ORGANIZATIONAL STATUS AND PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF THE SWEDISH PHARMACIES

In recent years, studies of the relationship between organizational status and success have focused largely on organizations transferring from the public to the private sectors: pharmacies in Sweden provide a case study of organizational status change in the reverse direction. Popular belief suggests progressive deterioration in the performance of an organization where ownership changes from owner-manager to public corporation, market conditions change from competition to monopoly, and internal management becomes increasingly command orientated. This article explores change in various performance and organizational variables in the National Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies, from its creation in 1971 until 1990. The corporation displays a high degree of stability amongst its senior management team, task specialization amongst employees is low, whilst standardization of working methods is high. Decentralization of authority has occurred over several years. A review of several measures of success, including productivity, financial ratios and innovation, demonstrates substantial progress over the period, comparing favourably with other Swedish public sector organizations. It is concluded that public sector ownership and monopoly supply need not result in deteriorating performance and lack of innovation, provided that criteria for success are clearly stated and properly monitored.     

Backpacking to Hailuogou Glacier

MOSTof the world's highest mountains are clustered along the barren, jagged area where Tibet, Nepal, and Pakistan meet, but Gongga Shan-in China's western Sichuan province -stands apart. A Western mountaineering team first reached its summit in 1935, and a Chinese team made the climb in the 1950s. The last team to attempt it perished in an avalanche.     

Workers, worries and welfare states: Social protection and job insecurity in 15 OECD countries

Abstract.  This article examines a model of the domestic political economy of subjective employment insecurity in advanced industrial societies. Based on data on people's attitudes toward their job as well as levels of and kinds of social protection collected in 15 OECD countries, it shows that there are distinct manifestations of job insecurity that are affected differently by distinct aspects of social protection programs. While the analysis shows that social protection measures reduce employment insecurity, it also reveals that overall levels welfare state generosity do not have any systematic effect on whether workers feel secure. The article's findings suggest the need to decompose the different components of employment insecurity as well as disaggregate national systems of social protection when examining the impact of welfare states on job insecurity.     

REPRESENTING CUSTOMERS’INTERESTS: THE CASE OF THE PRIVATIZED WATER INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND AND WALES

Privatization has been one of the most important and controversial policy initiatives to emerge in the UK over the last decade. However, to date there has been little attempt to assess the impact of privatization on customers, despite the fact that much of the justification for the privatization of the public utilities was couched in terms of the benefits it would bring for customers. In the case of the water industry opportunities for competition are virtually non-existent, and the ten regional water authorities were privatized with their monopoly position intact. Consequently customers’interests have been represented and protected through new regulatory arrangements operated by the Office of Water Services. The purpose of this article is to offer some provisional assessment of the effectiveness of these new regulatory arrangements. In doing so, the article regards the model of private sector consumer sovereignty as inappropriate given the continued absence of competitive arrangements for the representation of customers’interests against some of the criteria currently being discussed in the development of more consumer-oriented approaches to the delivery of public services.     

TREATMENT OF DELINQUENT YOUTH:

This article examines the relative influences of the juvenile probation officer's perceptions of self and work on his or her opinions of delinquency and decisions made about juveniles. Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 255 juvenile probation officers. Results indicate that the officer who is treatment-service oriented is less likely to label juvenile acts delinquent than the officer who responds to lawyer role models. Officers who make rehabilitative recommendations are less likely to label acts delinquent than those who do not. The independent variables accounted for a rural of 21.3% of the variance in the dependent variable, the officer's perception of treatment.     

Rolling translators

THERE is a popular new term of art in Chinese business circles these days - ＂win-win.＂ Even to the uninitiated, the concept should be more or less self-explanatory. But in entrepreneurial parlance it refers to a mutually advantageous business model in which no cost is incurred by any of the participants, customers included, and in which all parties to the arrangement come away with a tidy profit.     

Party systems and the dynamics of government support: Britain and Germany, 1960–1990

Abstract. This paper examines the impact that one feature of a country's institutional context -the party system - has on public support for governing parties in two West European democracies, Germany and Great Britain. Specifically, it argues that models of government popularity need to take politics and institutions into account, and need to do so in a systematic fashion. Using measures of party system fractionalization and public opinion data spanning the period from 1960 to 1990, the paper demonstrates that the effects of economic conditions on government support are mediated by the choices available to citizens to express discontent with the ruling party. The greater the effective number of parties in a system, the stronger the effects of macro-economic performance on support for the government.