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2757 items in total found

Working Papers | 1990

Strategies for Influencing Attitude

S Mukhopadhyay

The study examines application of communication in influencing attitude which turn habitual and therefore difficult to change. It tests the effectiveness of appeals based on information processing theory vis-à-vis educative appeals. Storage and Retrieval, two basic elements of information processing are operationalised to achieve the desired response. The basic exercise consists of using conditioning to reorient irrational food aversion or reverse undesirable food preferences. In the process it examines the context under which conditioning may occur and the process of conditioning. Respondents grouped according to their orientations are exposed to appropriate stimuli (for conditioning) and their responses noted. Findings indicate that affective conditioning may be difficult to achieve in a high involving situation (such as food habits) unless support of source and strong association is available. Conditioning may be initiated by both affective and cognitive processes. Hypotheses for further testing suggested.

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Working Papers | 1990

Threat Bargaining Problems with Incomplete Information

Lahiri Somdeb

This paper is a revised version based on two of my earlier papers Lahiri (1989c) and Lahiri (1990). For useful suggestions and discussions I am grateful to Jim Jordan, T.Parthasarathy, Prakash Chander, Arunava Sen and the participants of the 1990 International Conference of Game Theory and Its Applications to Economic held at Indian Statistical Institute (New Delhi). In particular this paper has benefited from the comments of Hans Peters and Mamoru Kaneko.

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Working Papers | 1990

Regeneration of Strategic Organizations

Khandwalla P N

One way of increasing the social responsiveness of OB, especially in the Third World, is to increase its contribution to the effectiveness of strategic organizations, that is, organizations set up to, or desiring to, achieve social priorities, such as public enterprises. These strategic organizations have pioneering missions but they are often subjected to severe regulatory pressures because of their dependence on or control by the government. They tend, therefore, to malfunction. In this paper the successful regeneration of an international sample of a dozen public enterprises is analysed and compared with the regeneration of an international sample of 30 private enterprises. The study indicates that even very sick public enterprises can be regenerated with the right kind of management. While there are some commonalties between the management of regeneration of public and private enterprises, there are also sharp differences, with the former exhibiting much more of a participatory, Theory Y orientation. The tools of action research, OD, behavioural science can, therefore, be more easily and successfully employed in regenerating public enterprises. OB should devise additional tools that can help the managements of sick public enterprises to turn around their enterprises. Also, OB experts wishing to contribute to the regeneration of public enterprises should enlarge their familiarity with tools of the management sciences to avoid over-reliance on just behavioural bias in diagnosing the ills of the organization. An important finding of the study is that relatively novel, creative, innovative ways of regenerating contribute significantly to regeneration. The tools of creative thinking such as brainstorming, and interventions that can usher in a climate of creativity in the organization can therefore usefully supplement Theory Y approaches to turning around strategic organizations. It would be productive for behavioural scientists to integrate creativity in such tools as action research, confrontation meetings, interpersonal competence labs, survey feedback, job enrichment, participate re-design of work, team building etc.

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Working Papers | 1990

Managerial Resourcefullness: A Reconceptualization of Management Skills

Kanungo R N and Misra Sasi B

Prevailing conceptualizations of skills required for successful managerial performance are partial and a jumble. This paper examines the limitations to our understanding of the nature of managerial skills based on the analysis of managerial jobs that are often non-routine, unprogrammed, and ill-structured. A fresh conceptualization that distinguishes between managerial "Skills" and "competencies" along three dimensions-specific-generic, task driven-person driven, and transferable-non-transferable is suggested. Competencies representing fundamental generic characteristics are viewed as managerial work. Integrating research from the fields of cognitive, clinical, personality and social psychology, the paper identifies and explicates various components of resourcefulness which have implications for selection and training of managers. Developing appropriate operationalization, assessment, and training procedures with respect to various components of resourcefulness are suggested as areas for research.

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Working Papers | 1990

Synchronous Innovation - The New Trend in Manufacturing Management

Korgaonkar M G

In this paper, we discuss a recent development in the area of manufacturing management-aptly called "Synchronous Innovation". This is a strategy which calls for synchronous deployment of technological and administrative innovations during modernization programs in manufacturing organizations. The spectacular growth in organization worldwide adopting the New Manufacturing Technologies (NMTs) has led to a growing body of research on effective implementation of the NMTs. One after the other, NMTs such as Group Technology (GT), Just In Time (JIT), Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS), CAD/CAM, Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), have grown in tremendous popularity in the past decade. One can safely predict that the nineties will see the drive towards new Manufacturing Revolution become much more vigorous, and widespread, with a growth many orders of magnitude higher than we witnessed in the previous decade. The foremost question that arises now is "how should the NMTs be effectively deployed?" An organization committing substantial investments for modernization is naturally concerned about effective deployment of the modernization program. This paper discusses the synchronous innovation strategy which has been advocated for this purpose. We look at a number of administrative innovations to make the modernization program a success by many leading organizations. We provide evidence by briefly reviewing a few case applications. Finally, we provide guidelines on implementation of synchronous innovation strategy. The individual references are too many to cite. However, a good compilation of these may be found in the book "Taking Charge of Manufacturing" by John Ettlie, Jossey Bass Publishers, USA (1988).

