Personnel Allocation Research Articles

Texts as organizational echoes

Although the notion of social context has great appeal and is related to a family of concepts with enduring explanatory power such as thick description (Geertz, 1973), group and grid (Douglas, 1970), elaborated and restricted codes (Bern? stein, 1973) and field, tenor and code (Halliday, 1979), it remains a rather vague and mercurial concept. It would appear to reference aspects of the social psychological world of the speaker and the hearer which in addition to a mes? sage are a necessary feature of meaningful communication (see Ochs, 1979, cit? ed in Levinson, 1983: 23). Conversational analysis, which has been most speci? fically concerned to specify the work of context in producing meaningful talk, relies on rather implicit notions, although the work of Sacks includes attention to setting specific-meanings or categorizations (Sacks and Garfinkel, 1970; Sacks, 1967). The role of context is obviously crucial in organized settings which daily pro? cess a large number of calls from the public. Calls may be as brief as thirty sec? onds, provide a bare minimum of information, and yet require rapid decisions involving allocation of personnel, equipment and resources to a reported trouble. Because in police, fire and emergency services, telephone calls which omit non-verbal signs normally accompanying speech are the primary means of communication, common-sense knowledge of behaviour, along with organ? ization-specific occupational and organizational culture (Barley, 1983) is used to fill in, construct, and infer meanings. These calls and their interpretation are context-dependent communication, and their analysis should permit a further explication of the relevance of context to organizational communications. ' Organizations are formally constituted systems for the processing of com municational units utilizing set technology, a structure of roles and tasks, sys? tems of encoding and decoding meaning, and interpretative practices (see Man

Online Staff Resources: Canadian University Libraries

Faced with a relentless upsurge in the number of online searches from 1981 to 1982, the Head of Reference, Morisset Library and the Coordinator of Online Searching for the University of Ottawa ran, in June, 1982, a limited survey of staff allocation practices for online searching in 10 Canadian university libraries. The results of this survey and its implications for specific remedies to online staffing problems at the University of Ottawa are detailed. Recommendations for personnel allocation for online searching may find application in other university library systems in North America and elsewhere.

The Bureaucratic Model in University Budgeting: An Alternative Explanation to Power

Budgeting research often investigates the degree to which budgeting decisions are based upon rational, bureaucratic models. Because measures of instructional workload are indicative of the bureaucratic model in university budgeting, this paper examines: (1) the relationship between instructional workload and the budgeting of personnel positions and (2) how this relationship changes as personnel positions become more scarce. The longitudinal data gathered in this research suggest a direct relationship between the bureaucratic model and personnel allocations. In addition, the tendency to use the bureaucratic model increases as personnel positions become more scarce, a finding that differs from the results reported in the studies of dollar budgeting. The results of previous studies are integrated with the data reported here and implications of using the bureaucratic model in university budgeting are discussed.

Enhancing the economic forecast

Economic forecasts play indispensable roles in organizational decision making. The revenue and expenditure figures contained in annual budgets and long‐range plans are based either explicitly or implicitly on a variety of assumptions about future economic and industry conditions. Tactical decisions, such as advertising, personnel allocations and strategic plans, including acquisitions and divestitures, also rest on tacit or formal expectations about the future economic environment. Yet, all too often, far less effort is devoted to preparing and utilizing economic forecasts than to formulating the budgets, plans, decisions and strategies they support.

Audit: an annual assessment of the work and performance of a surgical firm in a regional teaching hospital.

The assessment of the results of treatment has for long been one of the responsibilities of the medical profession. Prospective and retrospective surveys have formed the basis of original and review articles in the medical press, and of lectures and seminars. Postgraduate education has been well served by these traditional methods, which have often led the individual doctor to change and so improve his or her techniques in diagnosis and treatment. The scene, however, is changing. The cost of medical treat ment required to provide a comprehensive health service has, for various reasons, outstripped the resources available from the State. As a consequence the allocation and reallocation of finances and personnel have become matters of great importance to administrators, doctors, and politicians. A second change has been in the attitude of the patient, who has become more knowledgeable about health, and if, sometimes, higher expecta tions of hospital or medical care are unrealised may more often turn to some form of official complaint, or even litigation. Thirdly, the profession itself is changing. The number of graduates is increasing, and their attitude is naturally influenced by the changes in the medical curriculum over the past 20 years: overall there has been a reduction in the emphasis on acute hospital medical and surgical care, which has often been a dominant factor in health care planning in the past. It would be surprising if demands for the more accurate assessment of clinical performance, related especially to cost, had not been heard. It would be equally surprising if the pro fession had not responded. Demands there are?for example,

Ambigüidades e Divisão da Autoridade na Estrutura Matricial

Brazilian research institutes are known as matrix structure. This paper analyses the problem of authqrity distribution in 211 researchers of Brazilian research institutes operating in a matrix mode. The study shows that the project manager authority is higher than the functional manager when equipment purchasing and project deadlines are concerned. The functional manager has higher authority when promotion and personnel allocation are concerned. A high level of ambiguity was observed and it was higher in public companies compared to government administration. The study showed that the existence multidisciplinary project depends upon finantial resources coming from contracts with the environment that complement the institute budget.

