Existing theory and research on organizational impression management focuses on how spokespersons use remedial tactics, following image-threatening events, to put their organization in the best possible light. By contrast, little theory or research has considered how organizations use impression management tactics to avert undesirable responses to upcoming events. This paper uses a qualitative and inductive study of billing procedures at three large hospitals to develop theory about how organization members use impression management tactics to fend off specific, expected challenges to organizational practices that are ambiguously negative. We found that hospitals use anticipatory impression management tactics to: (1) distract, diminish, or overwhelm patients' attention to hospital charges; and (2) to induce emotions that lead patients to simplify their information processing of those charges. Hospitals appear to use such anticipatory obfuscations both to fend off patients' initial challenges and to prevent their existing challenges from escalating. We discuss these findings in terms of their contributions to theories of symbolic management, social influence, and routine service encounters.
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This paper uses data from career histories of technical contractors to explore how they experience, interpret, and allocate their time and whether they take advantage of the temporal flexibility purportedly offered by contract work in the market. Technical contractors offer a unique opportunity for examining assumptions about organizations, work, and time because they are itinerant professionals who operate outside any single organizational context. We find that contractors do perceive themselves to have flexibility and that a few achieve a kind of flexibility unattained by most permanent employees doing similar work, but rather than take advantage of what they call “beach time” and “downtime,” the majority work long hours and rarely schedule their time flexibly. The contractors' use of time is constrained by the cyclic structure of employment, the centrality of reputation in markets for skill, the practice of billing by the hour, and the nature of technical work. Our research suggests that markets place more rather than fewer constraints on workers' time.
Energy expenses are becoming an increasingly important fraction of data center operating costs. At the same time, the energy expense per unit of computation can vary significantly between two different locations. In this paper, we characterize the variation due to fluctuating electricity prices and argue that existing distributed systems should be able to exploit this variation for significant economic gains. Electricity prices exhibit both temporal and geographic variation, due to regional demand differences, transmission inefficiencies, and generation diversity. Starting with historical electricity prices, for twenty nine locations in the US, and network traffic data collected on Akamai's CDN, we use simulation to quantify the possible economic gains for a realistic workload. Our results imply that existing systems may be able to save millions of dollars a year in electricity costs, by being cognizant of locational computation cost differences.
A hell of a gift, an opportunity. Magnanimous. One of the advantages I ever experienced. These are the voices of World War II veterans, lavishing praise on their beloved G.I. Bill. Transcending boundaries of class and race, the Bill enabled a sizable portion of the hallowed greatest generation to gain vocational training or to attend college or graduate school at government expense. Its beneficiaries had grown up during the Depression, living in tenements and cold-water flats, on farms and in small towns across the nation, most of them expecting that they would one day work in the same kinds of jobs as their fathers. Then the G.I. Bill came along, and changed everything. They experienced its provisions as inclusive, fair, and tremendously effective in providing the deeply held American value of social opportunity, the chance to improve one's circumstances. They become chefs and custom builders, teachers and electricians, engineers and college professors. But the G.I. Bill fueled not only the development of the middle class: it also revitalized American democracy. Americans who came of age during World War II joined fraternal groups and neighborhood and community organizations and took part in politics at rates that made the postwar era the twentieth century's civic golden age. Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys with hundreds of members of the greatest generation, Suzanne Mettler finds that by treating veterans as first-class citizens and in granting advanced education, the Bill inspired them to become the active participants thanks to whom memberships in civic organizations soared and levels of political activity peaked. Mettler probes how this landmark law produced such a civic renaissance. Most fundamentally, she discovers, it communicated to veterans that government was for and about people like them, and they responded in turn. In our current age of rising inequality and declining civic engagement, Soldiers to Citizens offers critical lessons about how public programs can make a difference.
Some research presumes that, when rational parties bargain, nothing is left on the table, so that social outcomes are efficient and leave countries on the frontiers of their aggregate production functions. A study of differences in per capita incomes across countries shows that this cannot be the case. Countries’ endowments of natural and human resources do not explain any significant part of the variation in incomes and the mobility of capital assures that it is impartially available to all countries. National differences in the quality of policies and institutions across countries mainly account for differences in per capita incomes.
