Consensus building in safety and security: a case study of Fukushima evacuees returning home

This study examines consensus building in environmental and energy policies by analyzing the minutes of the safety and security committee of the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) of the Japanese government, in the context of the discussion of the safe return of Fukushima evacuees after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster. One important issue associated with evacuation policies was the high number of evacuees, if not all, who were not willing to return to their old homes. Although the contents of governmental committee meetings are freely accessible through the internet, they have been rarely analyzed for these purposes. In this study, we used text-mining techniques to analyze NRA committee minutes quantitatively and qualitatively. We have three primary findings. First, the committee attempted to take evacuees’ feelings into account and pragmatically discuss what was needed to restore their lives and livelihoods, as well as to make its meetings transparent and open to the public by, for example, streaming them live on the internet. Second, in earlier committee meetings, government representatives insisted on specific policies made by themselves to control the return of evacuees. However, outside experts at the meetings convinced representatives that decisions regarding issues surrounding the safe return of evacuees should consider the opinions of the evacuees themselves. Third, the NRA reported the outcome of the meetings at a Cabinet meeting to accelerate policies requiring urgent implementation as well as those related to the alleviation of people’s anxieties regarding exposure to radioactivity or those related to equal treatment among those who wanted to voluntarily move away from the affected areas versus those who want to return to their homes. Finally, this analysis further identified a number of issues concerning citizen participation and governance associated with environment and energy policies, all of which need to be overcome in order to establish consensus among concerned stakeholders.     

The Hierarchical Erosion Effect: A New Perspective on Perceptual Differences and Business Performance

Organizations are coalitions of individuals with heterogeneous interests and perceptions (March and Simon, 1958/1993). We examine an important source of heterogeneity, namely the different perceptions individuals hold across hierarchical levels. We introduce the notion of a hierarchical erosion effect whereby individual perceptions about specific practices become less favourable the lower one goes in the hierarchy. Using data from 4,243 employees across four levels in 38 business units, we provide evidence that this effect exists, controlling for other factors, including the overall favourability of the business unit culture across eight practices. We show how the size of this hierarchical erosion effect varies depending on the nature of the organizational practice being evaluated and the extent to which executives share strategic information widely, and we also show that a lower hierarchical erosion effect is correlated with higher business unit growth. In doing so, we enrich understanding of two aspects of March and Simon's work, their notion of intra‐organizational heterogeneity and their distinctive view of the nature of hierarchy.     

Cultural theory and risk perception: a proposal for a better measurement

Why do members of the public disagree – sharply and persistently – about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The ‘cultural cognition of risk’ refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy‐making are discussed.     

The African View of Participatory Business Management

In this paper I delineate the group of activities concernedwith business and then proceed to give an exposition of the concepts usedby Ubuntu as an example of the African view of business managementindicating those activities of human performances regarded by them asbasic to their world view. I proceed to deal with the way these Ubuntuconcepts are applied to business management using the ideas of LovemoreMbigi as an important advocate of the Ubuntu style of participatorymanagement. In doing so. I try to establish what some important Africanthinkers themselves regard as the special position of Ubuntu in contrastto individualism, collectivism and Western Humanism. I then focus on themost important topic of this paper, to wit, the application of the Ubuntuconcepts to a real case and analyse it as a case study. I conclude bycritically assessing the suggested Ubuntu style of management in terms ofuniversal and specific applications.     

区块链在场外衍生品市场组织中的应用研究

因其非标准化合约和非集中交易特征,场外衍生品市场存在交易效率低下,透明度低,交易对手方信用风险管理与监管困难等诸多难题。解决这些问题的传统思路是标准化、中心化,但这又牺牲了场外衍生品个性化、定制化特征。区块链技术有助于在缺乏中心化可信权威的条件下建立信任机制并实现交易,可有效解决制约场外衍生品市场发展的核心问题。基于区块链的场外衍生品交易基础设施的关键技术包括:权威认证共识机制、智能衍生品合约、统一信用评价体系、系统风险监测模型等。经论证,应用区块链技术可有效改善场外衍生品市场的运行组织,提高交易效率和透明度,改善交易对手信用风险管理,加强监管穿透和防范系统性风险。     