Bedside radiographic examinations: indications and contraindications.

Indications for requesting and performing bedside radiographic examinations in an institutional setting are proposed. A prospective study of such examinations was made in a 500-bed hospital. All nursing units were evaluated for criteria used in requesting bedside examinations. It was found that general medical and surgical wards generate the greatest percentage of bedside studies, and yet their criteria for requesting such studies yielded the lowest percentage of validity. General criteria for utilization of mobile radiographic equipment could lead to better radiographs and improved allocation of equipment and personnel.

A critique of the Bureau of Health Manpower estimates of the need for anesthesia manpower.

1977) is a concatenation of oversimplification and faulty assumptions which understate the need for anesthesiologists at the present time, as well as in 1980. In particular, the premises guiding their allocation of anesthesia personnel produce an Alice in Wonderland plan for anesthesia care which cannot be reconciled with the growing trend toward regionalization of medical services.

Medical patient/nurse dependency in Israel.

Patients' needs for nursing care have been studied in internal medicine departments in Israel. The needs in regard to ambulation, bathing, feeding, toilet and certain treatments were analysed for three standards of hospitals: university, central and peripheral. Considerable differences were found between the rates for these groups of hospitals as well as among individual hospitals and even among parallel departments in the same hospital. On average for all surveyed departments, 54·4% of the hospitalization days were of selfcare patients, 32·0% of intermediate patients and 13·6% of bedfast, highly dependent patients.A comparison with similar studies in New Zealand and Switzerland showed that patients in medical departments in Israel are less dependent on nursing care than in the other countries.Findings of this study stress that allocation of nursing manpower proportionally to the number of beds does not meet objective needs and is inequitable. Real needs of the patients should serve as a basis for allocation of personnel. Part of the nursing personnel should be ‘floating’, with a possibility of directing them daily to different departments according to priorities.

Sociological Theory of Social Order

According to Parsonian point or view, we can designate a given set of interactions as a social system in so far as statistical uniformities and orderliness or factual orders observable in that interaction process are, at the same time, normative orders which effectively control actions of persons interacting. Apparently, the concept of the social system just defined implies by definition the tendency for the gratification-deprivation dimension and the conformity-alienation dimension in the interaction process to coincide to a lesser or greater degree. Judging from this reason, it should be clear that Parsonian concept of the social system is a conceptual scheme appropriately called “the institutionally integrated social system”.Then, we can assume that structures of the social system in the above sense consist of the following two types of interdependent roles-complex. One is that of networks of institutionalized roles interlocked by interactions, and the other is that of patternconsistently organized role systems or institutions. In addition, it is also assumed that institutions are differentiated into recruitment, relational and regulative institutions.On the basis of the above preliminary conceptual clarification, it follows that the normative regulation of recruitment and allocation of personnel to roles is the prerequisite for the establishment of the distributive order of social resources at the societal level which in turn makes possible the compatibility (peaceful coexistence) of members under the condition of scarce social resources. It should be recalled that the distributive order is not anything but normative order, the change of which in auy direction is possible only if the resistance of vested interests is successfully overcome.

Engineering Services for Construction

The consultant should provide all the engineering services for the proper and efficient execution of the construction, from the time the client approves the design till the completion of the project. These services should be grouped as follows: (1) Tendering; (2) award of the contract; (3) mobilization; (4) construction; (5) contract maintenance; (6) taking over; and (7) operation. The criteria recommended for the selection of the staff are: (1) Integrity; (2) hard work; (3) know-how; and (4) knowledge of local conditions. For the allocation of personnel to tasks, the following principles are suggested: (1) Equal load of work; (2) well-defined responsibilites; (3) compatible abilities; and (4) reserve for abscences.

Administrative decentralization of municipal services: Assessing the New York City experience

New York City's Office of Neighborhood Government was created in 1971 to coordinate renewed attempts at decentralizing municipal operations. The decentralization was primarily of an administrative nature, with emphasis on expanding district (neighborhood) management. This study examined decision-making at the district level. The major focus of inquiry was the nature of decision-making responsibilities in five municipal agencies, and the degree to which district officers acted as autonomous managers before and after administrative decentralization had occurred. The results showed that major shifts in responsibilities occurred only in one management function, inter-agency communication. For other functions, such as budget and personnel allocations, priority setting, and information gathering, central headquarters retained major decision-making responsibility. The study thus casts doubt on administrative decentralization as a feasible alternative for reorganizing municipal services to increase service responsiveness to neighborhoods.