I wish to thank Max Bazerman, Kimberly Elsbach, Connie Gersick, Roderick Kramer, Keith Murnighan, Marina Park, Lorna Peden, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Linda Pike, Anat Rafaeli, John Van Maanen, and three anonymous ASO reviewers for their contributions to this article. I especially wish to thank Gerald Salancik for urging me to narrow and focus my arguments in ways that improved this article considerably. A qualitative study of a bill-collection organization was used to identify norms about the emotions that collectors are expected to convey to debtors and the means used by the organization to maintain such norms given that collectors' expressed emotions are simultaneously influenced by their inner feelings. These data indicate that collectors are selected, socialized, and rewarded for following the general norm of conveying urgency (high arousal with a hint of irritation) to debtors. Collectors are further socialized and rewarded to adjust their expressed emotions in response to variations in debtor demeanor. These contingent norms sometimes clash with collectors' feelings toward debtors. Bill collectors are taught to cope with such emotive dissonance by using cognitive appraisals that help them become emotionally detached from debtors and by releasing unpleasant feelings without communicating these emotions to debtors. The discussion focuses on the implications of this research for developing general theory about the expression of emotion in organizational life.'
Eugene Bardach's new book, the first volume in M.I.T.'s Studies in American Politics and Public Policy series, is an attempt to improve upon recent efforts to think more systematically about implementation as process and problem. Bardach's principal tool is the metaphor of game, which he uses to summarize the behavior of actors involved in implementation of various policy decisions. The metaphor, he says (p. 56), directs us to look at the players, what they regard as the stakes, their strategies and tactics, their resources for playing, the rules of play (which stipulate the conditions of winning), the rules of 'fair' play (which stipu-
As the evidence of the toxic effects of bisphenol A (BPA) grows, its application in commercial products is gradually being replaced with other related compounds, such as bisphenol S (BPS). Nevertheless, very little is known about the occurrence of BPS in the environment. In this study, BPS was analyzed in 16 types of paper and paper products (n = 268), including thermal receipts, paper currencies, flyers, magazines, newspapers, food contact papers, airplane luggage tags, printing paper, kitchen rolls (i.e., paper towels), and toilet paper. All thermal receipt paper samples (n = 111) contained BPS at concentrations ranging from 0.0000138 to 22.0 mg/g (geometric mean: 0.181 mg/g). The overall mean concentrations of BPS in thermal receipt papers were similar to the concentrations reported earlier for BPA in the same set of samples. A significant negative correlation existed between BPS and BPA concentrations in thermal receipt paper samples (r = -0.55, p < 0.0001). BPS was detected in 87% of currency bill samples (n = 52) from 21 countries, at concentrations ranging from below the limit of quantification (LOQ) to 6.26 μg/g (geometric mean: 0.029 μg/g). BPS also was found in 14 other paper product types (n = 105), at concentrations ranging from <LOQ to 8.38 μg/g (geometric mean: 0.0036 μg/g; detection rate: 52%). The estimated daily intake (EDI) of BPS, through dermal absorption via handling of papers and currency bills, was estimated on the basis of concentrations and frequencies of the handling of papers by humans. The median and 95th percentile EDI values, respectively, were 4.18 and 11.0 ng/kg body weight (bw)/day for the general population and 312 and 821 ng/kg bw/day for occupationally exposed individuals. Among the paper types analyzed, thermal receipt papers were found to be the major sources of human exposure to BPS (>88%). To our knowledge, this is the first report on the occurrence of BPS in paper products and currency bills.
Preface, 1997 I. PLACES IN HISTORY 1. Rethinking Presidential History 2. Power and Authority 3. Structure and Action II. RECURRENT AND EMERGENT PATTERNS 4. Jeffersonian Leadership: Patrician Prototypes Part One: Thomas Jefferson's Reconstruction Part Two: James Monroe's Articulation Part Three: John Quincy Adams's Disjunction 5. Jacksonian Leadership: Classic Forms Part One: Andrew Jackson's Reconstruction Part Two: James Polk's Articulation Part Three: Franklin Pierce's Disjunction 6. Republican Leadership: Stiffening Crosscurrents Part One: Abraham Lincoln's Reconstruction Part Two: Theodore Roosevelt's Articulation Part Three: Herbert Hoover's Disjunction 7. Liberal Leadership: Fraying Boundaries Part One: Franklin Roosevelt's Reconstruction Part Two: Lyndon Johnson's Articulation Part Three: Jimmy Carter's Disjunction III. THE WANING OF POLITICAL TIME 8. Reagan, Bush, and Beyond Afterward Notes Index
Abstract The idea is advanced that it is the rationality of individuals in societies that makes them achieve their production potential rather than their per capita productive resources, and that the low‐income countries of the Second and Third Worlds are poor mainly because they are much further below their potential incomes than are rich countries. If these countries were to improve their governance and institutions sufficiently, there would be huge gains from foreign investment and advanced technologies, which are for the most part, available at relatively modest cost to poor countries. The evidence for this view is taken from studies of the borders of countries and the flows of labour (migration) and capital that cross them, and data on per capita income in relation to population density.
