Knowledge that Transforms

This paper reports a research project on regulation and de-regulation in the Oregon nursing home industry. It investigates two contrasting public-policy views of the regulatory process, capture and majoritanan. The focus of this investigation is on the following issues: the relative benefits and costs of regulatory compliance; patients' rights; the intent of regulation; regulatory complications, duplications, contradictions, and inconsistencies; and whether compliance is measured in terms of activities or performance. Local and national representatives of three groups were surveyed: patient advocates, providers of nursing-home care, and state andfederal regulatory personnel. These groups' perceptions of the issues are identified; patterns of similarity and dissimilarity among the groups are examined; and inferences are drawn regarding the implications of these patterns for the competing public-policy views.

Critics charge that professors have views that differ from experienced managers and, therefore, that MBA students do not receive an accurate classroom depiction of organizational reality. This study investigated the extent to which 102 managers, 111 MBA students, and 43 professors have similar perspectives regarding the importance of fourfactors in attaining promotions. MANOVA indicated that managers and professors did not significantly differ in their views. However, MBA students did differ from both managers and professors in the level of importance they attached to several promotion factors. MANCOVA indicated that amount of corporate experience was unrelated to response patterns.

Profound changes in industrial performance in the 1980s have been accompanied by major changes in the practice of labor relations. This review identifies some of the major recent research directions in labor relations and examines theory development and empirical studies published since 1980. Primary coverage is given to union organizing; bargaining structures and issues; negotiating; contract administration; the effects of collective bargaining on employers, individuals, and unions; and unions and their environment. Research is grouped within areas according to the unit of analysis addressed by the study. Implications for practice andfuture research are suggested.

The consequences of initial diagnoses for organizational decision making remain largely uninvestigated. This paper presents an account of a decision in a public bureaucracy whose outcome was essentially determined by its diagnostic component. Two aspects of diagnosis-framing and exclusion-are examined in detail, and the possibility that diagnosis tends to occur in one of two types of decision arenas is discussed.

This summary article draws attention to four central questions concerning a turbulent and even troubled area of inquiry and practice. Three questions dominate. What is "public sector management" or PSM? How has PSM been approached? Whatfactors complicate coming to grips with PSM? The focus is basically descriptive-on what usually has been considered under the rubric PSM. Consequently, loose ends get more attention than prescriptionsfor tidying-up an area of inquiry and practice that now finds itself variably responding to political as well as analytic challenges. However, a fourth question does get some attention: How can we do better in PSM research?

Strategy researchers are often faced with the convenience or the necessity of using existing data bases that were assembledfor purposes that differ from the research being conducted. Inferences drawn from this research can be overstated or can be simply wrong because researchers have ignored the pitfalls of translating results based on aggregated data to specific situations. Although these issues have been addressed in political science and sociology, they have not been discussed at length in the context of strategy research. This paper, there fore, explores "unit of analysis" problems specifically as they can occur in strategy research. Issues of independent and dependent variable grouping, contextual effects and examples of aggregation practices and errors typical in strategy research are presented.

This article addresses a relatively unexplored area: the language that top managers share in the process of strategic decision-making. An empirical investigation of two groups of top managers responding to the same external stimuli revealed, first, that much of the language with which strategy was articulated was filled with imagery and, second, that managers made strategic decisions in partial response to their figures of speech. It is suggested that the process by which imagery emerges and influences decision-making may comprise three stages: (a) collective discussion of individual perceptions of the stimuli; (b) evolution of a common vocabulary and syntax, including images, by which managers describe and communicate aspects of the stimuli; (c) emergence of a reigning image that permeates the language describing the stimuli to which top managers respond strategically.

A field study was performed examining the influence of situational constraints on the job performance of 368 finance company cashiers. Increasing levels of contextual constraint (as rated by a cashier's immediate supervisor) were negatively related to supervisory performance ratings, self-appraisals, and objective performance criteria. No differences were in evidence in the degree ofperformance variation found in high and low constraining task environments. Constraints were also found to be weakly related to ancillary measures of cashier work load.

There is evidence suggesting,that acquisitive firms do not use consistent long-term acquisition strategies. Yet the research of strategic management academicians suggest that such strategies should be beneficial. As such, this study attempts to determine if acquisitive firms exhibit, by their externally observable patterns of behavior, evidence of pursuing consistent long-term acquisition strategies. If so, this study also attempts to determine the nature of these strategies, how common they are in the U.S. economy, and if consistent strategies are associated with superior performance. Results show that the majority of acquisitive firms do appear to follow acquisition strategies which are consistent over time. In fact, approximately one-half of the studied firms followed one of two highly consistent strategies. Finally, though the consistency of afirm's acquisition strategy wasfound not to be associated with better performance, strategies that evidenced "strategic fit" did show superior profitability.

This paper includes a brief review of the limitations of research on the definition, detection, and prevention of sexual harassment in organizations. It is proposed that sexual harassment may be explained using a role model approach. It is suggested that the existing literature on role conflict and role ambiguity may provide a theoretical framework to guide empirical investigations of the causes of sexual harassment. The use of role clarification techniques to reduce or prevent sexual harassment is also discussed.