Applications of crime seriousness information in police departments

This article describes the use of crime seriousness information in police operations. It is based on a project at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in which eight weeks of crime information were coded using the Sellin-Wolfgang seriousness scale. Statistics were then derived which quantified the seriousness of the various categories of crimes. Several applications were investigated based on the crime seriousness data. These included: (1) case assignment to detectives, (2) allocation of patrol personnel, and (3) determination of the size and location of patrol beats. Areas for future research are presented involving the use of crime seriousness data.

Zurechnung von Beförderungen im öffentlichen Dienst / The Attribution of Promotions Among Civil Servants

Abstract Within the framework of an empirical investigation in the civil service of the Federal Republic of Germany, interviews were conducted with civil servants with a view to determining (with the aid of an abbreviated measurement scale) whether they were generally more inclined to attribute events to an internal or to an external locus of control; in addition, the interviewees were asked specifically in which of these directions they were wont to locate the causes of their own promotions and those of their colleagues. - In its approach, the investigation was based on the attribution model developed by HEIDER, JONES, HECKHAUSEN, and others. The present paper reports on the study’s findings, and relates them to general problems of rational allocation of personnel in large-scale organizational systems.

An Optimal Procedure for Allocating Manpower with Cyclic Requirements

Abstract Certain types of organizations operate continuously and must allocate personnel over time to meet fluctuating, but cyclical, staff requirements. The optimal allocation of personnel in this situation is formulated as an integer linear programming problem, and the special structure of the formulation is exploited in order to develop an efficient solution algorithm which requires only hand calculations. The relationship between optimal solutions and flexibility in the original data is also considered.

A Decision and Value Approach to Research Personnel Allocation

A problem which exists in a large research laboratory is the allocation of professional people to work on research projects. Each department manager must allocate his personnel so that effectiveness, value of a given man to a given project, is maximized. Computationally, the transportation technique may be used to solve the problem if it is possible to determine the individual coefficients (or effectiveness values) giving the relative value of the ith man to the jth project, for all i, j. This paper describes a technique for determining these effectiveness values. The effectiveness values are subjective, and reflect the value judgments of the department manager and of those who assign projects. The philosophy used in producing the effectiveness values is to simplify the manager's decisionmaking task in expressing his value judgments to comparing only two alternatives with respect to a single criterion at one time. The results of the ratings taken are reduced to produce a set of normalized effectiveness values. The use of the technique in a model allocation problem is shown. The application of the technique need not be confined to a personnel allocation problem, but can be applied to any resource allocation problem where the objective is to optimize a subjective measure.

On Quantitative Approaches to Urban Police Patrol Problems

This paper reviews the use of "hazard " formulas for allocating police patrol personnel and indicates the need for new quantitative methods to assist decision makers. Mathematical models of patrol activity can be structured to provide insight to such planning and management prob lems as optimal design of patrol sectors, formulation of preventive patrol strategies, evaluation of technological and administrative innova tions, and precinct-by-precinct allocation of personnel. Several illustra tive models are discussed, with emphasis placed on the diversity of modeling applications in patrol operations and on the insights provided by use of the models.

The Allocation of Research, Teaching, and Extension Personnel in U. S. Colleges of Agriculture: Comment

The Allocation of Research, Teaching, and Extension Personnel in U. S. Colleges of Agriculture: Comment

The Allocation of Research, Teaching, and Extension Personnel in U.S. Colleges of Agriculture: Reply

The Allocation of Research, Teaching, and Extension Personnel in U.S. Colleges of Agriculture: Reply

The Allocation of Research, Teaching, and Extension Personnel in U.S. Colleges of Agriculture

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to inventory the allocation of research, teaching, and extension personnel by departments in United States colleges of agriculture and experiment stations, and to identify and measure factors that appear to influence this allocation. Although growth is the predominate characteristic of departments and disciplines, we observe and can predict decline in several instances. With the use of multiple regression analysis, state nonfarm income emerges as the most important variable explaining total funds available to experiment stations. Rural farm population has virtually no effect on total funds available. In fact, since 1960 it was somewhat of a detriment for an agricultural experiment station to be located in an agricultural state. At the departmental level, the departments engaged in farm oriented research (agronomy, animal husbandry, etc.) appear to be more dependent on farm income for support whereas departments in closer contact with the nonfarm sector (horticulture, agricultural economics, etc.) are more dependent on nonfarm income. Predictions for the early 1970's indicate largest growth for departments located in the high income, urban‐industrial states particularly for those more closely tied to nonfarm income.