votes indicate that gender exerts a significant and independent effect on voting for women's issues in the face of controls for other major influences on congressional voting. These influences include constituency factors, party, personal characteristics, and ideology. Interaction terms for gender by party indicate that much of the impact of gender is due to the influence of Republican women. Logit analysis of the individual votes demonstrates that the gender of the representative was most significant on votes that dealt with abortion and women's health. The influence of gender was overwhelmed by other factors such as party, ideology, and constituency concerns on votes that were less directly related to women, such as education.
American civic engagement soared in the mid-twentieth century, succeeding an era in which national government had become more involved in citizens' lives than ever before. I examine the effects of the G.I. Bill's educational provisions for veterans' subsequent memberships in civic organizations and political activity. I consider theoretical arguments about how public social programs might affect civic involvement and advance a policy feedback approach that assesses both resource and interpretive effects of policy design. Newly collected survey and interview data permit the examination of several hypotheses. The analysis reveals that the G.I. Bill produced increased levels of participation—by more fully incorporating citizens, especially those from less privileged backgrounds, through enhancement of their civic capacity and predisposition for involvement. The theoretical framework offered here can be used to evaluate how other public programs affect citizens' participation in public life.
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Theory: The interaction of individual legislators with their institutional environment is explored in a study of how and why United States senators use bill sponsorship to help construct their legislative agendas. Hypothesis: A senator's use of bill sponsorship is a function of institutional and political variables including seniority, proximity of reelection, size of state economy, staff size, committee membership and committee positions. Methods: Regression analysis and interviews with Senate legislative staff are used to predict and explain the number of bills senators introduce. Results: Senators are constrained in their use of bill sponsorship by a combination of institutional and political forces. This research suggests that current views of the Senate as a place that lacks structure and predictability in its operations may be overstated.
This paper shows that yields to maturity of U.S. Treasury bills are cointegrated, and that during periods when the Federal Reserve specifically targeted short-term interest rates, the spreads between yields of different maturity define the cointegrating vectors.This cointegrating relationship implies that a single non-stationary common factor underlies the time series behavior of each yield to maturity and that risk premia are stationary.An error correction model which uses spreads as Ihe error correction terms is unstable over the Federal Reserve's policy regime changes, but a model using post 1982 data is stable and is shown to be useful for forecasting changes in yields.
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SUMMARY Changes in the fat and flight muscle protein reserves of adult Red‐billed Queleas Quelea quelea were followed in two colonies in Tanzania and Botswana. At the start of a breeding attempt the protein reserves were higher that at any other time of the year, particularly in females which had heavier flight muscles (non‐fat dry weight) than did the (larger) males at that time. The pre‐breeding increase in the labile component of the muscle protein (the actual protein reserve) is calculated at 80% for females, but only 14% for males. The fat reserve was only increased slightly at the beginning of the breeding attempt. In both sexes, though for different reasons, the protein and fat reserves fell rapidly during the first few days of the attempt, in some individuals to dangerously low levels. During the incubation period there was rapid recovery while the situation during the rearing period appeared to vary between colonies. It is proposed that the proximate control of breeding is provided by the individual's own body condition, and particularly the state of its protein reserves. No environmental releasers are required for the birds to breed at the appropriate time of the year. Individual females producing two, three and four egg clutches differed in the rate at which their reserves fell during egg formation. The results are used to support the view that in this quelea the actual clutch‐size produced on any occasion is the largest the female can produce before becoming too enfeebled. Thus, clutch‐size appears to be determined phenotypically downward from a maximum which is indirectly under genetic control.
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This article examines the instrumental and constitutive effects of California Assembly Bill 540. The law grants undocumented immigrant students an exemption from out-of-state tuition, thereby making some forms of higher education more accessible. Despite the narrow actionable aspects of the law, it unintentionally legitimizes this disenfranchised group. This longitudinal study of undocumented immigrant youth consists of in-depth interviews before, shortly after, and four years after the passage of the law. The findings demonstrate that AB 540 immediately relieved stigma and later provided a socially acceptable identity that, within a legal consciousness informed by meritocracy, empowered these students to mobilize the law in a number of unforeseen ways. The case strongly suggests that it is possible for unintended constitutive functions to have more transformative effects on the daily lives of targeted beneficiaries than the intended instrumental objectives of law.