区块链技术对传统征信的变革研究

区块链技术具备的去中心化、共识决策、信息透明、不可篡改、无法抵赖、分布式数据库等特点,从根本上克服了目前基于观念、规制和经验的信用管理的理念和技术缺陷,这些特点恰恰是群体、社区和社会信用管理所需要的核心技术要素。区块链技术的应用对传统征信业务及其发展带来了理念、规程和技术等方面的变革,未来征信业将面临良好的发展前景。     

Cultural determinants of alliance management capability – an analysis of Japanese MNCs in India

This study examines the role of national and organizational culture in alliance management in the context of three prominent joint ventures between India and Japan, which reached diverse alliance outcomes. It uses the case study method as a tool for an initial rich exploratory analysis (Yin 2013) of alliance management capabilities that may later be tested on a larger dataset. The study finds that national and organizational culture is both important factors of alliance management capability. It highlights the specific role of trust, consensus in decision-making, communication and relationship building as key constituents of alliance management capability. This paper thus contributes to an important strand of literature on alliance management in the context of two important Asian players from the developed and emerging markets. Its focus on cultural factors as determinants of alliance management helps to establish a managerial blueprint leading to positive alliance outcomes for such ventures in future and to establish a roadmap for increased interaction between India and Japan.     

The Role of the DS/AHP in Identifying Inter-Group Alliances and Majority Rule Within Group Decision Making

DS/AHP is a nascent method of multi-criteria decision-making, based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and indirectly the Analytic Hierarchy Process. It is concerned with the identification of the levels of preference that decision makers have towards certain decision alternatives (DAs), through preference judgements made over a number of different criteria. The working result from a DS/AHP analysis is the body of evidence (BOE), which includes a series of mass values that represent the exact beliefs in the best DA(s) existing within certain subsets of DAs. This paper considers the role of DS/AHP as an aid to group decision-making, through the utilisation of a distance measure (between BOEs). Here, the distance measure enables the identification of the members of the decision-making group who are in most agreement, with respect to the judgements they have individually made. The utilisation of a single linkage dendrite approach to clustering elucidates an appropriate order to the aggregation of the judgements of the group members. This develops the DS/AHP method as a tool to identify inter-group alliances, as well as introduce a ‘majority rule’ approach to decision-making through consensus building.     

The Commons with Capital Markets

We explore a dynamic commons problem and assess the welfare consequences of access to capital markets. The commons has a high intrinsic rate of return but its fruits cannot be secured by individual agents. Capital market access allows resources to be held securely and intertemporally transferred, but at a lower rate of return. In a two period model, we completely characterise symmetric consumption and extraction behaviour in four environments: under a strategic and a competitive equilibrium concept, and with and without market access. Strategic equilibria dominate competitive ones: while agents disagree over how to divide the resource, all would prefer it to be larger; the strategic concept allows them to anticipate returns to their conservation. As the number of agents becomes infinite, the strategic outcome converges to the competitive; as the number of agents falls to one, it converges to the planner’s. Market access has a positive effect on welfare owing to its consumption and extraction smoothing properties and a negative effect owing to its creation of an outside option to the commons, encouraging its depletion. A sufficient condition for autarky to dominate market access for some levels of communal endowment is that the world market discount factor exceed the subjective discount factor. Multiple equilibria may arise: these result from market access, not the equilibrium concept. The authors thank Ralph Bailey, Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Matthew Cole, Carl Devore, Felix Kubler, Chirantan Ganguly, Martin Jensen, Indrajit Ray, Celine Rochon, Dave Rusin, participants at the Royal Economic Society 2005 and an anonymous referee for valuable comments. They are grateful for funding under the ESRC’s World Economy and Finance programme (RES-156-25-0022).     

基于隐喻抽取技术的烟草商业企业客户服务体验研究

近年来,随着烟草企业数字化转型不断推进、新型客我关系逐步建立、工商零协同营销不断深入,卷烟营销队伍转型升级已然势在必行。以ZMET隐喻抽取技术和扎根理论为理论基础,通过对烟草零售客户关于卷烟营销工作服务体验的调研,构建零售客户的体验心智模型,从而了解对于服务对象而言,成功开展卷烟营销工作包含的属性元素、用户需求以及价值,形成H（属性）、C（用户需求）、V（价值）共识地图,进而找出当前卷烟营销一线人员在市场营销服务工作中存在的问题。最后,从行业、企业、员工三个层面提出烟草营销队伍转型的建议。