The marginality component of personality appears appropriate for men who hold integrative management positions. Research reveals an association between the Self-Other Orientation measure of marginality and two marginal occupations. Marginality suggests open-mindedness and other favorable attributes of integrators.

A company with a long standing practice of leasing equipment may amass, over a period of time, a complicated structure of leasing arrangements, both long-term and short-term. Due to changes in costs of leasing, purchase prices, etc., there should be frequent evaluations of whether the existing strategy is optimal. The usual approach is to perform a “macro-steady-state” analysis, where cash flows and/or return-on-investment calculations are performed. However, some macro-analyses indicate only which choice is preferable and do not take into account either the possibility of a mixed strategy (own some and lease some) or implementation problems and the resulting costs that occur when converting from one system to another. Furthermore, if there is to be a conversion from leased to owned equipment, additional burdens will be placed on the maintenance department. An overall planning model has been developed which yields an optimum conversion schedule and the cost of conversion. The optimal solution can be updated over time if there are changes in leasing and purchasing costs, taxes, interest rate and maintenance costs. Various assumptions are discussed, along with the inputs, the model structure, and the use of a matrix generator. The specific example considered is the problem relating to leasing or purchasing railroad equipment for transporting finished products to the customer.

In this paper, the sampling experiment approach is used to evaluate the performance of alternative estimators that may be employed to estimate the transition matrix for a Markov probability model when only the aggregated data, reflecting the proportion of the sample in each state over a sequence of trials, are known. In addition, the experiments provide some initial information relative to the sampling properties of restricted estimators when time series data are used.

In an attempt at bridging the sometimes seemingly unbridgable chasm between management theory and management practice, the recent annual meeting of the Western Division, Academy of Management scheduled a dialogue on one of today's most vital subjects. The following are portions of the luncheon address and the panel presentation.

The article presents a section of abstracts on management dissertation papers. They include “Heuristic Programming Applied to Intermittent Overhead Costs Associated With Linear Programming Models,” “A Study of the Careers of American College and University Presidents” and “Optimal Recurrent Decision Making For Lower-Level Managers.”