The author, technical director of the UK’s biggest accounting body, assesses how businesses will cope with new financial reporting rules in 2004 and predicts that an emphasis on…
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The author, technical director of the UK’s biggest accounting body, assesses how businesses will cope with new financial reporting rules in 2004 and predicts that an emphasis on reporting on prospective financial information will come to the fore.
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Anne Sigismund Huff, Frances J. Milliken, Gerard P. Hodgkinson, Robert J. Galavan and Kristian J. Sund
This book on uncertainty comprises the initial volume in a series titled “New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition”. We asked Frances Milliken and Gerard P…
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This book on uncertainty comprises the initial volume in a series titled “New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition”. We asked Frances Milliken and Gerard P. Hodgkinson, two well-known scholars who have made important contributions to our understanding of uncertainty to join us in this opening chapter to introduce this project. The brief bios found at the end of this volume cannot do justice to the broad range of their contributions, but our conversation gives a flavor of the kind of insights they have brought to managerial and organizational cognition (MOC). The editors thank them for helping launch the series with a decisive exploration of what defining uncertainty involves, how that might be done, why it is important, and how the task is changing. We were interested to discover that all five of us are currently involved in research that considers the nature and impact of uncertainty, and we hope that readers similarly find that paying attention to uncertainty contributes to their current projects. Working together, we can advance understanding of organizational settings and effective action, both for researchers and practitioners.
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Gerard P. Hodgkinson, Robert P. Wright and Jamie Anderson
Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as…
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Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.
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A recent report, commissioned by Vigers Chartered Surveyors and carried out by the Building Performance Unit at Liverpool Polytechnic, has collected extensive evidence of defects…
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A recent report, commissioned by Vigers Chartered Surveyors and carried out by the Building Performance Unit at Liverpool Polytechnic, has collected extensive evidence of defects in raised floors. One of its central themes is to provide guidelines for facilities managers wishing to obtain value for money from their raised floor installations. This article provides advice to managers who wish to extend the life cycle of raised floors in their care and in doing so reduce the scale of defects in use.
One of the greatest opportunities for increasing the efficiency of organisations lies in improving the human resource input. Over a decade ago Likert, in his paper ‘Human resource…
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One of the greatest opportunities for increasing the efficiency of organisations lies in improving the human resource input. Over a decade ago Likert, in his paper ‘Human resource accounting: building and assessing productive organisations’, maintained that benefits of between20 and 40 per cent can be achieved, if management can be encouraged to channel their efforts in this direction. One of the problems in this approach, however, is to find some reliable means of preliminary diagnosis of the health of the organisation.
If facilities managers are to have an impact on the performance of buildings it is vitally important that they appreciate the links between day‐to‐day use of a building component…
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If facilities managers are to have an impact on the performance of buildings it is vitally important that they appreciate the links between day‐to‐day use of a building component or element and its durability. Facilities managers play an important role in providing a body of expertise and feedback to design professionals who frequently only have a limited association with the building in use. This article examines the impact of dynamic loads on raised access floors located in general office areas. In particular it highlights and discusses rolling loads, an area surrounded by controversy.
The genesis of the moral leadership concept in educational administration and examples of studies exploring this idea during the 1979‐2003 period are discussed. The author…
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The genesis of the moral leadership concept in educational administration and examples of studies exploring this idea during the 1979‐2003 period are discussed. The author recommends more contextually sensitive descriptive studies with a focus on the social relations among school leaders and others, giving particular attention, in a phenomenological sense, to the meanings, perspectives, and espoused purposes of school leaders’ actions, social relationships, and interpersonal orientations.
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Practising internal and external auditors regularly find that crucial concepts governing how they operate are the twin terms of independence and objectivity. Part of the problem…
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Practising internal and external auditors regularly find that crucial concepts governing how they operate are the twin terms of independence and objectivity. Part of the problem is that the two terms are often equated. The impact can be conflict with the auditee, misunderstanding with other stakeholders, impairment of efficiency and effectiveness, and role conflict within the internal audit department. The Institute of Internal Auditors is reviewing some of the cherished notions of internal audit in the light of pressures and developments in the business environment. It has already produced a new definition of internal auditing, which, as before, includes the terms independence and objectivity. Consistently, it decided to re‐evaluate these two terms, and established an international research team. This was the briefing submission from the UK, which was highly influential in determining the final product, not yet in the public domain. It considers professional statements and standards, research and developments in both internal and external auditing.
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Richard L. Wood and Mark R. Warren
Questions whether, in the USA, faith‐based communities can have an important effect on politics. Contends that other areas, where there are poorer communities, are more likely to…
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Questions whether, in the USA, faith‐based communities can have an important effect on politics. Contends that other areas, where there are poorer communities, are more likely to be influenced politically in civil society although does not preclude other income sectors from being similarly affected just that deprived areas are more likely to listen to faith‐based organizers.