSM system effectiveness upgrade. This article includes recommendations for improving PSM as a result of an NEP inspection. The recommendations are for the PSM elements that routinely have major OSHA citations; that is: Operating Procedures, Mechanical Integrity, Process Hazards Analysis, Process Safety Information, Management of Change, and Incident Investigations. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 2009     

Breathing Down Your Neck!: The Impact of Queues on Customers Using a Retail Service

While a rich body of research has examined the psychological costs and benefits of queuing, this research focuses on the customer currently using a retail service and examines how this customer is affected by lines forming at his or her back. Drawing on Social Impact Theory, we postulate that customers feel pressured by people waiting behind them and that this feeling of social pressure leads to more negative affective experiences, poorer participation in co-creation settings, and lower perceptions of service quality. Five field and controlled experimental studies tested these predictions and also explored how retailers can reduce the adverse impact of queues. Studies 1A and 1B show that the customer’s experience deteriorates as queue length increases and that perceptions of social pressure mediate this effect. Studies 2A and 2B show that this effect is moderated by customers’ own waiting time such that customers are more affected by queues forming at their backs when their own waiting time decreases. Finally, study 3 identifies two strategies to attenuate the negative effects of waiting lines, namely explicitly reassuring the focal customer that she need not feel pressured to be efficient and removing the waiting customers from the line of vision of the focal customer.     

A test for the fainthearted

Just a few years ago, becoming an entrepreneur was pretty simple. All you needed was some idea--any idea--a little experience, and venture capital funds to get you going. Many young people started to believe that entrepreneurship was a viable, even safe, career choice. Older folks, too, underestimated the risks of financing start-ups, and, as a result, they ended up throwing millions of dollars into doomed ventures. The economic downturn has laid waste to those illusions. So now is a good time to ask potential entrepreneurs and their financial backers the hard questions unheeded in the days of the Internet boom: What makes an entrepreneur? What characteristics set successful entrepreneurs apart, enabling them to keep their company alive even when the going gets tough? This article addresses those questions, reminding us that becoming a successful entrepreneur is decidedly not a squeaky-clean affair; you may end up making powerful enemies, risking your own financial security, or even, in extreme cases, looking at jail time. Specifically, the article explores the key qualities that make someone a successful entrepreneur. Walter Kuemmerle has distilled these characteristics into a kind of litmus test of the following five straightforward, albeit disquieting, questions you should ask yourself if you are considering starting your own venture: Are you comfortable stretching the rules? Are you prepared to make powerful enemies? Do you have the patience to start small? Are you willing to shift strategies quickly? Are you a closer? Answering these questions honestly will help you decide if you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur.     

ENTREPRENEURS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AFRICA

The article examines the widespread belief that indigenous entrepreneurshipis less well represented in African countries than in otherparts of the developing world. The evidence shows no dearthof ability among Africans to identify business opportunitiesand to act upon them—the two quintessential characteristicsof entrepreneurship. But the management problems these businesseshave sometimes encountered suggest that there may be a continuingrole for expatriates, provided the industries are fundamentallysound. Small businesses appear to have a better chance of successand are more viable than some of the heavily protected and subsidizedtransnational enterprises. The article finds that successful industrial entrepreneurs havecome from a variety of religious, cultural, and educationalorigins. It casts doubt on the efficacy of training programsto teach entrepreneurial skill and argues instead that a liberaleconomic regime is more likely to encourage entrepreneurship.Equally important is a well-grounded and widely dispersed growthof income, especially among small-scale cultivators, which leadsto a growth of demand for what small businesses produce.      

Risks and Rewards in Emerging Market Investments

In light of the recent currency crises in East Asia, this article questions the accepted wisdom that emerging market securities deserve to be included in global portfolios primarily because of their low correlations with more conventional asset classes. The authors suggest that the basic cycle of emerging market loans and securities appears to have been compressed, and its swings accentuated, by the herd-like behavior of global institutional investors. This is not the irrational behavior of crowds infected by investment euphoria, but the rational behavior (however volatile) of a large number of institutional investors with huge stakes in the market, each trying to outperform or at least keep up with the others. While stressing the benefits of foreign capital for emerging nations, Smith and Walter also point to the adverse consequences of abrupt shifts in investor sentiment and capital flows. Citing a recent World Bank study, the authors suggest that the effect of portfolio equity inflows on many developing economies has been a “glut” of foreign exchange and liquidity, which tends to cause inflationary pressure and appreciation of real exchange rates. Such currency appreciation can in turn have unwanted “real” effects, such as increases in trade deficits. Going somewhat “against the grain of the Washington Consensus,” the authors suggest that emerging nations undertake a gradual, though steady movement toward adoption of freemarket policies. In particular, they cite with approval attempts by more successful emerging nations such as Chile and South Africa to limit portfolio capital inflows to avoid this problem of excess liquidity. As the authors conclude, “At no point in their development did now-established countries like Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Spain, and Chile adopt a totally free-market approach. They moved purposefully over decades in that direction, but only at a pace that could be accommodated by the accompanying political thinking and infrastructure-building.”     

Intertemporally Consistent Population Ethics: Birth-date Dependent Classical Principles

This paper shows that, in a partially welfarist framework that permits discounting, perperiod social evaluations can be consistent with a timeless social ordering only if social principles lead to the repugnant conclusion . The same result applies if per-period social evaluations are replaced by forward-looking evaluations (social orderings that, in a given period, depend on present and future utilities only). This is the case because geometric classical generalized utilitarian principles are the only social principles satisfying these intertemporal consistency conditions together with some basic assumptions. The conclusion to be drawn from this paper is that history must matter to some extent if social-evaluation principles are to be ethically acceptable.
JEL Classification Numbers: D63, D71