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Working Papers | 1990

Dynamic Optimization with Integral State Equations

Lahiri Somdeb

In this paper we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality in dynamic optimization problems governed by integral state equations.

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Working Papers | 1990

Livestock Component of Farming Systems Research

Rao V M

Farming systems research is an innovative approach to address the problems of resource poor farmers in less developed countries. FSR stemmed largely from the pioneering work of Collinson and that of Norman. The primary objective of FSR is to improve the well being of individual farming families by increasing productivity of their farming system. However, the work on FSR conducted in various international institutes is focussed by and large on crop systems. Multiple roles of livestock are analyzed in this paper with reference to Indian. They include (a) livestock as a source of food (b) as a source of power (c) as a source of manure (d) as a source of capital (c) risk against insurance (f) in the context of environmental stability; etc.

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Working Papers | 1990

Cost of Quality - Their Determination and Relationships

Korgaonkar M G

With a renewed emphasis on Management of Quality, the question of collecting and quantifying Cost of Quality (COQ) has assumed special significance. It is realized that organizations intending to launch quality improvement programs need to first deploy a suitable COQ system to support and direct the quality improvement process. Although the various components of COQ i.e. prevention, appraisal, external and internal failure costs have been recognized for a long time, it is only recently that the various issues connected with it have been systematically studied. In this paper we take a comprehensive look at the COQ issues and the kind of answers that research has yielded. More specifically, we are interested in the analysis of the following questions: 1. What are the various elements of quality of costs and how are they classified into COQ Companies? What are the company practices regarding these? 2. What are appropriate indicators of COQ? In general, how much do companies spend on quality, as reflected by COQ indicators? 3. What are the relationships between the COQ Components? How do they influence the COQ? 4. What are the effects of COQ on unit product cost and product profitability? 5. Can suitable analytical model be developed to predict the effect on COQ of changes in company efforts on prevention and appraisal? 6. How should a quality cost systems be set up? The above issues are analyzed in detail. The results from prevailing research are reviewed in seeking answers to the above issues. Finally we summarize the conclusions drawn from the study.

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Working Papers | 1990

An Axiomatic Characterization of the Value Function for Bimatrix Games

Lahiri Somdeb

In this paper we obtain an axiomatic characterization of the value function for the class of all bimatrix games satisfying the equivalency and efficiency properties.

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Working Papers | 1990

Politics of Articulation, Mediating Structures and Voluntarism: From "Chauraha" to "Chaupal"

Anil K. Gupta

There is a considerable concern in India about the 'silence' of a large number of disadvantaged groups who have either learned to be helpless or articulate their problems rather feebly. The nature of articulation, mediating structures or platforms for dialogue or negotiation be it political channels or voluntary arenas have to analysed as a basis of alienation of masses from the state. Emergence of the social movements encompassing ecological struggles particularly in backward regions indicates the limits of the patience of the poor disadvantaged people. One can hypothesize that NGOs emerged or became stronger when the political channels got partly choked so that people could neither remodel the nature of their representation nor communicate with/through state bureaucracy. The transition in mediating structures has been studies through five metaphors i.e. from counter to corridor; corridor to courts; courts to 'Chaurahas' (cross roads); 'Chaurahas' to Char diwaris' (four walls) and finally from 'Char diwaris to 'Chaupal' as a future solution. The voluntary initiatives in this context could also reflect a way of reducing transaction costs, fulfilling ones urge to go beyond the mandated responsibilities or just to provide a channel of articulation to those who find the existing channels and platforms non accessible or non fulfilling. We have presented discussion on articulation, mediating platforms and voluntarism through following four questions in different parts of this paper. 1) What are the major transitions in the process of articulation? Does the design of platform for negotiation influence the nature of discourse? What are the trends in articulation at central, state, district and local level with particular reference to the problems deprived groups in backward drought prone regions?; 2) what are the mediating structures or set of strategies providing a basis of dialogue or conflict resolution between state and the people particularly around environmental issues? To what extent voluntary initiatives and bureaucratic channels of communication?; 3) what are some of key trends in rural development voluntarism? How does one contrast the spirit of voluntarism with the nature of voluntary organization?; 4) what are the implications of increasing international attempt to bypass state structures for routing aid through NGOs instead of existing public or private channels? The future scenarios are discussed in the last part.

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