Hybrid Style Research Articles

Fantasía and Disobedient Daughters: Undistressing Genres and Reinventing Traditions in the Mexican American Carpa

Abstract During the 1930s and 1940s, female performers in Mexican American tent shows in San Antonio modified the costumes associated with Mexican "folkloric" dances, incorporating elements derived from vaudeville, to form a hybrid style called fantasía. This style asserted Mexican American identity while subverting the purist nationalism of folklórico dances and marking the performers’ entry into newly public female roles. At the same time, it also involved the performers in reified masculinist discourses of female beauty and fashion.

Negotiatory Alchemy: The Court Special Master as Scientist and Mediator

An environmental health scientist and mediator was appointed for the first time as a special master to oversee cleanup of a hazardous waste site in California. The case analysis examines the creative assimilation of integrative/mutual gains bargaining (mediation) into a distributive/zero‐sum bargaining construct (litigation). The special master played multiple, overlapping, and conflicting roles as the case unfolded. The interfaces and tensions of these roles produced a hybrid style of dispute resolution, termed “mediation‐negotiation” by the author.

The Malaysian English mosaic

An outline of the three social dialects and hybrid style of a vigorous ‘New English’

Management style

Management style is associated with McGregor and his Theory X‐Theory Y, which he introduced in 1960. Comparatively little change in ideas about preferred styles took place throughout the sixties and seventies, once McGregor had established his approach, until around 1976 or so when social scientists began to look more closely into Japan's successful formula. As a result, one group of investigators claim to have identified an A style which grows out of American culture and a J style which grows out of the Japanese. These differ fundamentally in essential details and one new approach is to seek a hybrid style, known by the investigators as the Z style, which incorporates the best of both cultures. The terms A, J and Z, though not yet in wide usage, are beginning to creep into the literature and might eventually find their way into the manager's vocabulary, but in any case, the review of these new styles makes a valuable contribution to the study of management style. As seminar material this article is important in that it relates management style to the socio‐political environment.

Discussion of An Empirical Study of the Role of Accounting Data in Performance Evaluation

My general response to Hopwood's paper is very favorable. For one thing, it signifies the movement of accounting from the area of the sacred to that of the secular-a transition long overdue. In other words, Hopwood prefers constructive questions to unquestioning assumptions and prefers testing alleged values to assuming their fulfillment. His research exemplifies these preferences consistently and well. Having said that much, and meant it, I want nevertheless to offer some criticisms of the research, both for what it is and what it is not. Let us begin with what it is, substantively and methodologically. It is a quantitative study of how accounting data are used in evaluating the performance of managers. More specifically, the research is built around a comparison of three styles of such use-the budget-constrained, the profit-conscious, and the nonaccounting. There are several problems with these categorical concepts. First, life is not so purely typological, a difficulty with which Hopwood deals by introducing the hybrid style that is both budget-constrained and profit-conscious. Second, there is a confusion of the budget and profit orientations with time orientation-short-term versus long-term approach to the managerial function. (It may be argued, of course, that the budget orientation is intrinsically short-run and the orientation toward profit intrinsically longer-run, but I think this would be better treated as an empirical question than as a matter of assumption or definition.) Third, the nonaccounting category emerges as a rather unsatisfactory residual type; so much is relegated to it that definition becomes very difficult, as Hopwood points out. Finally, the conceptual distinction between the budget and profit orientations does